SoundCloud’s Story
SoundCloud is to music what MySpace was to bands. Established in Berlin by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud has since expanded to an extensive app that encompasses a streaming service, a distribution platform and an online community. It is music interaction and discovery distilled to its purest form and home to just as many famous artists as ones that will be soon. It is as close to indispensable as you get on the internet today. In order to understand and accept that statement it is imperative to discuss the origins of SoundCloud and its cultural impact.
As engineering students, Ljung and Wahlforss found themselves deeply dissatisfied with the platforms and tools available allowing them to collaborate as musicians. They would struggle to describe to each other what part of the song they wished to edit and how they wanted it to sound unless they were sitting right next to each other. In Success Story’s article it is stated that “The founders argued on the need of one such service because Flickr was there for images and, and Vimeo for videos. But there was nothing really there for sounds or audio.” Essentially SoundCloud was created by two musicians who wanted to solve the problem of making collaboration easier. The unique vision of SoundCloud is to harness and combine the deeply social essence of music and the internet.
SoundCloud “offers a truly collaborative environment that can replicate the kind of back-and-forth spontaneity that musicians need to feed on.” SoundCloud offers users the ability to share tracks and give feedback in ways never seen before. Although it was born out of collaboration, SoundCloud has become so much more. SoundCloud is more than just indie musicians looking to be discovered. Whether you are looking for a new track from an underground rapper or the latest from Beyonce, SoundCloud is where it is at. It’s where music can be found before it lands on Spotify, before it hits iTunes, before anywhere else at all. What makes SoundCloud so special is that it offers tools for musicians to create and distribute their art on a level playing field. You can make a song and post it on SoundCloud with no expensive record deal or distribution plan required.
When it first came out people were amazed how SoundCloud changed the music game. After their steady rise following the release, in May of 2010 “SoundCloud announced they hit one million users” (Butcher). The boost for this huge milestone was a 2.5 million euros investment by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. SoundCloud used this investment to advocate big changes. TechCrunch explains how the “tracks tend to be quite large in size, which makes them difficult to transfer (typically musicians would be forced to resort to FTP or services like YouSendIt, which are hardly ideal for frequent music swapping)”. They fixed this issue by allowing users to listen to music without downloading it. In other terms, users were allowed to stream it on the actual servers. Additionally, “musicians can optionally allow their peers to download their tracks, and can use the site’s analytics to see who has listened to them. The site also offers an embeddable music player that musicians can distribute across the web which allows users to leave a comment directly on a portion of a song”. These software changes ultimately helped people collaborate much more easily.
In January of 2011 SoundCloud had received another investment of 10 million USD. On June 15, 2011 The Next Web tells us how “today, SoundCloud celebrates 5 million users, an increase of four million over the last year, and an undisclosed amount of funding from Guy Oseary and Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Fund”. At this point SoundCloud is starting to grow exponentially in not only their fanbase, but also their investors.
Just a year later in January 2012 SoundCloud’s Blog stated “Today, we’re more than thrilled to extend 10 million Thank You’s to our registered SoundClouders.” In May 2012, SoundCloud announced that they are the “leading sound platform in the world” and they are “growing at a rate of 1.5M users a month. SoundCloud currently has 15M users, including celebrities like Snoop Dogg and John Mayer” (Olanoff). At the same time, SoundCloud held a press conference showing new features that were soon to come. The new features consist of “redesigned profiles, more sharing options (including “Re-posts” which allows users to repost a certain song that comes up on their followers newsfeed), Real-time notifications, Continuous play (so you can explore the site and still listen), and sets (so you can create lists of sounds to keep for yourself or share)” (Olanoff). Following the press conference, in December 2012 the new API (Application Programing Interface) came out.
Unfortunately the reviews were mixed. “Some of its 30 million users absolutely loved the new website design, apps and focus, a lot of users didn’t really care either way, while a small subset of users was outraged by the terrible and seemingly counter-intuitive moves undertaken by” the program. SoundCloud received over 60,000 comments regarding the new layout. This was soon resolved by a few minor tweaks to the application.
Jumping ahead in time, in an interview with Midiem, Ljung illustrates to us how Soundcloud has “175 million unique monthly users, 12 hours of audio every minute is uploaded, and 100 million available tracks on the platform which is the largest collection out there” (Ljung). At this time SoundCloud was reaching almost 8 percent of the global Internet. In present day the multimillion person fanbase this gives users “control, data, and above all, an audience” (Kirn). Unlike Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and all the other competitors, “SoundCloud is the only major unlimited streaming service that gives individual artists real-time control over the audio that appears” (Kirn). Additionally, it is the least expensive streaming service that allows the user to collect such a plethora of data. SoundCloud has built a number of tools that increase engagement on its site. “That engagement turns out to be good for musicians, because unlike on sites like Facebook, more engagement leads people to listen to more music” (Kirn).
When an artist takes advantage of that, he or she can enter the big leagues. Post Malone and Bryson Tiller are two now famous rappers who utilized SoundCloud to boost their popularity. Bryson Tiller did not start out so big. Luckily “in 2014, he gained recognition with the release of his debut single, “Don’t,” on his SoundCloud page. It was commercially released as a single in 2015 and made it the top 13 on the US Billboard Hot 100”. Had that song not been uploaded he debatedly would not be where he is now. Post Malone is another example of an artist to benefit from the notorious Streaming service. Post loaded “White Iverson on SoundCloud in February 2015. It became a viral sensation, racked over a million plays within a month, and brought Post Malone attention from labels. He soon got a record deal and signed with Republic Records”. Not only did his song become viral from the application, but he also received a record label, which is life-changing.
SoundCloud breaks down barriers between musicians and fans which is the key advancement in the disruption of entertainment across all of the arts. Famous artists are using SoundCloud to hold remix competitions and encouraging fans to perform over their tracks. The platform is also challenging the traditional distribution model for musics by giving users the ability to monetize their audio or music.
Some of the best ideas are the simplest. SoundCloud was born out of a simple need to solve the problem musicians had collaborating. Today SoundCloud is so many things to so many people. Moreover SoundCloud is not just a streaming service or collaborative platform. SoundCloud is the future of of music and soon to be all arts and entertainment.