SoundCloud opening to public tomorrow

“The greatest music sharing site in the history of the Internet”. Sounds ambitious, doesn’t it? Well, we’ll have to wait to find out if this becomes true, but let’s see how it all started. In June 2007, Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, two young Swedish web-entrepreneurs/musicians fed up with existing ways in which musicians share music (senspace, yousendit, etc.), decided to leave everything behind, move to Berlin and start working on a new project.

Although the founders burst with enthusiasm and passion typical for open-source developers, the whole venture was run as a proper IT project from the very beginning. The early stages included hiring staff, renting an office space and apartments for out-of-town crew members, organizing kick-off parties, seeking for inverstors and starting a blog to document the development process.

Despite the professional approach of the team, they still managed to communicate with their target audience (musicians and labels) in a understandable and pleasant way. For instance, changes to the service were streamlined into milestones and introduced periodically as versions. But to keep things nice, they were named after artists (like Evangelos after Vangelis, Fabio after Fabio Genito, Will after Will Oldham) instead of boring numbers like version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc…

Speaking of audience, SounCloud was undergoing some heavy testing by real users, but this was done in a private-beta manner. In order to register for the service, one had to be invited from someone already on the inside and each new user had a opportunity to invite 3 people. The limitations were necessary to avoid problems caused by unforeseen, rapid growth of traffic cause by new users and also were a good way to make sure that the feedback comes from professionals from the music industry rather than kids looking for the new MySpace. This exclusiveness is about to vanish tomorrow as SoundCloud is opening to public tomorrow (Oct 10th), but more on that later.

Understanding how it’s been brought to life, let’s look at what it actually is. The “music sharing site” expression quoted at the beginning, although coming from the founders, doesn’t really give the right idea. Associations with p2p and piracy that spring to mind are completely irrelevant.

It’s all about the artists/labels being able to upload their music and receive comments, including timed comments, which are “attached” to a specific time mark in the track indicating that the comment concerns a specific event occurring around the mark rather than the whole piece. This feature can be very useful for distant collaboration on music allowing to avoid the necessity to write down time codes or other remarks when referring to a specific place in the track. To make listening and commenting even more comfortable, there’s an embedded player capable of displaying the track’s waveform along with the avatars of users that have placed comments. The player can handle music uploaded in virtually all common formats so there’s no need for an artist to perform any conversions prior to uploading his music.

Another innovative feature allows to decide weather the uploaded music will be shared with everyone (as a public track) or just with selected users (as a private track). That’s a great way for artist and labels to distribute promos having to upload the track only once and giving selected users the ability to listen and/or download the file.

DropBox is another nice feature useful especially to labels allowing other users to leave their file for the DropBox owner similar to dropping a letter into ones mailbox. The advantage of the DropBox over sharing tracks is that the person uploading doesn’t need to be a SoundCloud user of have any storage space available on the internet. They just “mail” their work, which then awaits to be heard by the box owner only.

Soundcloud offers a lot more, but giving the innovatory nature of the features their functionality may be hard to understand after reading about it. The developers were obviously aware of that, because they have made a video, which is a sort of a virtual tour showcasing some of the things you can do. Watch the video below.

To see detailed videos about specific features, see SoundClound’s profile on Vimeo.

Remember how I wrote that the project was managed professionally including seeking for investors? Now it’s time to answer the question what’s in it for them? It must have cost a lot of money to develop the site and the features work really well, so how can it pay off? At first, I was almost sure (as well as many other beta testers) that the site will become ad supported and this will be the funding source as it usually happens with all web-community based portals. Well, we were wrong. Along with the announcement stating that service is opening to public (no invitations necessary to register), SoundCloud introduced paid accounts called PRO. That decision remains very controversial among the beta users community, but let me avoid any judgemental statements and provide some details instead.

Starting tomorrow, the site remains ad-free, but there are going to be 4 types of accounts:

• Free,
• PRO Light (9€ per month),
• PRO Standard (29€ per month),
• PRO Max (59€ per month).

The level of service associated with the above options will differ in terms of:

• the number of tracks user is able to upload,
• DropBox functionality,
• statistics features (basic vs. advanced),
• level of support (basic/normal/premium).

So what can you get for free? Here’s what Eric wrote on the forum yesterday. An owner of a free account will be able to:

• send 5 tracks/month,
• see the 10 latest sent tracks (they will also show on user’s profile),
• have a DropBox, but only with the ability to see the last 5 tracks dropped,
• make contact lists with up to 20 people.

I’m not sure if the internet users used to free sites will be willing to pay for their accounts, but I guess the owners rely on the fact that their target audience are music professionals and will be using the site for business. The question is, will the benefits of having a pro account be valuable enough to pay the amount being asked for? I wouldn’t want to judge now whether the prices are too high or not. Purely because in order do it properly, I’d have to conduct some sort of research to find out what are the alternatives and how they are priced, which I don’t have time for. One of the alternatives mentioned on the forums was having a dedicated web space provided by some ISP and running some services on them like FTP for instance for the same kind of money. But the ease of use is second to none comparing to SoundCloud. Together with the financial aspect, also the decision about opening the site to public recived some criticism as artists were enjoying that SoudCloud was nice and quiet compered to other sites like MySpace or Fecebook.

I’m very curious to see how this develops. The time will tell, I guess…