Just wanted to share an article I wrote about SoundCloud (my new love; it has replaced CoolWhip, and before that imminent domain) for my application to Paste that I sent in today. I put together a mini magazine for my application, and I wanted to include an article that fit in to the aesthetic I was trying to design, rather than hodgepodge (can you use that as a verb? Or is it just a noun?) a bunch of previously published articles together. Hope you like!
By Michael James
Let’s face facts: getting one million people to be interested in what you do, especially what you do online, can be a real struggle. Barack Obama’s
Facebook page is followed by 12 million F-groupies, ex-pro-wrestler turned model Bobbi Bilard is holding down the third most popular female profile on
MySpace with 1.4 million friends, and, though you may find it difficult to believe, 3.4 million Tweeters care enough about the musings of
E!’s Ryan Seacrest to subscribe to his 140 character verbal outpourings. But these are extraordinary political figures, women wrestlers, and “entertainment news” show hosts, they’re not you and I. Ask any downtrodden video blogger (of which there are many) why they gave up their one true love of recording every damned asinine thought they had and uploading it to their
YouTube channel and the overwhelming response is likely to be because the internet demographic mostly wasn’t interested in them… insert frowny emoticon.
And with good reason, that silence you hear, xXxEmoJoexXx7794, is Ellen not calling you to perform your original acoustic ballad on her show because she hasn’t stumbled across your wildly unpopular online video. That silence is the world wide web’s way of telling you that a goat falling off a metal roof has more melodic merit than your singer-songwriter ability and those posts journaling your daily activity only gave credence to the argument that we should stick to using the internet for its original intent: undermining the music industry and obtaining cheap, shame-free pornography. It’s hard to predict which trends will last, but a good place to start is trying to remedy a long standing technological ill.
SoundCloud co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss have done exactly that. Commonly described as
Flikr for music,
SoundCloud’s premise is simple enough.
The site’s tagline is “let’s move music,” and Ljung and Wahlforss’ original idea back in 2007 was to establish a way for artists and industry types to easily share and collaborate on music, offering the full range of privacy flexibility available through other social media sites. “It was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music,” Ljung relayed in a 2009 interview for
Wired, “just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music.” The idea clearly resonated with others who shared the same complaint about the state of the internet’s audio mobility. In May of this year the site surpassed one million users, a haven for music business professionals (like Beck, RAC, and
The Hype Machine) and enthusiast alike, uploading, downloading, embedding, tweeting, and commenting on their jams. In a world where internet superpowers make sharing increasingly more proprietary, a small company in Berlin is making it a little easier for us all.
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