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SOUNDCLOUD REPORTS FIRST EVER PROFITABLE QUARTER

The streaming platform was also 37% up year-on-year in 2019

Words: DJ MAG STAFF

SoundCloud has reported its first ever profitable quarter.

In January this year, streaming giant SoundCloud reported that in 2019 it had turned over more than $200m for the first time. Now, it has announced the first-ever profitable quarter for the site, with a 37% increase year-on-year in 2019.

Kerry Trainor, Soundcloud CEO, told Music Business Worldwide that “with the end of 2020 now in view, we will have achieved our third consecutive year of accelerating revenue growth and our first profitable quarter, with substantial cash reserves to continue investing in SoundCloud.”

Earlier this year, SoundCloud announced that it had received a $75m investment from Sirius XM, one of America’s biggest radio station and online streaming conglomerates. Back in 2018, Pandora – owned by Sirius XM – and SoundCloud merged their advertisement sales relationship that saw targetting data, ad production and programming run by the Sirius XM team, with the switch growing SoundCloud’s ad revenue by 37.4%.

The streaming platform also revealed that around 20m tracks were added to the site in 2018 – that works out at a whopping 55,000 tracks per day, a total of around 190m unique tracks existing on the site by January of last year.

More recently, SoundCloud shared a new streaming plan called SoundCloud DJ. The new service offers DJs unlimited offline caching from music on their platform, letting users download and cache tracks to DJ software like VirtualDJ, with Cross DJ and Denon DJ being added “in the coming months”.