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.

If you’ve not left your TV, radio and internet-less cocoon for the last four weeks, then you wouldn’t have realized that Madonna has just released her 11^th studio album, Hard Candy. With all-due respect to the comeback(?) queen of pop (I guess she’s never really been away long enough for a comeback), what really caught my attention was the promotion of the album.

Madonna has always re-invented herself to the new emerging markets, physically and musically. This album is no different, and working with the biggest producers of recent years, Timbaland and The Neptunes, as well as performing alongside Justin Timberlake on the launch single, ‘4 minutes’, ensures that sales are already through the roof thanks to a fresh generation of music buyers and millions of long-term fans.

But the way that this album was also marketed to the new generation of music buyers really struck me. With the release date being 28^th April (in the UK), Warner Bros decided to market the album by releasing seven songs on the seven days prior to this, available to download via mobile phone. Myself growing up with CDs, I quite like the artwork of and album, and I like to read all the inlay notes while I listen to it for the first time (GEEK ALERT!). I’m sure people love vinyl LPs partly for the same reason. However you can’t ignore the streams of ‘yoofs’ around the shopping malls, all playing the latest pop tracks on their mobile phones – the market here is huge! Gone are the days of monotone rings, these are full mp3s, and all the major mobile companies offer various packages and download sites through which they aim to claim back some of the download music monopoly that Apple hold.

I look forward to hearing more about how the move was received by her worldwide audience, and I’m sure I’ll be bringing you more news on this very soon. I think that as much as recent years have been a rocky ride for the digital music industry, the years ahead will be filled with innovative ways to feed the revolution.

Lee.