So, Soundcloud or Mixcloud?
This is one of the most complicated decisions that DJs, producers, and musicians have to make. The right choice will ensure that your fans can track down and enjoy your music.
Soundcloud may be the most popular and well-known choice thanks to its extensive heritage, but Mixcloud is gaining a lot of cloud lately too.
Both options allow you to upload and share mixes online, but it can be difficult to decide which one is most suitable for you, Soundcloud vs Mixcloud?
Mixcloud is usually the most popular choice for mix-tape designers, radio shows and DJ mixes. It provides an easy environment for people to share and listen to all kinds of music creation. This is also a popular site for podcasts and radio shows too.
Soundcloud is more directed towards indie musicians, podcasters, DJ mixes, music producers, radio shows, and similar professionals. This is where you’ll go if you want to share music outside of the mainstream.
So let’s have a look at the differences between Soundcloud vs Mixcloud.
Soundcloud vs Mixcloud
Here’s what we cover:
- Introducing Soundcloud
- Benefits of Soundcloud
- Issues with Soundcloud
- Soundcloud Sound Quality
- The Difference Between Soundcloud Premium Products
- Is Soundcloud Right For You
- Introducing Mixcloud
- Benefits of Mixcloud
- Issues with Mixcloud
- Mixcloud Sound Quality
- The Difference Between Mixcloud Premium Products
- Is Mixcloud Right For You
- Finishing Thoughts
Introducing Soundcloud
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Soundcloud launched in 2007, offering musicians and professionals a way to share their music outside of Myspace.
At a time when social media was evolving at an incredible pace, people were quickly growing disinterested in Myspace, and Soundcloud became an appealing option, with much better features. By 2012, it already had 15 million registered users.
Soundcloud allows you to add tracks, radio shows, mashups, albums, and playlists to your profile – virtually anything that doesn’t have copyright restrictions.
However, free customers can only import up to 3 hours of material. Soundcloud also makes it easy to download tracks.
Even free customers are allowed up to 100 downloads, and professional customers can access up to 1,000 tracks.
Unfortunately, Soundcloud also has its issues.
Benefits of Soundcloud
SoundCloud is an excellent platform for building audience engagement and generating interest in your music.
If you’ve been looking for an easy way to get started in the digital world, SoundCloud has you covered.
Plus, you can use this platform alongside a range of other options too. Benefits of SoundCloud include:
- Excellent audience engagement: Your customers can share, like, and comment on your audio, and provide instant feedback.
- Easy to access all kinds of content: You can post everything from DJ mixes, radio shows to podcasts on Soundcloud and find plenty of music too.
- Good audio quality options: Your audio should sound great, even if you don’t have the premium service.
- Data analytics: It’s easy to see which of your songs and mixes are gaining the most attention.
- Easy to use: Everything is pretty straightforward on SoundCloud, although the mobile app could benefit from some extra tweaks.
Issues with Soundcloud
Piracy, label issues, and profitability are the biggest problems linked to Soundcloud. In 2014, the site lost around $43.9 million in revenues, although in 2016, the top-line revenues were once again up by 43%.
As Soundcloud continued to grow, record labels started demanding their cut of the profits, and many users got into trouble for sharing copyrighted material.
To deal with the piracy issues, Soundcloud adopted a new algorithm, although some users complained that it accidently removed legit tracks.
The algorithm hit DJ mixes and radio shows hard, because they included copyrighted music, and it’s notoriously difficult to appeal the takedown process on the site.
Soundcloud Continues to Grow
By 2017, Soundcloud was struggling to raise additional funding from investors, and the company almost sold.
Eventually, the company found the cash it needed to continue, although the CEO left and was replaced by someone new.
Today, Soundcloud:
- Has over 100,000 monthly downloads on Ios (as of 2019)
- Has over 15 million users (September 2019)
- Earns about 28% of its traffic from the US
- Achieved a revenue of $200 million in 2019
- Supports around 25 million music creators.
Even big musicians like Post Malone got their start with Soundcloud.
Soundcloud Sound Quality
If you’re a free user on Soundcloud, you can stream at a rate of around 64KBS through Opus audio (a lossy compression codec).
The Opus audio system sounds about as good as MP3s.
Although SoundCloud offered 128KBS streaming in the past, MP3 streaming cost too much in bandwidth.
If you use the paid subscription service, you will be able to access much higher quality audio. Users can download tracks and DJ mixes with the premium version, with music encoded at 256kbs AAC.
Even if you’re not a premium user, then you should always upload your files in a lossless format just in case you have premium listeners.
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There’s also a mobile app for SoundCloud which allows for similar streaming experiences, depending on the quality of the device that your listener is using.
Although the app has its benefits, users have complained about certain tracks being inaccessible in specific countries.
The Soundcloud app is a great way for users to discover new artists and radio shows but it’s not the most effective tool for artists wanting to manage their account, as the interface can be a little messy.
The Difference Between Soundcloud Premium Products
Paying for your software will usually get you a better quality of service, and extra features to explore. That’s certainly the case with SoundCloud.
The two premium products offered by the website are SoundCloud Pro, which is for content producers, and Soundcloud Go, for music lovers.
Soundcloud Pro comes with access to unlimited upload time (Rather than just the 3 hours on the free account).
You can also allow users to access the highest-quality versions of your music, schedule releases, and unlock statistics about your track listening rates.
There’s also a premium account for content producers known as SoundCloud Premier, but not everyone can access this service.
If you’re approved for Premier, then you can sell your tracks, promote them in the community, and distribute them to partners too.
SoundCloud Go, which is available at a discount for Pro customers, is a good investment for those who use Traktor and Serato for mixing. Although the support isn’t ideal in some areas, you can access Soundcloud with both Serato and Traktor.
Is Soundcloud Right for You?
Soundcloud is one of the best and most popular tools out there for sharing and finding music and DJ mixes or radio shows as a DJ or producer.
However, this solution has had its issues too. There are countless complaints online from content producers who have had music taken down for seemingly no reason. What’s more, it’s very difficult to have takedown notices removed once you get hit.
Soundcloud isn’t the best for customer support either. If you have issues with your account, then you’ll struggle to get hold of anyone who can help you quickly. However, Soundcloud isn’t all bad, it has its positives too.
For instance, the heritage and popularity of Soundcloud means it comes with a massive audience to connect with, and there are generally more listeners than producers active, so there’s still room to grow.
Compared to other sites available for uploading your music, like YouTube, Soundcloud can also be a lot easier to work with. It’s very easy to get banned from YouTube if there’s any copyrighted content in your music.
The key to success with Soundcloud is knowing how to use it correctly.
Access to the premium features does make it easier to connect with your audience on a deeper level and build your brand as a content producer. However, you’ll still need to ensure that you’re careful about how you product DJ mixes, DJ mashups and old tracks.
Of course, that’s something that could be said for virtually any online platform for sharing your music.
Introducing Mixcloud
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Mixcloud started life in 2008, just a little while after SoundCloud. In 2012, the company reported having more than 3 million active users.
In general, Mixcloud aims to be the “YouTube” of radio shows, helping bedroom DJs, professional DJs and producers to distribute content to a versatile audience.
You can easily monetize DJ mixes and radio shows on this platform, and the system helps you to ensure that all the right people receive the cash they deserve for their share of contributing to your music.
There were about 12 million people visiting Mixcloud in 2019, and the majority of the visitors come from the US.
Benefits of Mixcloud
Mixcloud might not be quite as big as Soundcloud yet, but it’s growing at an incredible rate. There are over 1 million audio creators on the site as of 2018, and around 12 million DJ mixes have been uploaded here so far.
Mixcloud also claims to support more than 1 thousand hours of music per day.
The site has raised millions in funding, and it pulls in around 10 million unique listeners every month, with about four hours of content introduced per minute. Benefits of Mixcloud include:
- Excellent reach for finding new listeners in your target audience
- Brilliant back-end environment is very easy to use, particularly if you’re a beginner online
- Fewer issues with piracy claims and content that gets pulled down before people can find it
- Ideal for longer track uploads, radio shows, podcasts, and DJ mixers that fall outside of the mainstream
- Mix competitions are available on the site to help you generate even more attention for your DJ brand.
Issues with Mixcloud
As brilliant as Mixcloud can be, it does have some limitations.
The platform just isn’t as streamlined as sleek as Soundcloud, and although everything is generally quite easy to use, you might need longer to get used to navigating the content.
Mixcloud gets around a lot of the copyright issues that Soundcloud deals with, however, you might find that it’s harder to find your audience on this platform.
Additionally, there’s no direct messaging system on the Mixcloud website, so you can’t reach out to your fans or connect with people who might want to collaborate through the stie itself.
Mixcloud benefits from the occasional competition which can help to generate interested in your music, but with hundreds and even thousands of entries, it’s difficult to win anything.
Mixcloud Sound Quality
Mixcloud doesn’t have a lot of information available about its streaming options. Most people believe that the songs on the platform stream at around 128kbs via MP3, but it’s hard to know for certain.
Keep in mind that, as with any music hosting site, you’ll need to ensure your sound quality is great before you start uploading.
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Mixcloud gives you the option to upload various newer file formats, and you can access a range of AAC files or OGG too. You can also listen to your audience through the available mobile app.
One thing to note about the mobile app of Mixcloud, is that the free version can suffer from bugs from time to time.
Moving to premium can save you some issues, but it may be difficult to take the plunge for some users.
The Difference Between Mixcloud Premium Products
Notably, like Soundcloud, there is a free version of Mixcloud available, but it comes with limitations to be aware of. Mixcloud does insert ads into your music with the free version, and you can only listen to a show within 14 days up to 3 times.
It’s also only possible to see a track list once you’ve listened to a show or mix, which is quite restrictive.
Upgrading to a premium package will allow you to skip your music player forwards and backwards, while playing shows and mixes as often as you like.
There aren’t any adverts to worry about, and you can view track lists in advance.
As a content creator on Mixcloud, the free version is quite generous. You can upload as many shows as you like and generate all the listeners and followers you want.
There’s no way to upload DJ mixes which contain more than 3 tracks by the same artist, however. Additionally, individual tracks aren’t allowed, nor are any private shows or mixes.
The premium version of Mixcloud for content creators is GoPro, and it allows you to monetize your content pretty easily, without as much risk to worry about.
You can measure engagement levels through reports, schedule upcoming releases, disable commenting, customise your profile, and so much more. There’s also the option to make shows exclusive or private for specific users.
One of the most confusing things about Mixcloud, is that you can’t always legitimately download music files. You can access shows through the mobile app which you can use offline, but you won’t be able to access those files from any other device.
Is Mixcloud right for you?
Mixcloud provides podcasters, radio show creators, and DJs with a handy alternative to Soundcloud if they need a great way to host their music and DJ mixes.
Mixcloud’s music player isn’t as impressive as Soundcloud’s, and it doesn’t come with a feature to leave comments at specific points in a track. However, both options are embeddable, so placing them within your website is simple enough.
Mixcloud benefits from a much less significant range of piracy issues, and fewer people have their tracks removed without warning.
However, the audience balance isn’t great for Mixcloud. The majority of the audience seems to be made up primarily of content producers, rather than content consumers and listeners.
You’re likely to have a harder time standing out from the crowd with Mixcloud. Mixcloud’s registered user base does have a lot of listeners to reach out to, but the biggest portion of people appear to be making content, rather than searching for it.
Mixcloud isn’t going to be the right choice for producers hoping to upload individual tracks either.
There’s no way to do this, which means that you have to create entire shows at once. You’ll also struggle to upload a lot of music which contains multiple sounds from the same artist.
There’s not a huge difference between the pricing options for the Mixcloud premium packages, and the pricing for Soundcloud, and you do get a much larger audience on Soundcloud.
Finishing Thoughts: Mixcloud or Soundcloud?
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Both Mixcloud and Soundcloud are fantastic tools for music creators looking to make their mark in the digital world.
Whether you’re searching for unique sounds that you can add to your own content, or you want to spread awareness for your sound, both Soundcloud and Mixcloud can help.
Clearly, Soundcloud has a more significant grasp on the market right now, despite only being around for a little while longer than Mixcloud.
There’s much more competition in the market now, and Mixcloud can’t access the same benefits as Soundcloud which came from the death of Myspace.
Soundcloud had the advantage of being in the right place at the right time as content creators discovered how unhelpful Myspace was for launching their music careers.
If Myspace had tied things together properly on their end, Soundcloud probably wouldn’t have been as big as it is today.
Despite the popularity of Soundcloud, and its massive audience, Mixcloud still has benefits to offer. As we discussed above, one of the biggest problems that people have with Soundcloud is the fact that it suffers from a lot of piracy issues.
If you’re worried that you’re going to get your music taken down within moments of uploading it onto the web, then Soundcloud might not be the ideal choice for you.
Mixcloud will give you more peace of mind.
However, security seems to be the best thing that Mixcloud has over Soundcloud right now.
In terms of simplicity and ease of use, Soundcloud still knocks the alternatives out of the water for many music producers and content lovers.
