Warner Music Group becomes first major record label to sign licensing deal with SoundCloud

Shawn Knight

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warner music group signs deal license music soundcloud warner music group

Warner Music Group has become the first major record label to sign a licensing deal with SoundCloud. The agreement will see SoundCloud pay royalties to the label each time a song that’s monetized is streamed or even when one of its songs is spliced into a mashup according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The deal will no doubt help SoundCloud attract new listeners to its existing service as well as a new subscription service it’s planning to launch next year.

Warner Music represents a vast array of popular artists including Bruno Mars, The Black Keys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, just to name a few. Interestingly enough, the label won’t be required to make its entire catalog available as SoundCloud has traditionally been used to discover underground artists.

warner music group signs deal license music soundcloud warner music group

Full terms of the deal weren’t disclosed although people familiar with the matter claim the label is taking a three to five percent stake in the company in addition to royalties.

The Berlin-based audio sharing platform has been in the news quite a bit in recent months. Back in August, the service launched a creator partner program called On SoundCloud that laid the foundation for content creators to start making money from their work.

In order to come up with the funds to pay artists, however, the site made the decision to introduce advertising – a first for SoundCloud.

More recently, SoundCloud partnered with Twitter (rumored to be a potential suitor for the audio platform not all that long ago) to bring music and audio to tweets through the use of Audio Cards. 

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This is the death bell toll for the site. SoundCloud has been slowly becoming too mainstream and will die a slow death as it leaves its roots. I have been a member, dj, and producer on the site for a few years. This saddens me as the value has beem going downhill. The biggest issue is the play and download generators that enable tracks or mixes to hit artificially high numbers. How will that be handled? What would stop the record companies from pinning up their own content and then fake playing it thousands or tens of thousands of times to increae profits? Not too much I wager. Well it was fun while it lasted. I have been transitioning to another service since the beginning of the year and will not be renewing my premium membership when it comes due. Way too mich money for a circus.
 
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