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SoundCloud Hires a Chief Revenue Officer as It Preps Its Subscription Service

NBCU and HBO vet Alison Moore comes on board.

Peter Kafka
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

SoundCloud, the music and audio-sharing service, has hired digital media veteran Alison Moore as its chief revenue officer.

Moore, whose resume includes stints at NBCUniversal* and HBO, joins SoundCloud as it is getting ready to launch a consumer subscription service.

That service has taken years to put together, because it has taken SoundCloud years to work out agreements with the big music labels. But now that SoundCloud has a deal with Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest label, it should be ready to go.

SoundCloud started off as a way for amateur and semi-professional musicians to upload and share their audio files with each other and with fans; in recent years it has become a favored distribution channel for big-name artists like Kanye West as well.

It’s still unclear how big a business SoundCloud can become as it faces much bigger rivals like Spotify and Apple’s Apple Music. In 2014, SoundCloud was ready to sell itself to Twitter, but that deal fell through.

Late last year, Jeff Toig, SoundCloud’s chief business officer, left to become CEO of Tidal, the Jay Z-backed subscription streaming service that has cycled through many executives in the last year. A SoundCloud rep says Moore’s CRO position is a new one for the company.

* Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, has invested in Vox Media, which owns this site.


Code/Media 2016: Vevo and the push for subscription based music services

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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