SoundCloud global head of music Emmy Lovell: “To have zero plays is soul destroying for musicians.”

July 2024: Emmy Lovell, global head of music at SoundCloud. She discusses how, in an age of plenty, the mythical level playing field of digital is often a cemetery, why repeat visits by users is the earliest sign a track or artist could explode and why, if too many tracks go unplayed and undiscovered, SoundCloud is failing in its duty. 

And that’s the zero-to-hero scenario: the biggest problem for music in an age of digital ubiquity is the sound of silence. Daily, hundreds of thousands of new tracks appear online, but a large percentage of them are never played. Ignored, unloved undiscovered, slowly suffocated by digital cobwebs. SoundCloud cannot force users to listen to everything, but it wants to save millions of tracks from the dark fate of total obscurity. 

---

In late 2008, MySpace was hitting its peak, having passed through an intense and profound period where music was positioned as a major hook for social media and musicians finally had a platform operating at scale to bypass (or grab the attention) of the record label gatekeepers. Towards the end of that year, SoundCloud arrived and was able to take the DIY ethic kickstarted by MySpace and amplify it even further. 

With over 40 million creators and north of 375 million tracks, it remains a powerful breeding ground for new music. Having held senior digital roles at EMI, Warner Music Group and Napster, Emmy Lovell joined SoundCloud in January 2023 as its global head of music. 

“I’ve championed artists my whole life,” she says of her remit. “It felt like at a major label there were the chosen few, but SoundCloud is the masses.”

Catalogue is unimportant if it’s unplayed

Its SoundCloud Go and SoundCloud Go+ tiers offer not only pretty much the same music as found on the other DSPs but also tens of millions of creator-uploaded tracks (making YouTube Music its closest competitor in terms of range of music sources). Volume of catalogue is important to a point, but increasingly redundant if much of the music is unplayed. 

Like the philosophical conceit about a tree falling in a forest and whether it does or does not make a sound if no one is around to hear it, if a service has X millions tracks that no one has ever played, doubt hangs over if they even truly exist. 

Numbers from Luminate claim 45.6 millions tracks on DSPs last year had zero plays while 158.6 million (the bulk of the 184 million it estimates are on DSPs) had 1,000 or fewer plays. 

This is an accelerating concern for SoundCloud, says Lovell, especially given 170,000 new files, equal to 56,146,525 hours of audio of all forms (tracks, mixes, podcasts and more), are uploaded onto the platform every day. 

“These are songs where people have put their heart and soul into trying to create something,” she says. “To have zero plays is soul destroying for these people.” 

The very, very, very long tail

The quixotic nature of Chris Anderson’s theory of the long tail ran that, with no storage issues and instant access to everything, all creations would find an audience. Yet the acceleration of music creation makes getting heard incrementally more Sisyphean rather than egalitarian. 

To try and cool this burning worry, SoundCloud’s product team came up with First Fans. “Based on understanding the track, they would give the opportunity for it to have 100 listeners – real listeners,” says Lovell of how unplayed tracks would be pushed into algorithmic playlists based on a user’s tastes. “Not all of them would listen, but it would be given to 100 listeners for them to listen to. If that did well, it would then go to 1,000 people to broaden it out.”

She says over 3.5 million tracks have been given this boost since the launch of First Fans in June 2023 (initially using a limited test base and currently only open to uploads by Next Pro subscribers). From there they can be elevated to the Buzzing playlist. 

“It’s our duty to make sure that people discover new stuff,” she says. “That’s why they come to SoundCloud.”

Without discovery of new music and new musicians at the very earliest stage of their career and development, the SoundCloud proof of concept becomes, at best, rusty and, at worst, null and void. 

“Then we’re just like every other platform,” Lovell says of the label-centric catalogues that make up the offering on standard DSPs. “We have all of that as well, but our exciting area is helping people discover their new next obsession.”

Fixing this nil-play conundrum is especially important for SoundCloud given that it has two main audience constituencies – music fans and the music business. They are theoretically distinct but when they fuse, an act or a track – be that Billie Eilish uploading ‘Ocean Eyes’ in 2016 or Cassö uploading ‘Prada’ (a remix of D-Block Europe’s 2021 track ‘Ferrari Horses’ that also features Raye) last year – can explode. 

“We have so many fans on our platform that do the music discovery or the first layer of A&R for us,” says Lovell. “That’s the bit that’s really exciting because there’s no barrier between the creators and the fan communities. We are the place where A&Rs come to find their next signing; but we are also the place where fans come to find their next favourite obsession.”

Success metrics on digital platforms have shifted over the years. Initially registered users were flagged as proof of growth, then active users, then dwell time, then likes, then follows and so on. For SoundCloud, the earliest tremor that a track is starting to connect is return listens as distinct from repeat plays. 

For SoundCloud, the earliest tremor that a track is starting to connect is return listens

“We were seeing the telltale signs of something interesting because people were coming back and listening again and again,” says Lovell of how the Cassö track, for example, first appeared on the platform’s radar. The number of people coming back to this track peaked more than our standardised benchmarks. And so it went on a watchlist for us.”

In the seismology of SoundCloud user data, return visits to tracks takes on special power. 

“The key thing here is every successful artist or track that goes on to exceed everyone’s expectations on SoundCloud always starts with an action – an action from a human being that turns into a superfan,” she explains. “The actions that someone takes, whether it’s as simple as liking a comment, listening to the track constantly, or going the whole hog and contributing in the comments, is the single biggest thing that we see as an indicator for the potential success for a track or an artist.”

The past quarter century’s democratisation of creativity running in parallel with the ubiquity of all music from all eras is one of the most profound changes and challenges the music has ever experienced. The cold irony of anyone being able to create and release music compressed down to zeroes and ones is that the painful reality of zero plays will endure and increasingly feel more like a feature than a bug.