#MIXLOUD LISTEN LATER HOW TO#
#MIXLOUD LISTEN LATER OFFLINE#
#MIXLOUD LISTEN LATER FREE#

“We’ve been taking the time to do deals that make sense for us, and that make sense for the wider industry, we believe. The flipside of that is that we’ve been in control of our own destiny. Even today we’re 22 or 23 people, so it’s quite a small team. “The history of the company has been very much one of we can only really hire people when we can afford it. We don’t have X million dollars to go and spend on marketing, so how do we figure this out without doing it another way?” he said. “That really taught us a financial discipline. In Mixcloud’s early years, its co-founders didn’t take salaries, working out of a warehouse in north west London while freelancing on the side to keep things ticking along.

#MIXLOUD LISTEN LATER HOW TO#

“ If you don’t raise money early on, you kinda have to figure out how to build a sustainable business pretty quickly,” said Perez. Mixcloud is an outlier in the world of music-streaming startups, having survived until now without external investment: the company has been bootstrapped since Perez and co-founders Nikhil Shah, Mat Clayton and Sam Cooke set the company up in 2008, with its service going live a year later. “But that’s easier, because that’s stuff that we’ve always been doing, and the questions around functionality and what you can do are less complicated.” “Universal, Sony and Merlin are all live conversations right now,” said Perez, adding that publishers will also be part of this evolution. For those kinds of features, it needs direct licenses with labels, with WMG the first deal to be sealed.

#MIXLOUD LISTEN LATER OFFLINE#

Those licences came with restrictions: Mixcloud couldn’t let its listeners download mixes and shows for offline use, most notably, nor could it show tracklistings in advance. However, the company has been paying music royalties from day one, operating under blanket licences from collecting societies like PPL and PRS for Music in the UK, and SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and SESAC in the US. Since its launch, Mixcloud has been a user-generated content platform, with the mixes and shows uploaded by its users: more than 1.2 million have contributed so far. “But in a sustainable way, where it works for the underlying rightsholders, the labels, the artists, the songwriters, and the people creating these shows and podcasts and DJ mixes.” This idea that people have their favourite creators and those are the people they want to support and subscribe to and be fans of, and so we want to be the platform that helps power that,” said Perez. “ It’s a little bit like Patreon and a little bit like YouTube.

The plans sit somewhere between the ongoing crowdfunding model of a platform like Patreon, and YouTube’s ( recently shut-down) option for individual channels on its service to charge monthly subscriptions for their premium videos. “But in terms of the creators, it’s about enabling that relationship between fan and creator to really thrive, and to give people a sense of being closer to their favourite curator,” he continued. Maybe higher quality audio, we’ll have to see about that,” said Perez. “The ability to cache things offline, the ability to see track lists in advance, the ability to remove ads.

#MIXLOUD LISTEN LATER FREE#

He added that these individual creator subscriptions will sit alongside a service-wide premium tier offering Mixcloud listeners features that haven’t been available on its free service.

“ It’s not going to be 9.99, it’s going to actually be variable price points that the creators can set,” co-founder Nico Perez told Music Ally. That focus will extend to its premium-tier plans. Since its launch in 2009, Mixcloud has differentiated itself from services like Spotify by focusing on long-form DJ mixes and radio-style shows, rather than a catalogue of individual tracks. The streaming service’s ambitions to move beyond its traditional ad-supported model were revealed earlier this month, when it signed its first direct licensing deal, with Warner Music Group. Mixcloud’s plans for premium subscriptions will include the ability for individual DJs, curators and podcasters on its platform to launch subscriptions for their mixes and shows.

Mixloud listen later