In a few short months SoundCloud has begun to give mighty MySpace a run for the hearts and minds of recording artists eager to interact more nimbly with fans than is possible on the giant social network which has, for the past five years, been the de facto online platform for musicians.
Sonic Youth used SoundCloud to stream their latest album via Twitter while Moby uses it to promote his latest tracks on his site rather than on MySpace. And when Beck decided to trash his so-five-years-ago Flash-based site and start over with simple pages heavy on high-quality content and light on everything else, he too turned to SoundCloud.
SoundCloud sounds like an obvious idea — like every good one does once somebody else has it. The necessity that was the mother to this particular invention was the absence of a truly collaborative online environment that could replicate the kind of back-and-forth spontaneity that musicians need to feed on and which proximity uniquely enables.
"We both came from backgrounds connected to music," co-founder Alex Ljung said in a recent interview with wired.com. "And it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music — I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we'd be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn't have that kind of platform for our music."
Still, SoundCloud's original ambitions were relatively humble: It was built just to help music industry types share recordings with each other. But the simple idea sound designer Ljung and artist Eric Wahlforss had quickly morphed into a full-throttle publishing tool that lets artists reach fans on Twitter and elsewhere, lightning-fast, with only a minimum of effort.
Unlike MySpace songs, SoundCloud's can be embedded anywhere, have no file-size limit, let fans comment on specific parts of a recording, and allow bands to share songs publicly or only with certain contacts — the sort of flexibility we've become accustomed to on sharing and social sites like Flickr and Facebook.
So far the market penetration is aspirational rather than affirming: SoundCloud, a few months out of private beta, now claims 160,000 professional artists, labels, producers, music journalists and musicians. MySpace is thought to have listings for over 13 million bands. But the recent buy-in by some major artists is a significant endorsement for the upstart.
"Beck's trying to redefine his online image right now," explained the artist's web developer, Lee Martin. "His previous website was this Flash-based mess." Martin said when he stumbled across SoundCloud at the SF Music Tech conference, he knew he'd found the perfect audio hosting site to use for Beck's idea to post lengthy DJ sets on his site.
"I said, 'man, you've got to see this embeddable player, it's incredible,'" recalls Martin of meeting with Beck to discuss plans for the site. "And for a mix tape that's 40 minutes long, SoundCloud allows you to comment on different parts of the track. That's incredible for a mix tape."
Artists and labels are finding SoundCloud attractive because it lets them upload music and share it in minutes with a distinct URL. This makes it a much better fit for the fast-paced world of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms than an old-school MySpace page. Leung says the combination of SoundCloud and Twitter allows bands to form a more direct connection with fans than they can achieve by friending them on MySpace.
"[MySpace] is kind of cumbersome, and if you put [a song] up there, it's only for that platform," explained Ljung. "There's a huge audience there, but there are also other places where the artist wants to be. We're more of a distributed thing. You put it on SoundCloud, but there's usually the aim of putting that widget on your own page or your blog. [SoundCloud] can automatically tweet every track you upload. We also have a dropbox for artists receiving tracks from their fans, to see if they're good enough to be an opening act."
SoundCloud is free to use, and contains no advertising. Premium accounts remove restrictions on how many songs you can upload and how many contacts you can have, among other perks. Like Flickr, SoundCloud has an open API that lets other applications upload or download music, interviews, field recordings, etc.
"One of the nicer examples which is public is an iPhone field recording app FiRe from Audiofile Engineering that integrates with our API, so you can go around sampling sounds on your iPhone and save them directly to SoundCloud," said Ljung. "It's really cool... we're encouraging anybody building an audio application to store that audio online, so we should start seeing some really good cloud apps."
As for an iPhone app that can access the recordings on SoundCloud, Ljung admitted, "there might be one soon, you can quote me on that."