After having decided to write again, I began tending to my 3rd SoundCloud account. I say 3rd because their free accounts only allowed for a limited amount of upload time and I had already hit the limit twice!
As they say, the 4rd time is certainly the charm.
I decided to buy into the platform. They pack a lot of value into their Pro Plan.
Easy to monetize, they distribute you across all popular music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple and YouTube Music and their platform in general is a nice mix of creators and listeners.
Their insights allow me to see who plays, where they’re streaming from and how many times they’ve played this song or that.
They have a merchandise integration so I can link my awesome T-Spring listings, offer a Fan Support module to allow fans to contribute to artists directly.
My Home in The Clouds
This is a perfect example of "If you build it, they will come."
The year was off to a slow start. At this point, this account contains a ragtag mix of music I’ve made over the years. Everything from the earliest recordings I’ve made to captures of later works as they appeared on radio are here. The majority of these plays are from friends and bandmates who come mostly for the nostalgia, to reminisce, hear the music of our hey days, glory years. How much of that can one really do? I couldn’t expect much outside of being “discovered” by new listeners who happen to come along, or shall I say, as my music happens to occur as they’re streaming.
Outside of Valentine’s Day, during this quarter, I didn’t receive much love, lol.
Things got worse as Spring sprung and my music fell off the radar for 3 solid months. Days without plays!
Summer came and went with barely a blip on the insights play counter. It wasn’t until the season would again begin to turn that I would see any attention. What changed? I began to write and release new music.
The 4th quarter was a good one. I continued to write, release pick up momentum. I managed to hit a couple of cool milestones over the course of these last months of the year. For me, it certainly was a Grand Finale to the calendar year!
Where the 2nd half of the year saw me average of about 3k plays every 30 days, December, my moon, saw a jump to 5k in plays, including a single 1k day backed by a 950 play day that suffered partially due to a SoundCloud outage!
In the end I was played over 11k times!
To put the year into perspective, the following image show my All-Time Plays Count for this channel.
I began the channel in 2016. 9 Years in the works and in the 4th quarter I received all but about 1300 of those plays!
2026 Is going to be a fun year. I plan on exploring my past more deeply, and will continue to produce new material as well.
If it’s received at least as well as these, I’ll be happy!