One of the most fashionable words in 2011 was “cloud”. And it will continue in 2012. After Apple’s iCloud, another one growing very fast is SoundCloud. It is an online audio distribution platform which allows collaboration, promotion and distribution of audio recordings. Some people consider it is a myspace killer. Originally from Sweden, SoundCloud quickly got installed in Berlin-Germany in August 2007. It was founded by sound designer Alex Ljung and artist Eric Wahlforss. It had the intention of allowing musicians to share recordings with each other, but later transformed into a full publishing tool which also allowed musicians to distribute their music tracks.
Basically, you can record your original-sound and share it with your friends, ask them what they think about it or even share it throughout the social networks.
Of course, all records need to be original and you should be the owner (or have the official rights) to display it. So it is pointless to share your best singers, you will get censored or even banned.
SoundCloud is developing fast and they have the aim to become the biggest sharing platform around Music in the world. For that, SoundCloud got big investors: Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures joined the board.
In this beginning of the year, we heard they raised around 50 million US$ in order to “allow for further expansion and scaling for mobile and international markets”. This shows how serious they are.
Since they have created the mobile app, they won 1 million users in a couple of weeks.
Get the iPhone App here
2 interesting features that spices up SoundCloud. The first one is the Social Media sharing. You can share your sounds throughout the major social media platforms, which gives a huge power to the tool. The second point is about apps. In deed, within SoundCloud there are several apps that allow you to record, to improve, to modify, to edit sounds. There is also Developers resources, so everybody is able to propose new apps.
With these 2 features, SoundCloud gets in the path of rich media and social content production, basically the future of internet. So is Soundcloud a myspace killer? Not sure, at least their aim is to do with audio what Youtube did with videos.
Check the official website: http://soundcloud.com
Sounds great.
LA
info sourced at SoundCloud website, Wikipedia and socialtimes.com
image: Tungphoto