It seems Soundcloud is set to establish a new trend in relations between streaming services and recording artists. This service decided to allow its artists to keep the full amount of their distribution royalties.
It comes as part of a new addition to the Artist and Artist Pro subscriptions, and will see the company remove its distribution revenue share by the end of November 2025, meaning that artists on the platform will be allowed to keep the full amount of their royalties going forward.
The company has described the move as the “most artist-first subscription on the market”.
While artists who make royalties directly on SoundCloud have always kept all of their royalties, this new addition will mean that those rules will extend to distributions on all other major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and TikTok.
The new feature comes at a vital time for artists, as figures over the past couple of years have continually highlighted an uphill struggle for artists to afford to exist, let alone play live.
The problems are exemplified in some of the recent moves by the moves taken by Spotify, the largest streaming service around. Last year, Spotify had made profits of over €1billion (£860million), but at the expense of staff being laid off, artists struggling to make any income from streaming, and subscription prices rising.
Artists faced even more trouble trying to make any money from their music when Spotify officially demonetized all songs on the platform with less than 1,000 streams. The policy was launched on April 1 2024, but had been planned for some time.
