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.

For those of you that are unaware, I thought i’d share some information in this blog about Creative Commons. Lawrence Lessig has been a driving force in creating a non-profit organisation with new, groundbreaking copyright rules, that aim to guide forward-thinking musicians and artists through a new digital age of arts.

Building upon existing laws, Creative Commons licenses adapts them to allow remixing, mashing, evolving and combining of existing works, which makes for a creative freedom that will surely help inspire many new artists; influence is a powerful motivator, and something that creative people love to share. The original artists are able to choose which rights they want to maintain, and which they can offer to allow experimentation and sharing for future works, the idea often being that no work is ‘finished’, and that by sharing and giving in this 2.0 world, exposure, discovery and accreditation are more important than direct revenue from one set product.

Lessig is not aiming for an out-of-control, misdirected world where no-one has any rights to any of their work, hence the Creative Commons tagline adapting ‘All rights reserved’ to ‘Some rights reserved’. His intention is to avoid the problems and boundaries created by current copyright laws, not to send the arts world into anarchy by declaring ‘No rights reserved’ on all works, something that major corporations and governing bodies are failing to understand, especially within the music industry.

There are four main parts of Creative Commons licenses, all available for free, can be combined together, and the Wikipedia page offers a good explanation;

* Attribution (by) requires users to attribute a work’s original author. All Creative Commons licenses contain this option, but some now-deprecated licenses did not contain this component.
* Authors can either not restrict modification, or use Share-alike (sa), which is a copyleft (a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions) requirement – it requires that any derived works be licensed under the same license, or No derivatives (nd), which requires that the work not be modified..
* Non-commercial (nc) requires that the work not be used for commercial purposes.

As an example, Chicago-based record label Rock Proper have just released a new album under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, “making the experimental rock songs therein freely sharable/remixable as long as [the artist] is properly attributed and reuses are noncommercial in intent”.

I feel that this is important to share in this blog, and strongly suggest a bit of further reading from my links, as I believe that independent musicians can use the licenses to their advantage, and, through a good promotional idea and strategy, help raise awareness of the original, and ultimately the artist (/brand) behind that work. Putting creative freedom above trying to directly sell a product opens up other income streams such as touring, merchandise and more, and with the right online presence, you can really make this boost your music career.

Lee Jarvis.