Soundcloud is possibly my favourite music website. I use it at least every week for a variety of music purposes. I love the clean feel of the site and the intuitive simple functions. It is such a user-friendly and well evolved website, that it is hard to believe they are just celebrating their 1st birthday. As any kind of musician, label owner, radio / podcast show host and more, Soundcloud is a great way to send and receive music, and it provides an efficient way to distribute, privately or publicly. It is becoming a hugely popular tool, and yet their friendly nature is still seen across the site. In their words, “We’re a few people who moved from Stockholm to Berlin, found some more cool people there and set up a small company to create the best dedicated music site in the world.”

Quick Facts
* SoundCloud is an online audio platform for music professionals that makes sending and receiving music simple and efficient.
* Accounts are currently only available by personal invite.
* SoundCloud is in use by many of the worlds leading electronic music producers and labels.
* Some people think of SoundCloud as an email application but for music, and with a play button.
* Founded in 2007 by Swedes Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss and based in Berlin–Mitte, Germany.

How Does it Work?
The easy way I can explain, is to show you via one of their friendly videos: The Soundcloud Tour.

Sharing
Using their embeddable music player is a great way to promote your music. The code is easily found once your song and details are uploaded, and simple to paste around the web. For example, here is a recent deep house remix that I produced for UK label, Lost My Dog.

Danny Stott – Bunker (Lee Jarvis’ Secret Kelvedon Hideout Remix) (320promo) by Lee Jarvis

Personally, I find this a much easier way than directing music fans to a (now overloaded) Myspace page, plus you are able to display the payer in blogs with ease. Using the Soundcloud Facebook App is also incredibly easy, gaining further recognition for your music on a popular social networking site. Allowing DJs, tastemakers, label owners, friends and co-artists to download your music from the site does away with the need for uploading and sending links that soon expire or FTP log-ins. As the Soundcloud guys put it, ” Music is just kind of tricky to deal with over email. So, we thought we’d change that. SoundCloud is our way of doing it.”

iPhone app
What next for the Soundcloud team? Obviously, mobile markets are going to be a huge development to most of the music industry, and so that’s where they went, announcing their iPhone App last week.

Having received endless feedback from their users, Soundcloud acted upon on of the most popular requests and have built an app allowing you to listen to your own uploaded tracks, as well those sent by people you follow, and tracks sent to your dropbox. It also lets you mark any of these as favourites, and send your tracks via email to anyone in your mobile address book.

Currently priced at €0.79 or $0.99 the app is available from the app store. Although only the first version, I’m sure they will continue to develop this the way they have the full website, and look forward to more announcements over the next year.

Lee Jarvis.

LL Cool J once said “I can’t live without my radio”, but do people still have radios nowadays? Hasn’t internet broadcasting killed off Tim Westwood, Pete Tong, Tony Blackburn et al? Not quite, but you catch my drift; you certainly can live without your radio. With the vast array of gadgets and gizmos available, it got me thinking what I can’t live without. We have personal mp3 players smaller then a matchbox and phones that can email and take photos (not forgetting, make the occasional phone call).

Apple have just unveiled their new iPods, and are rumoured to be announcing the launch of the Macbook Touch in October, combining the touch screen usability of their iPod Touch and iPhone ranges with their already successful MacBook laptops. Yet more kit that we don’t need but we all want.

For us recording artists, the gadget list snowballs. Learning my basic skills on an Akai 3000XL sampler, I’ll always have a soft spot for that. Popular dance artist Monika Kruse just yesterday told DJ Magazine that her Oscar Synthesizer will never leave her side.

Maybe you’re more classical and there’s one particular instrument that you will never sell. Maybe you are an aspiring music journo and you can make do without any of this, but you still can’t do without your inspiration (and maybe a pen that’s also a voice recorder).

Finally, those crazy Latvian disc jockeys, well, they just can’t live without their DJ Sport Games, so much so that they made an official event out of it! (Thanks to The Sound Republic for the heads up on that one).

Please share what you can’t live without by adding your comments. Or even pictures of you and your beloved

Lee.