SoundCloud Ramps Up Music Discovery, Adds ‘Suggest Tracks’
SoundCloud is now competing directly against Spotify, Apple Music and others. So it's adding features to match them. With 125 million tracks on SoundCloud vs. about 35 million on Spotify and Apple, solving music discovery is a big issue.
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Today SoundCloud began rolling out a newest discovery feature, Suggested Tracks, across all platforms. It uses listening activity to automatically find new tracks and artists – ones that the user has never heard before, but are similar to songs they are already playing.
Songs are chosen using a machine learning algorithm in much the same way as Spotify's Discover Weekly. But instead of a weekly playlist, suggestions are available at any time. On the web, Suggested Tracks is the centerpiece of a Discover tab added the the home scree. In the app, Suggested Tracks are in the Search field, accessible by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the footer (iOS) or header (Android) of the app.
SoundCloud said it will be releasing more discovery features in the coming weeks.
