Soundcloud

= = toc = SoundCloud = [|SoundCloud]is a social media platform that lets users create their own sounds and share them with other SoundCloud users. It supports a large variety of music files, including AIFF, WAVE, and MP3.

History
SoundCloud was created in August 2007 by Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, both designers and artists. They intended it to be a tool that musicians could use to share recordings with each other. SoundCloud later became a publishing platform that allowed musicians to distribute their recordings on Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Ljung said, "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.” To that end, SoundCloud was quickly in line with its main competitor, [|MySpace], and by 2011 SoundCloud had a million users with professional artists, producers, and musicians using its easy platform. Reknown artists like Beck, the Foo Fighters, and Sonic Youth were debuting tracks on SoundCloud. In contrast to MySpace recordings, SoundCloud's songs can be embedded anwhere, with no file-size limit. It allows fans to comment on specific parts of a recording, and bands can share songs both publicly or with private contacts.

Functionality
SoundCloud's main platform hosts three functionalities: Upload or Record, the Waveform, and Timed Comments. New users can view the [|Soundcloud Help Video] to begin using its services.

As the example above shows, users can first upload files they have created or record directly into SoundCloud itself. The Waveform lets users visualize their sounds and makes them presentable for playing purposes. Finally, the Comments component lets users insert timed comments for feedback at specific moments on the Waveform. Users can pinpoint an exact moment in a song to comment on as seen in the image below. One of the main advantages of SoundCloud is that users can upload their music with a distinct URL. This allows users to embed their sound files anwhere, in contrast to MySpace where users' music is only accessed by its site. SoundCloud can be used with Twitter and Facebook as well. A key feature of SoundCloud is that it lets artists upload their music with a distinctive URL. This contrasts with MySpace, which hosts music only on the MySpace site. By allowing sound files to be embedded anywhere, SoundCloud can be combined with Twitter and Facebook tto let members reach their audience better. SoundCloud also uses widgets and apps. Users can embed the widget on their Websites, blogs, or Facebook pages, and SoundCloud will automatically Tweet every uploaded track. SoundCloud also has apps available for the iPhone and Android platform

**References**
Buskirk, E.V. (2009). SoundCloud threatens MySpace as music destination for Twitter era. [] Butcher, E. (2010). Now a million on SoundCloud: This startup is scaling globally. [] SoundCloud (2012). The Tour [] Stewart, D. (2010). The awesomeness of SoundCloud. []