Sony Artist Lashes Out Over Forced SoundCloud Catalogue Removal

Madeon Profile

Sony Music's campaign against free music-streaming service SoundCloud, which has seen the entertainment juggernaut pull artists such as Hozier, Adele, Passion Pit and others from the platform, has claimed another artist scalp, this time in the form of French EDM heavyweight Madeon — and he is not happy about it.

Madeon — who, like a lot of contemporary electronic musicians, owes much of his reach to services such as SoundCloud — expressed his displeasure on social media this morning, alerting his fans to the fact that Sony would be taking down "all of my music from my SoundCloud account in the next few days", and urging them to "have a farewell listen".

Asked by a follower whether the takedown of his content was the artist's wish, Madeon responded that it was "against [his] will", elaborating in a consequent tweet: "Thank you SoundCloud for being such a great discovery platform over the past five years. Well done Sony for holding your own artists hostage".

Madeon's debut full-length, Adventure, was released a couple of months ago on Columbia Records, which forms a part of the larger Sony hydra — though it should be noted that the 20-year-old producer did take the time to praise his label, just not "Sony Corporate's disconnected-from-reality strategy".

The original disagreement with SoundCloud arose out of a perceived "lack of monetisation opportunities" on which Sony could capitalise for their artists, because — profitable or not — clearly there is no other intangible upside at all to having an existing, loyal audience base of nearly 885,000 people.

Read Madeon's irritated tweets below, then maybe scoot on over to his SoundCloud page to squeeze in some final listens before his tunes are pulled for good.