SoundCloud Acquires Nina Protocol Assets
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- SoundCloud acquired the remaining assets of Nina Protocol, roughly two months after Nina announced it was shutting down, gaining its editorial archive, genre map, and opt-in access to artist music catalogs.
- Artists who opt into SoundCloud will reportedly keep 100% of royalties on direct sales and gain access to distribution, fan monetization, audience growth, and engagement tools, per the deal terms.
- Mike Pollard, Nina Protocol's CEO and co-founder, called SoundCloud "the natural choice" in a press release, saying the platform shared Nina's mission of empowering independent artists and documenting music communities.
- Nina Protocol was founded in 2021 by Jack Callahan, Mike Pollard, and Eric Farber as a Solana-based Web3 streaming service and marketplace; artists including Yung Lean, Aya, and Ana Roxanne and labels like Warp, Hyperdub, AD 93, and Stroom distributed through it.
- A Components report found that roughly $50,000 was spent across Nina Protocol's entire lifetime, while about 77% of its nearly 37,000 listings went uncollected.
- SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton last year pledged that artist content would not be used to train generative AI, following backlash over the platform's earlier AI policy wording.
Why it matters: Independent artists who hosted catalogs on Nina Protocol now face a binary choice: opt into SoundCloud's ecosystem for distribution and monetization tools or lose their platform entirely. The Components data—$50,000 in lifetime spending across ~37,000 listings, with 77% uncollected—underscores how small the Web3 streaming experiment was, making this a consolidation of a defunct niche rather than a competitive threat to anyone.
