Hey Dad, what’s a SoundCloud?
Well kid, imagine you spend your days in open waters of the Dominican Republic, taking guests to swim alongside humpback whales and while you’re at it, record the whales singing under the surface. Or perhaps you’re a composer and make a living writing and recording music for TV, film or theatre soundtracks. You could also be devoted to teaching others how to speak Korean, one new phrase every week. Or maybe you play in a band, are an aspiring singer/songwriter or sell your house in the US, start a transcontinental journey on bicycles with your girl and record all sorts of interesting sounds from a variety of cultures around the world. Sounds cool?
You know what; it actually is pretty cool because all these people are real and have one thing in common: in one way or another, they create sounds and share them with the people they care about. That’s what SoundCloud is about: the one place on the web for your sounds, the simple and most elegant way to share your creations with the people you care about most, from anywhere to everywhere.
In short: if it’s audio, it belongs on SoundCloud. The longer version:
Today, three P’s best describe SoundCloud in more detail: the Platform, the Product itself and most importantly, the People who use it.
Platform:
From the very moment the service went live in early 2009, third-party developers were able to read/write from the SoundCloud API and since then we’ve seen countless applications built on top of SoundCloud. Recently announced the milestone of more than 100 apps in the App Gallery that lets you browse and find mobile, desktop and web applications to create and record, share and distribute and listen and discover that will amplify your SoundCloud experience.
We’re a technology company; 80% of the team work directly on or with the product and API, we’re deeply involved in the developer community of which the best known event would the Music Hack Days, originally initiated by one of our own.
Product:
Every day, users tell us about how much they love the ease of use, the clean design and the fact that there are no ads. I think the product speaks for itself and to this date has been our main marketing tool. The ability to give feedback at specific moments within the distintive waveform was the core idea to start with and remains an important factor today. Over time, we’ve extended the basics with additional features to enable creators to easily, update, share and measure their work. And if you ever need more space or advanced features, there are four different Premium accounts available for heavy-users.
People:
Looking back at the two years of SoundCloud, we’ve been lucky to learn about the many different ways people use the service to share all kinds of sounds: voice messages, songs, jokes, samples, interviews, compositions, effects, lectures, stems, loops, podcasts - you name it.
Our core user base is an extremely engaged, supportive and passionate community of more than two million music and sound creators and we’re excited to see more and more people joining the ‘Cloud in the future, sharing sounds in a more casual way, think Instagram for sounds.
So today, we’re taking one more step towards becoming the first stop for audio creators by introducing the ability to capture any sound right on SoundCloud and with the free iPhone app while you’re on the move.
Thanks to M. for nudging me to write a longer post about what SoundCloud is. If you like to know more, browse around our brand-new tour and home pages.
