Music Industry Moves: SoundCloud Enables Artists to Connect With Their Biggest Fans; Stargate Inks JV With Pulse

variety.com:

SoundCloud has launched a new product called “Fans” that provides artists with access to deep user data and makes it easy for them to connect with their most loyal listeners.

Now available on SoundCloud for Artists, the tool allows artists to view the platform’s data and sort their most engaged listeners based on factors like comments, listening behavior, sharing habits and location — and even directly message individual fans and share previews of upcoming music, info, sell tickets and merch and more. (There’s also an opt-out for those who don’t want Beyonce cluttering up their DMs.) The program had been in beta for around six weeks but is now ramping up to 60,000 artists who are members of its premium Next Pro tier.

The company considered it the next logical step in their fan-powered royalties system, under which the company pays out each listener’s subscriber revenue entirely to the rights-holders or the artists they’ve actually listened to, rather than the all-in model used by most streaming services. + Pulse Music Group has signed production duo Stargate — aka Mikkel Eriksen and Tor E.

Hermanson (Torr) — to a creative joint venture. The team has worked closely with several award-winning artists including Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, Celine Dion, Janet Jackson, Shakira, Katy Perry, Coldplay, Pink, Sia, Whitney Houston and Nas, among others.