The New TikTok of Music: SoundCloud’s Rise to Popularity and What It Means for Artists

TikTok is a great content discovery tool. Its vertical feed, where the algorithm shows you both content related to your preferences and new content, is the central pillar of the app, to the point that some believe it could overtake the almighty Google as a search engine.

TikTok DOWNLOAD

A type of feed that has not gone unnoticed by SoundCloud, the music streaming service, which is now testing a vertical feed content discovery feature on both iOS and Android. As picked up by TechCrunch, SoundCloud users who are part of the test will be able to see and access a new tab called “Discover” under the Feed tab.

SoundCloud DOWNLOAD

The Discover page will display songs “based on your listening history and musical tastes,” according to SoundCloud. The app will also explain, via a line of text, why a song appears in your recommendations, with phrases such as “Because you follow…” or “Because you liked…”, in the same way that already happens in apps like YouTube.

Youtube DOWNLOAD

Another highlight of this test is that, from now on, artists can create 30-second previews of their tracks that can be viewed in both Discover and Following, another of the new pages included in the test. The selection of the audio clips can be done manually, by their authors, or in an automated way, thanks to Musiio‘s AI.

If the clip of a song matches your taste, you can hit “Like” to add it to your Like list. To listen to the full version, just click on the play button, which will display information about the audio track on a new page. The new design makes it easy for users to comment on the song (appearing in the corresponding timestamp), as well as add it to a playlist.