Soundcloud may become a paid service within the next nine months

Based on the reports from Digital Music News, Soundcloud is reported to become a paid service within nine months. Currently, the streaming service is available for free to all users but by October of this year, Soundcloud may become a completely different destination for music. The rumors began circling around when Allison Moore, the former Chief Revenue Officer of NBC Universal, was hired on March 7^th.

Since getting the position, Moore has prioritized the transition of Soundcloud into a subscription-based service, which would end its ongoing struggle in obtaining paid users. With millions of users across the globe, only a small portion of them actually pay for the service. As a result, Soundcloud has lately been bombarded with numerous lawsuits from labels and artists.

To help fix its numerous issues, the Berlin-based company officially partnered with Universal Music last January, which granted Soundcloud licensing rights to Universal’s catalog. One of the conditions, however, was supposedly for Soundcloud to establish a subscription-based service and now with the following recent reports, this stipulation is set to take effect within 2016.

This particular deal called for a ‘subscription-based 1.0’ to be effective by July but Universal is expected to give Soundcloud grace periods if there are cases where any improvements in its platform’s foundation arise. Despite its introduction of advertisements in 2014, the music streaming service company has lost millions of dollars over the past few years and to break from this predicament, Moore and Soundcloud undoubtedly have a lot of work on their plate within the next couple of months.

H/T: Dancing Astronaut