Mixcloud Adds Premium Accounts and Reposting, Announces Online Radio Awards Winners

Mixcloud today announced new premium accounts, "Premium for Listeners" and "Pro for Uploaders." But the ad-supported free tier remains with the promise, "Mixcloud will always be Free," and all accounts have unlimited uploads and unlimited listening. Mixcloud also introduced "Reposts" to open up sharing and curating to more participants. In addition, last week Mixcloud and the International Radio Festival announced the winners of the Online Radio Awards 2014.

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I've got to say that I consider Mixcloud one of the truly important music tech companies of our time. Like the rest of a handful of interesting startups that emerged or launched to serve electronic musicians and are rising with the EDM boom, Mixcloud seems both sharply attuned to the times while offering services that musicians, djs and broadcasters in all genres should be checking out.

New Premium and Pro Accounts

Mixcloud now has three plans:

Basic: free with unlimited uploads and listening. Ads and basic stats.

Premium for Listeners: $6.99 a month with no ads and early access to new features.

Pro for Uploaders: $15 a month with multiple features for musicians, djs and broadcasters including full stats (demo), scheduled uploading, comment disabling and content highlighting.

Note that Pro listeners will hear ads "due to licensing constraints." I don't know the details on that but Mixcloud has been licensing music all along which means musicians are getting paid and random takedown orders are eliminated.

Adding Reposts

Mixcloud users can now allow others to Repost their content on the platform. This opens up social interactions and marketing as well as curator roles for those so inclined.

Reposting seems like an obvious addition but most socially-inclined platforms that have succeeded with reposting, SoundCloud and Tumblr for example, feature smaller chunks of content in the forms of tracks or simple blog posts.

So reposting may not have been so obvious for a platform that features full dj mixes and shows.

Online Radio Awards 2014

Last week Mixcloud and the International Radio Festival announced the winners of their inaugural Online Radio Awards.

See winners from 15 categories here.

Serving All Interested Parties

Overall Mixcloud seems to be doing a good job of considering the needs of all parties from rights holders to uploaders to listeners. In sharp contrast to SoundCloud they license music and they are improving things for the djs and other uploaders who helped them build their audience. That's a difficult balance to maintain but so far Mixcloud is accomplishing what others cannot.

More:

• Mixcloud and The International Radio Festival Launch Online Radio Awards
• Mixcloud Web Radio and DJ Platform Sets Up Shop In New York
• Mixcloud Relaunches For Radio Shows, DJ Mixes: Still Free, Still Fully Licensed

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) recently launched DanceLand. Send news about music tech startups and services, DIY music biz and music marketing to: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.