Yet another on-demand music streaming service is here.
SoundCloud Go costs $9.99 per month and is intended to compete directly with Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Red, and every other paid music service out there. The paid version of SoundCloud, a service which was completely free and ad-supported until Tuesday, has some features diehard SoundCloud users will probably love. The most notable addition is the ability to save songs for offline access.
But for everyone else — especially those who already pay for Spotify or Apple Music — SoundCloud Go simply isn't worth the money.
If you decide to pay $9.99 per month for SoundCloud go, you get unlimited, ad-free access to SoundCloud's catalog of 125 million tracks, which at face value is a much larger number of tracks than Spotify's 30 million songs. But if you've used SoundCloud before you'll understand why it can boast such a huge catalog; there are countless DJ mixes, remixes, and podcasts uploaded to SoundCloud that can't be found anywhere else.
And that's great! It's the main reason I've kept using SoundCloud alongside Spotify for years. The endless remixes and one-off singles make SoundCloud a unique treasure trove of music.
But when you look at the music a paid Go subscription gets you, the number of tracks shrinks drastically. SoundCloud declined to provide Tech Insider specifics about its paid vs. free tracks, but some basic napkin math gets you an answer. SoundCloud last reported having 110 million tracks on March 18, and the introduction of paid-only songs with Go brought that number to 125 million tracks.
That means SoundCloud Go has roughly 15 million songs you can't get on the free version of the service. SoundCloud has been trying to get a paid subscription off the ground for years and has yet to sign with all of the major labels. As The Verge notes, several big artists aren't on Go at launch, including Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Arcade Fire, and more.
The way SoundCloud presents music will also be maddening for people who are used to the traditional album/single approach of every other service. There is no way to view individual albums on SoundCloud, so when you search for Drake you get a list of every song he's uploaded. That's it. There's no organization outside of playlists artists can make (and most don't make them) or playlists you make yourself.
SoundCloud is betting on people making their own playlists, following other playlists, or just kicking back and using the service's surprisingly good, Pandora-like radio station feature.
The thing about SoundCloud Go is that you can get pretty much all of SoundCloud's best offerings for free already. So what's the point? Outside of the ability to save music offline on your phone and the removal of ads (which I wasn't even aware existed on SoundCloud as I have never heard an ad in years of using the service), the appeal of a Go subscription is difficult to understand.
If you do end up paying for SoundCloud Go, make sure you do it on SoundCloud's website where it costs $9.99 per month. Due to Apple taking a cut of in-app purchases through the App Store, SoundCloud is charging an extra $3 per month for the same subscription through its iPhone app.
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