How long can SoundCloud maintain its precarious position?

Content creators, investors, record labels, and users. These four groups are essential to SoundCloud’s success, but unfortunately, not all of the four want the same thing, and this often leads to conflicts that SoundCloud has to resolve, or else lose invaluable assets. At the International Music Summit in Ibiza earlier this week, SoundCloud founder Alex Ljung tried to dodge some difficult questions regarding these conflicts and how the company is choosing to solve them. Even so, it’s apparent that SoundCloud isn’t going to be able to keep everyone happy, which leaves the company in a rather precarious position. 

SoundCloud‘s founder Alex Ljung was one of the most anticipated speakers at International Music Summit (IMS) Ibiza, the three-day conference that gathered professionals from the electronic music industry. In a keynote interview, he got grilled by UK-based journalist Craig McLean on a series of relevant issues, from revenue sharing to rights issues. While Ljung somewhat dodged difficult questions and declined to disclose new numbers, he still made interesting comments on SoundCloud’s past, present and future. It was also quite revealing to see some negative comments being posted on Twitter during his talk, highlighting the end of the startup’s honeymoon period with the electronic music community. One of the hot topics was the controversy around potential content takedowns of derivative work, such as DJ mixes. Ljung reminded the audience that copyright was a complex issue, but also that SoundCloud was navigating uncharted territories, which required a sizeable amount of work. “We’re actually trying to change things quite significantly,” he later said, in reference to his company’s effort to adapt to the democratization of content. “The challenges around solving this space are a pain that we feel as well,” he confessed.