More than a dozen artists from the Sony Music label have disappeared from SoundCloud. Considered by many to be one of the best promotion platforms, due to the closeness created by 'artist-fan', SounCloud currently has more than 350 million monthly visits. Artists like Lorde got a bigger reach thanks to SoundCloud.
In August last year, SoundCloud's first ad-supported monetization strategy was announced: 'On SoundCloud'. The company began announcing the names of the companies it would start working with, with names like Warner Music Group, Sony Music or Columbia Records, in addition to independent labels. SoundCloud said that "The company had already paid more than $ 2 million in advertising revenue to more than 100 partners", which at first sounded like a success achieved by this new service.
But now we find that Sony Music has started to remove the original recordings of quite a lot of artists, among which are Adele, Passion Pit or Hozier. Everything has been the product of the unsuccessful negotiations between Sony and SoundCloud. Spokesmen for Sony and Columbia - stamps of the most affected artists - have not made any statements in this regard, although executives close to these negotiations said that the reasons stemmed from the lack of monetization opportunities for this platform.