SoundCloud Reached A Deal to Pay Royalties to Indie Record Labels

Popular streaming music web service Soundcloud has reached a deal to pay royalites to thousands of independent record labels.

A deal was reportedly crafted with over 20,000 indie labels.  Merlin (a company that represent smaller record labels) was instrumental  in helping secure this deal as their premiere partner.  The expanded deal with Merlin extends Soundcloud’s commercial, promotional and monetization opportunities to Merlin’s 20,000 indie labels and distributors.  This means the same indie artists that helped put SoundCloud on the map will now get a share of the revenue.

SoundCloud has 175 million unique users a month, and has signed up about 100 Premier Partners including Warner Music. Universal and Sony have not yet signed on. Sony Music recently pulled some of its top artists, after reportedly reaching an impasse in negotiations.

One of SoundCloud’s co-founders Alexander Ljung said…

“Independent creators have always been at the core of SoundCloud, and with this partnership we’re thrilled to extend new revenue-generating opportunities to thousands of independent labels.”

SoundCloud partnership doesn’t just offer revenue sharing, but it provides access to their Deck platform, which allows record labels to request that copyright infringing content is removed.  It will also include SoundCloud’s forthcoming subscription service due to launch in 2015.