SoundCloud turns on ads and Go premium subs in the UK and Ireland

SoundCloud turns on ads and Go premium

Now that SoundCloud has inked licensing deals with all the big music rights holders, the startup is wasting no time rolling out subscription services and advertising to a wider number of markets to better monetize its 175 million users and compete better against the likes of Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music and the rest.

The music-streaming company (sometimes referred to as the YouTube of audio for its wide array of user-generated content) is today expanding its SoundCloud Go premium subscription service to the U.K. and Ireland, a month after first launching it in the U.S. As with the U.S. version of Go, users will have ad-free access, plus a Spotify-style selection of millions of premium tracks alongside the wider SoundCloud catalog of music and podcasts — some 125 million tracks in all for a fee of £9.99 or €9.99 per month after a 30-day free trial (the U.S. version costs $9.99 per month).

Read following: One month from the launch of Go, SoundCloud is not giving away much about how it has been received so far in the U.S

Venture investments in new manufacturing technologies could reshape American industry

The cost of hardware and infrastructure to support the application of technology 

in manufacturing has come down dramatically

A wave of venture investment into new manufacturing startups looks set to transform American manufacturing.

While the foundations for these companies may have been laid in cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco, the startups that are driving this next industrial revolution hail from more unlikely hubs of technology innovation in the smaller urban centers of the Sun Belt and the Southeast.

These include cities like Lexington, Ky., in states whose economies were ravaged by the 2008 financial crisis and see redemption in the entrepreneurial energy of startup businesses.

New industrial processes, such as on-demand machining and additive three-dimensional printing, may have a tremendous effect on the U.S. economy.

Roughly 33 percent of the economy is fueled by manufacturing and it’s one of the arenas that has been most resistant to incursions from the technology world. Now, all of that is changing for several well-documented reasons.

Read following: The cost of hardware and infrastructure to support the application of technology in manufacturing has come down dramatically