Share Your Music In The Sound Cloud

why a new web startup might be just what you need

The SoundCloud Logo

SoundCloud is an interesting new startup that seems to fill a very real need in the music industry. It allows online collaboration of music professionals. Whilst this is nothing new, SoundCloud is definitely taking a different approach.

The typical page view of a track

Aimed at musicians, producers, and other music professionals the site’s aim is to enable easy sharing and foster collaboration of music. With a clean interface and a user base in the hundreds of thousands this site has quite the potential. Perhaps the largest drawcard to SoundCloud is the unlimited file size.

Traditionally it was a pain to transfer large files around the world, especially music, between small groups of people for the purposes of collaboration. Old methods included FTP, or websites dedicated to sharing files like SendFile, RapidShare etc.

SoundCloud allows streaming of the uploaded tracks, saving the need to download the entire track. Especially useful if you just want to hear how that lead solo is sounding.

In recent times the site has drawn favour with DJ’s and remixers alike.Bipolar Badwise a popular indie act is a notable mention. Quite a few different people are currently remixing them, so it’s no wonder they caught onto this service.

According to TechCrunch they just received “a €2.5 million (around $3.3USD million) funding

Not surprising considering how easy it is to send and receive, as well as make comments on the tracks. More importantly time based comments, whereby one can comment on say the chorus, or 1:40 in for example.

Another great feature is that ability to embed songs, with a really nice widget. It lets you see a graphical representation of the song, very handy if you want to skip to that chorus. As well as all the comments that have been made, and the ability to customise the colour.

The longevity of the site is still up for debate, as it has some competitors and boasts a freemium model. In the late 90’s a company called Rocket Network tried a similar idea, and whilst it wasn’t extremely successful it was later acquired by Digidesign (the makers of Pro Tools) and is now known as DigiDelivery.

Entwined by bipolarbadwise

According to a commenter at TechCrunch one potential problem for SoundCloud is that the majority of studios use Pro Tools, and thus are already signed up to DigiDelivery. Though to be fair, SoundCloud isn’t directly targeted at the majors, more it seems to be favourable for independent artists.

The other issue SoundCloud faces is funding. According to TechCrunch they just received “a €2.5 million (around $3.3 million) funding round led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.” A part of the deal will see Stefan Tirtey of Doughty Hanson “join the company’s board of directors.” With this in mind one would be inclined to believe SoundCloud isn’t going away anytime soon.

Uploading tracks is easy

On the topic funding the site uses a freemium business model. For all accounts there is no limit on file sizes, however there is a limit on the number of tracks one can upload. For a free account you get 5 tracks a month, and you can only access the last 10 uploaded tracks.

Forking out €9 a month will get you 15 uploads a month, and access to all your old tracks. €29 gets you 50 uploads, and €59 gets you unlimited tracks.

These may seem steep, but there is one killer feature I haven’t told you about yet. That is the DropBox. It works exactly as you would expect it too. You get a page where users can personally send you a track.

One potential use of this, and one I am looking into, is the ability for a blogger or member of the press to have one central site to be given new music. The preview and playback features certainly make trawling through many tracks easy, and also feature a link to get in contact with the sender.

An alternative to SoundCloud is playlist.io from the makers of drop.io. This service is a much simpler and significantly cut down method to share music on the web. You get a private url and 100mb to send people to. They see a simple page with a playlist of your favourite tracks. Great if your in a rush and need to show something to someone.

A far cry from SoundCloud’s unlimited file size, though you don’t have to sign up to use it. However looking at the traffic the site is getting (below) they have the potential to last quite some time.

SoundCloud web traffic