Fresh Pressed will feature the trending new tracks on SoundCloud every week and will dig deeper in the stories behind them directly with the artists involved. Fast Track will be the production – themed show and will see breakout beatmakers going live and making a beat in 60 minutes.

Crossovers are always interesting but, let’s say it, not often effective. Since the first partnership between the two platforms has been nothing but positive, we can legitimately stay optimistic, but let’s see if also this time SoundCloud will be able to intercept the needs of its community.

You can see the calendar of events for the next few weeks (with times and guests) here.

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What can Affiliates do?

As a Twitch affiliate, you’ll unlock several technical features such video and monetization tools. You will be able to set up payments subscription options through which fans can subscribe to your channel for ad-free viewing and extra perks. It’ll be also possible to enable Bits on your channels, so viewers can offer direct financial support without leaving Twitch. Other very interesting features as an Affiliate are the chance to run ads on your channel, before or during the stream, and to link to music and merchandise stores.

How can I get the Affiliate status?

Once you have created your account (if you don’t have one already), you have to fill out this form and Twitch will fast-track your channel to Affiliate status. Twitch stated that they “will email you with an invitation to their affiliate program within a matter of days”. After that you’ll just have to customize your account and broadcast and funnel your fans and audience on the platform. If you’re new to Twitch, you can find advice and tutorials on the official Twitch Music guide.

A note from SoundCloud:
Twitch Affiliate status access is a manual process, meaning your Twitch account will be reviewed by a real human being and, as such, access is not guaranteed. So make sure your profile follows best practices on Twitch before you submit. SoundCloud and Twitch must validate each account and have the right to refuse an application.

In order to boost this brand new partnership, SoundCloud is also running a limited-time offer on its top tier subscriptions plan. Until the 30th of March, SoundCloud Pro Unlimited can be purchased for 50% off (the discount is available both on monthly and yearly plans).

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Eliminate Regional Restrictions

One of the greatest things about the rise of the internet is the massive increase in connectivity and the breakdown of international borders. SoundCloud took this to the next level for music. Whether you’re in the heart of the industry in LA, on the coast in Australia or a small village in Singapore, if you had an internet connection and some skills you could get your music out to a wealth of fans and like-minded artists. Recently it seems SoundCloud has been taking distribution cues from major cable networks and restricting content to specific countries. I’ve personally seen music from Canadian artists that is not available in Canada! It’s absurd and a sad step backward for a platform that completely redefined streaming. SoundCloud needs to fight the label pressure and make all content available to everyone everywhere.

if I didn't have internet back in 2009-2010 to discover progressive house

I'd still be spearing fish in my singaporean village

— MYRNE (@MYRNEmusic) February 22, 2017

Reduced Takedowns

From bootlegs and remixes to DJ mixes. This is the issue that’s lead to many artists and fans to claim that SoundCloud is dead or dying. SoundCloud built itself upon bootlegs, mixes and remixes. Due to label pressure they’ve been taking a hardline stance and deleting the content that made them so popular. To be fair there isn’t an easy solution. Copyright infringement is no joke and major labels wield a ton of power over streaming platforms. If only labels would realize that remixes/bootlegs/mixes only help to promote their artists. Maybe one day.

https://twitter.com/Lido/status/664962840466358272

Get Rid of The 3 Strike Policy

The only thing worse than takedowns is full-scale account deletions. Artists and tastemakers take years building up their following on the platform only to have their account completely stripped away. Look, I get it, if you’re posting copyrighted content you’re technically in the wrong but there’s a huge difference between blatantly re-uploading an artist’s work without their permissions and putting out a remix or DJ mix and having your account deleted as a result. This is especially hard to stomach given the fact that SoundCloud rose to popularity largely as a result of hosting this content for years. SoundCloud has been taking measures to try to figure out this process but in the interim it would ideal if they put this one on hold.

thank u @SoundCloud for deleting our account

— BOOMBOX CARTEL (@BoomboxCartel) April 29, 2017

Improved Search

Considering the fact that Google often knows what you’re looking for better than you do, we’ve come to expect search to be a seamless and intuitive process. On SoundCloud this is not the case. Whether you’re looking for an artist or a song there’s about a 10% likelihood the results you receive will actually be what you’ve expected. There’s no logic in place to detect common misspellings and results are not tailored based on who you follow or your likes. It’s so bad I’ve actually left SoundCloud to do a Google search for a song on SoundCloud. Step up that algorithm!

Simplified Time Stamps

I don’t know how this has still not yet been addressed, but how many times has this happened to you? You upload a track privately on SoundCloud a few days before the release to save time, send it to your DJ Friends, a few blogs or whatever. When you make it public instead of updating the time stamp to when it was made live (like YouTube) it presents the date it was first uploaded. This means the track is guaranteed to get lost in the sea of reposts and new tracks on yours followers’ home page. To solve this issue, users frequently will re-upload the song right before its release to ensure it gets the proper the time stamp. This is time consuming and unnecessary. It also applies to playlists as well as tracks. SoundCloud should make it so that the date stamped is when the track goes live publicly.

Clean up the Sexbots

The possibility of having horny singles sliding in your DMs sounds pretty enticing right? An instant ego boost assured to have you gassed and leave you wondering, “damn is my music so fire that random strangers want to hook up with me without ever meeting me?” The answer is no. Like most things in life, if it’s too good to true it probably is. Recently SoundCloud has become overrun with Sexbots bursting in your DMs and clogging up the comments section. Comments used to a great place for artists to get feedback, confirm how sick their drops were, or get shit on from haters. These days a scroll through a major track’s comments feels like you accidentally wandered your way into some seedy listings on back pages.

Improved Embed Functionality

As a blogger one of my favourite things about the platform is the easy to embed player. With a built in WordPress code, easy sizing and styling options, the SoundCloud player is by far the best embeddable music solution out. That said, there’s still room for improvement. Adding the embed option to the mobile app would be a great addition for on-the-go music bloggers. I personally do most of my writing on my phone and being able to easily embed the tracks on my device would be extremely helpful. One of the biggest misses around the SoundCloud embed is with the newly released content types. While tracks and playlists are easy to embed, the recently defined content types such as albums, EPs, etc. seem to neglect the functionality all together. Did the developers just simply forget? Do they not do QA checks our user testing before releasing updates? Hopefully they get this sorted as soon as possible.

That’s a wrap for our list. Are there any other changes you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook and Twitter.

The post 7 SoundCloud Improvements We’d Actually Like To See appeared first on FUXWITHIT.

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[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/232881532″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

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