Over the past few months, SoundCloud has been evolving at a rapid pace and the streaming service is getting serious about other aspects of track sharing. The Berlin-based company has gone through a series of policy shifts this year that tackled copyright-associated “takedowns,” limits on streaming, and advertising. Now, it looks like the next phase of their plan involves limiting the amount of reposts by users (sharing a foreign track to their channel).
Reposting tracks is a nice way to get a page recognized or grow a collective. Users may trade repost for repost on their channels to reach a wider audience also. Pigeons & Planes reported last week that some of their peers had notified them about new restrictions on reposting. 1833.fm was the target of a friendly study, sharing their private messages after SoundCloud temporarily took down their account. Despite only having just over a thousand followers on their account, constant reposting has left them with the following messages below.
This account in particular is experimenting with how much they can “get banned,” noting that their longest period of suspension was about nine hours. The user tends to repost a minimum of three tracks per day, which is over 20 a week.
While artists and labels continue to decide the best way to share on their social media pages, SoundCloud is a unique model. Many labels do not want artists uploading separate versions of their tracks because it can compete with their plays and overall traffic. This conflict means artists will have to take small shortcuts to combat these new features and organize new ways to promote. The spotlight feature does not allow reposted tracks, for example.
Artists who use SoundCloud regularly might have twice as many reposted tracks on their channel as original content. Kill The Noise spoke about this yesterday on his Twitter account.
Sound cloud is great model I just think they could make some minor adjustments that would improve your feed and the flow of content
— jake the human (@killthenoise) October 26, 2015
Read more from the story about 1833.fm on Pigeons & Planes here.
