The new music economy: SoundCloud users now have a tipjar thanks to Flattr

For struggling musicians, making a buck, let alone a living, from their music can be difficult. While SoundCloud has emerged as a useful way of easily sharing audio online in recent times, there hasn’t been a straightforward way for users to monetise those recordings.

Now Flattr, the ‘online tipjar’ startup founded Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, has launched a way to connect a Flattr account to SoundCloud. This means that users can now earn money from their songs – or any other audio they upload.

A Flattr button will be added to the user’s SoundCloud players, wherever they’re embedded. Now, Flattr has hardly gone mainstream yet, but it’s another potential revenue stream for musicians online. What’s more, it shows that it’s less important than ever to have a traditional record deal – just like BandCamp, this is another easy-to-set-up ‘roll your own’ monetisation solution. SoundCloud’s probably kicking itself it do this itself.