Songbox vs Soundcloud: what our users say

Here is a list of themes that our subscribers have told us about when we asked them why they left Soundcloud and came to Songbox.

1. Soundcloud is a social network

Soundcloud is a place to get discovered, to get likes, to get followers and to get fans. This isn't necessarily the type of environment that a high profile (or any professional) music creator might want to upload highly valuable unreleased works.

In short, Soundcloud is about "one to many" - one music creator looking to get exposure to as many individuals as possible.

Songbox is about "one to one" or "one to very few" where a music creator is looking to share their tracks with specifically identified individuals and no-one else.

2. Soundcloud's terms of use

Here is an excerpt from Soundcloud's terms (10th Sept 2021):

By uploading Your Content to the Platform, you also grant a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to other users of the Platform, and to operators and users of any other websites, apps and/or platforms to which Your Content has been shared or embedded using the Services ("Linked Services"), to use, copy, listen to offline, repost, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, adapt, prepare derivative works of, compile, make available and otherwise communicate to the public

Here's another snippet:

To the extent it is necessary in order for SoundCloud to provide you with any of the aforementioned hosting services, to undertake any of the tasks set forth in these Terms of Use, including the distribution of advertising or other promotional material on our Platform and/or to enable your use of the Platform, you hereby grant such licenses to SoundCloud on a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid basis.

What does that all mean? We're not lawyers so we're not going to try and decipher it for you, but it doesn't sound all that enticing to someone who has audio that must remain private and secure.

At Songbox we have no public facing element of the site, we have no advertising and we don't share your music with any third parties. In fact, we proudly don't do ANYTHING with your tracks except host them for you and allow you to choose who you want to listen. When you delete your tracks from the Songbox interface, the tracks are deleted from our servers; gone; unrecoverable.

3. Soundcloud's bloated interface

Many of our users who have come from Soundcloud have mentioned the fact that Soundcloud is visually bloated; Comments, reposts, adverts, upsells, related artists, playlists, share buttons... it's a lot to get on one page because they are trying to do so many different things.

With Songbox we pride ourselves on minimalist and beautiful design. We have no ads, no upsells, we don't try to convert your listeners into members, there are no share buttons, "like" counts or related artists. Nothing. Pages on Songbox are about you, and your tracks. Thats it.

4. How your data is used

Soundcloud harvests your data so that they can sell it to advertisers. Snippet from their privacy policy:

To deliver targeted marketing for SoundCloud products on and off the Platform and measure the success of those campaigns. When you see our ads on a third party website or apps, we or third party services we engage for this purpose, may collect information that your browser or mobile app makes available when seeing the ad (e.g IP address, referral URL, browser details, timestamp of request), including whether a click converted to an actual purchase of a Subscription. Please see the privacy policy of such third party websites to understand what data may be collected and how to opt-out.

Also:

Ads are more effective when they are shown to people who are likely to be interested in the product or service advertised. For this reason, we use the information we collect and receive to help us select which ads to show you on behalf of advertisers.

There's so many references to how Soundcloud monetises your personal data that it wouldn't make sense to have it all here. Check out their privacy policy if you're interested.

What do we do with your data at Songbox? Well, basically nothing.

We don't share it, we don't monetise it or use it in any way. We don't even really collect it. We only have what we need to let you have an account, which is your email address and password (which is one-way encrypted and even we can't see it).

5. Copyright infringement

We have had multiple users join Songbox who have told us they can't host their own music on Soundcloud because it gets flagged for copyright infringement. This requires a frustrating back and forth each time they upload a track (apparently) which can take days, or longer, and sometimes doesn't get resolved at all.

We're not saying these automated processes are bad, but because Songbox is a completely different type of platform (see point number 1), we don't need this. As such, high profile artists, record labels and agencies can share music that they own without any hassles.

In Summary

Soundcloud is a great platform if what you're looking to do is grow an audience. However if you are a professional audio creator; be that a musician, songwriter, recording artist, producer, engineer, artist manager, agent or anyone else who handles valuable audio IP, then Songbox is the perfect tool for allowing you to share this with the individuals who need to hear it. All with privacy and security baked in.

Checkout Songbox