Sony’s current spat with Soundcloud over “lack of monetisation options” has taken a turn for the worse after French DJ and producer Madeon revealed that Sony will delete his Soundcloud page in the coming days against the producer’s will.
The French producer tweeted, “Thank you SoundCloud for being such a great discovery platform over the past five years. Well done Sony for holding your own artists hostage,” all but confirming he’s the next artist to be forcibly removed from the music platform despite him wanting to stay on it.
He did offer some nice words about his label Columbia, but didn’t speak in glowing terms about its parent label Sony Music, “Lots of love for my label Columbia of course, they’re great. Less love for Sony Corporate’s disconnected-from-reality strategy.”
Ultra Records’ Patrick Moxey, who was speaking at the IMS conference in Ibiza this week, offered his thoughts on Soundcloud and major labels wanting to remove their content from the service.
“I think that SoundCloud is fantastic because there 100,000 creators uploading new music to [the platform] every night, but what do they pay artists and writers right now? Little to nothing. Will they pay anybody anything in the near future? Not really,” said Moxey, according to Music Week.
“What electronic artists are going to get out of SoundCloud financially in the next few years is close to nothing. Once you realise that then you’ll realise that you do have to protect the guys that are trying to pay the artists and the labels.”
The head of Soundcloud is set to speak at IMS today, and hopefully will be able to persuade the major labels and artists that Soundcloud will become a fully-licensed paying music service, and in turn won’t destroy the amazing community it has built up over the last 5 years. Whether Sony will be alongside them remains to be seen though.