Plans Book

By: Anthony Panagos, Dana Hetrick, Matthew Grosky,

Luis Rodriguez & Vanessa Ramos

Background Research
Company/Product Information:
SoundCloud is an interactive music sharing platform where artists and music fans can
share and upload music from artists. Based in Berlin, Germany, Soundcloud was created in 2007
by Swedish sound designer, Alexander Ljung with co-founder, Eric Wahlforss. From its
inception in 2007, SoundCloud has grown to have approximately 40 million users in July of
2013, but reaches approximately 200 million people throughout the world. Perhaps the most
important quality of SoundCloud is that it allows upcoming artists to share the music they
created as audio files for users. Users can share the audio files among other users in order to
easily spread music of new artists, providing them with a greater likelihood to gain new fans. For
artists, the first two hours of posted content are free, but beyond that they must begin paying a
fee of either $38 a year for four hours of content or $130 a year for the ability to post an
unlimited amount of content. The unique quality of SoundCloud is that many audio files are able
to be directly downloaded by users in addition to each artist having an embedded link making
sharing on other social media sites incredibly simple.
Consumer Information: The majority of SoundClouds users are millennials who are either
music fans or music creators. Other than a shared interest in music, SoundCloud has a diverse
consumer market, as it offers various genres as well as podcasts for site visitors. Though
SoundCloud is an international website, many of SoundClouds are from the United States.
Competitive Information:
SoundClouds biggest competitors are Spotify, Pandora, Grooveshark, imeem, Rdio,
Last.fm, MySpace, and Ezmo. These are all online music services that provide free music to
fans.

SWOT Analysis:
Strengths

Weaknesses

Visitors
Growth
Value
Technology

Monetization
Social Engagement
Search Traffic
Geography
Competitive Market

Traffics
Markets
Universal Search

Opportunities

Threats

Social
Competing Sites

Strengths:
Visitors:
o An average of 200 million desktop visits per month over the past 12 months to the SoundCloud site:

o Registered users Over 38 million monthly registered users

o 50% more traffic than Pandora (the 2nd largest site in group) and four times more traffic than
Spotify (the smallest site in the group)
o Loyalty 33% of average monthly visits were by logged in users (based on visits to
soundcloud.com/stream, a file-path that indicates a logged-in user).

o Traction with music content creators and possibly upcoming deals with record labels.

Growth:
o Desktop Traffic- to SoundCloud grew by 62% over past 12 months. It increased from 154
million in May, 2013 to 247 million in April, 2014.
o Direct traffic This jumped by over 60% over past 12 months for SoundCloud; direct traffic
tends to be the most stable form of traffic and shows a high degree of brand awareness. Direct
traffic for the other sites actually fell over that past 12 months, with Pandora tumbling the most:

o Referral Traffic Grew by 28% since Jan, 2014 for SoundCloud, this a much larger increase

than enjoyed by any of the other analyzed sites. Grooveshark and Pandora show signs of
stagnation, and Spotify doubled its search visits.
Value:
o Users Fairly high quality users in terms of geography for all four analyzed sites; the top five
countries driving traffic are US, UK, FR, DE, and BR. A large percentage of traffic is from other
European countries. The below graph shows relative share of traffic each country drives to the
analyzed sites, so for example, of all the US traffic sent to all four sites, 28.72% of it went to
SoundCloud:

o Search Traffic over 99% of SoundClouds search engine traffic is organic, with almost no

money spent on paid traffic (PPC), Spotify and Pandora both spend money on paid search engine
traffic.
o Free Content SoundCloud currently pays no royalty fees to artists, publishers, or labels.
Technology:
o Streaming Content SoundClouds infrastructure is based on file streaming, and as internet
speeds increase, current trends are moving away from downloading content and towards
streaming, which is faster and easier for most users.
o The site is built to make it easy to upload content for both
desktop and mobile uses, in an extremely social environment.

Weaknesses:
Monetization:
o SoundCloud does not seem to have a clear monetization model, most users have free accounts
and consume or curate music, as opposed to upload it. It is unclear how they intend to make
money.
o SoundCloud currently attempts to monetize in several ways, but their primary method seems
to be through selling Pro and Unlimited subscriptions to users that need to upload more
content than is possible with their free account.

Engagement:
o High bounce rates, or users that visit only one page on the site and then leaves. These average
49% over the past 12 months, which is much worse than any of the competing sites and shows
either a bad target audience fit or a pain point that is compelling visitors to flee in droves:

Social:
o Social visits dropped by 50% since Jan, 2014.
o YouTube traffic is weak relative to Pandora. SoundCloud gets 6.81% of its social traffic from
YouTube, while Pandora gets 17.51% of its social traffic from YouTube.
Search Traffic:
o Low visibility in search engines, which drove only 15% of the sites traffic over past 12
months.
Geography:
o While SoundCloud has relatively high quality traffic in terms of geography, only 34.82% of
their average traffic over the past 12 months came from the US.

Opportunities
Traffic:
o Increase reach outside of the US
o Pandora is only open to US, AU, and NZ users
o Spotify is open to US, AU, parts of Europe and some of South & Central America
o Grooveshark is open worldwide

o As stated in Weakness section above, SoundCloud only gets 34% of its traffic from the US,
there is a huge opportunity to improve the US user base.
o Referrals Increase referral traffic from sources that seem to be working for their
competitors.
o allmusic.com, with about 14 million monthly visits, which only sends traffic to Spotify
o lastfm.es, with about 4.3 million monthly visits, which only sends traffic to Spotify
o ask.com, with about 2.5 billion monthly visits, which sends traffic mostly to Pandora
o duckduckgo.com with about 26 million monthly visits, which sends traffic mostly to Pandora
o shoppstop.com with about 24 million monthly visits, which sends traffic mostly to Pandora
Monetization:
o Great opportunity to increase monetization, current efforts are so low, they have tremendous
room for improvement of both existing funnels and creating new revenue streams see the
section about monetization and conversions in Weaknesses.
Universal Search:
o Googles Universal Search mixes videos, images and news articles into the search results,
often in top slots for competitive terms. Neither SoundCloud, nor any of its competitors get any
real traffic from Googles Video or News search, which has the potential to drive significant
amounts of visitors, with a relatively small changes to the sites code:

Threats

Social:
o SoundClouds social traffic barely increased over that past 12 months (from 40 to 48 million),
while Spotifys almost doubled (from 6 to 11.5 million).
o Besides the fear of stagnation, 75% of SoundClouds social traffic came from Facebook,
which has a greying demographic teens are becoming increasingly weary of Facebook ,this
does not bode well for future traffic:
Competing Sites:
o While SoundClouds Traffic grew by 62% over the past 12 months, Spotifys traffic jumped
by 118% over the same period.
Problems and Opportunities:
The primary problem is that there are so many different websites who offer a similar service and
SoundCloud needs to make it known to consumers that it is the best option for making content
sharing simple. Make Soundcloud different from all other music sharing sites in where the
consumers have an opportunity to engage with our brand.

Key Strategic Decisions

Digital Advertising Objectives and Strategies:
To increase traffic on website through a multifaceted digital advertising campaign.
Target Audience and Persona:
Men and women ages 16-30 who are music fans and currently registered members
Sample persona: Dave is a 21 year old Chicagoan who is currently enrolled at Columbia
University for sound engineering and audio production. Dave is a huge fan of the electronic
dance music genre and spends much of his time online logged into SoundCloud to check out new
artists. Though Dave is busy with school, he spends his Friday nights, DJing at a bar downtown.
When Dave isnt listening to new music, he is creating it and uploading it to SoundCloud to
share with his friends.

Media Recommendations
Media Objectives:
To reach 40% of young adults ages 16-30 online at least 3 times a week up through a week after
the execution of the campaign event.
Media Strategies:

 Update the SoundCloud homepage

Increase traffic to SoundCloud website through social media
Increase the number of Instagram followers to perpetuate promotion of festival and overall brand
Tactics:
Update SoundCloud homepage to feature Airwaves Music Festival advertisement which will
include contest information
Use Airwaves Music Festival contest to encourage sharing content sharing via users personal
social media pages in order to increase traffic to SoundCloud homepage, and engage more with
our users
Encourage festival attendees to instagram their favorite artists whom are either at the festival, or
whom they wish were at the festival in order to increase followers while increasing traffic to site.

Creative Brief
Name/title: Soundcloud Presents: Airwaves Music Festival
Client: Soundcloud
Dates: 5/25/14 9/7/15
Pages: Digital application
Type: Music Festival/Interactive Broadcast Platform
Objective:
Soundcloud Presents: Airwaves Music Festival is a two-prong campaign centralizing its efforts
around fostering the principle of artist discovery and active engagement for Soundcloud users,
affording them the opportunity, not only to tune into live festival/concert broadcasts, but also
offer users the chance to perform at this exclusive festival. While Soundcloud primarily serves as
an online digital platform to for artists and other users to share their music and gain exposure,
this campaign acts as a real life representation of Soundclouds staple ideology, which is artist
discovery and a communal appreciation for new artists/music. This campaign and music festival
will be run through the summer of 2015, beginning Memorial Day weekend and running through
Labor Day weekend. The warmer climate offers an inviting atmosphere as well as the plausibility
of utilizing outdoor venues, ultimately maximizing attendance rates.
Target Audience:
Primary Audience consistent, recreational listeners with a registered Soundcloud account
Men and women (ages 16-30)
Some events/festivals enforce an 18+ admission policy, this campaign allows those listeners to
be included in the musical experience although they cannot be physically present at the festival
Secondary Audience professional, touring musicians and up-and-coming artists
This allows direct communication with the artists who wish to gain more exposure and those
whose ideals align with the notion of inclusiveness and active fan/listener engagement

Message Theme:
Soundcloud serves as a platform where users can identify themselves musically, moving to their
preferred rhythm alongside an audience with identical musical preferences. Soundcloud offers a
mutual playground for artists and listeners alike where they can see their advocacy for
underground artists come to fruition right before their eyes.
Purpose:
The primary purpose of this advertisement is to spark an interest among listeners of all musical
preferences while fostering the inclusive nature of Soundclouds social sound community.
Provide users with active listener capability
Demonstrate an emphasis on superior customer service coupled with the absence of financial
implications for participation
Offer an inclusive, unique experience for listeners that arent provided by competitors (Spotify,
Pandora, Mixcloud, etc.)
Remain the worlds leading social sound platform where anyone (including artists) can create
sounds and share them everywhere
Taking it one step further, sharing those sounds in real time with live broadcasts of Soundclouds
very own music festival
Take full advantage of the various touchpoints such as Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook to increase
promotion and enforce the one-click listen/view tactic from those touchpoints
Encourage further artist discovery and active participation from Soundcloud users
Offer up-and-coming artists an opportunity to gain exposure, which aligns directly with
Soundclouds primary function
Style & Tone:
This platform is lively, engaging and most of all user-friendly. Users should look at Soundcloud
as an inviting community where external judgments are left aside and the only differences lie in
regards to what sound users like best. These advertisements should foster a bond between
listeners and their favorite artists with a referent connotation for who brings them together
Soundcloud.
Benefits/Support:
Social platform for collaboration and music sharing/listening
Free of charge for recreational and consistent listeners
Account upgrades are optional for those such as professional musicians who wish to receive
statistical info regarding their music

Fostering relationships between an artist and their following

All content/music is free and free downloads are often made available by account holders and
professional musicians
Soundcloud is the driving force behind the fight for net neutrality, steering away from
conglomerate record labels and allowing artists to expose their music entirely for free

Constraints/Challenges:
As copyright laws become more restrictive and penalties more severe, users on Soundcloud
(including professional musicians) have experienced a vast portion of their account content being
taken down by major record labels.
By targeting music enthusiasts, competition from companies such as Spotify and Pandora pose
problems. Due to their archive of content, a major struggle will be emphasizing Soundclouds
passion to connect people to music and help them discover it, not just provide it.

Creative Execution
Airwaves Music Festival Advertisement and Homepage

SoundCloud Instagram

Evaluation
Once Airwaves Music
Festival is over we, as a team
would evaluate the increase in
Soundcloud subscribers, on

all

forms of social media,

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

and

actual Soundcloud users. The

web

traffic of people who visit Soundcloud after Airwaves, the amount of people who come to
Airwaves and who the audience was primarily. Whether or not the festival helped foster a new
brand image. One that is beneficial to aspiring artists. From all of this, we would gain a better
glimpse on whether or not to continue Airwaves in the following years.

Sources:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/talkingtech/2013/07/17/whos-listening-tosoundcloud-200-million/2521363/
http://blog.similarweb.com/soundcloud-swot-analysis-not-your-moms-mtv/