In a keynote interview at the International Music Summit conference in Ibiza, SoundCloud founder and CEO Alexander Ljung stated that the company's premium subscription service would launch this year, as planned.
Ljung says, "We have our path mapped out and we're working away at that. It's an incredibly interesting time for music overall. There's a lot of players making big bets at the moment and lot of opinions on where things should land."
It's not certain what the subscription service would entail, though Ljung told the Wall Street Journal late last year that it would be ad-free and had already signed licensing deals with Warner Music. At this current moment, SoundCloud has yet to sign licensing deals with two out of the three majors.
Ljung also had some comments about the ad-supported music streaming business model: "There are a lot of headlines saying that person or this person doesn't support free, on-demand streaming. I think that's not quite the issue … There's virtually no people in the world that don't say music is a significant part of their lives. So if you translate that into a business perspective, it's basically a product that every person wants. And how can it be that something with that much emotional power, that much engagement and that much audience has so little revenues.
"I think that sometimes there's a perspective that if we would not have ad-supported, it would all be in subscription. Which is not a useful way of thinking because it's not going to happen. So the solve is very straight forward, it's a mix between ad-supported and subscription."
As interviewer Craig McLean points out, SoundCloud currently boasts 175 million unique monthly users and every minute, 12 hours of audio is being uploaded to SoundCloud.
You can check out Alexander Ljung's full interview at the International Music Summit below.
