The interesting thing is that sound has always been an under-represented form of content on the web. When it comes to music, most innovation had been focused on the premium consumer listening experience, which was largely done in silos. But when you think about the whole world of sound that exists outside of music there’s still a long way to go. Take a look at your Twitter or Facebook stream. There’s a lot of photos, videos and news, but not so much sound. We want to change that – we’re always continuing our efforts to unmute the web. 

What is SoundCloud doing to compete with websites like Bandcamp and MySpace. Do you see SoundCloud working with – as opposed to against – those other services in any way?

SoundCloud is now one of the default sites for artist, bands, and many other types of sound creators. If you post your sounds to our platform then it’s just about driving your audience to your SoundCloud profile. You can also share those sounds to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest and you can encourage fans and music bloggers to share your music to their audiences (with our HTML5 embeddable waveform player). In addition, we’ve also seen a rich eco-system of other tools and sites for musicians such as Bandpage, Mobile Roadie and Webdoc, which have SoundCloud integrations. We love to work with companies who shared our same vision to make sound creation social. We’re also fans of innovative companies with great products, both design and technology wise.

What are some recent examples of how signed artists have used SoundCloud?

Beyonce: From 8th Feb to 8th March 2012, Sony/Beyonce ran a remix contest for Beyonce’s single ‘End Of Time’ using the SoundCloud Competition app. A total of 2,939 were submitted and voted on by the public before the top 10 most voted for tracks were presented to Beyonce and a panel of celebrity judges. The winning single came from Poland native Jimek.

Snoop Dogg: has been engaging with SoundCloud’s active community by commenting on others users’ sounds, favoriting tracks and sourcing new talent. He’s uploaded a range of content from new tracks, studio ideas and voice messages to his fans. Recently, Snoop recorded voice messages to announce upcoming releases such as his recent 4/20 project. He’s also asked other sound creators to collaborate on tracks such uploading sets of beats looking for verses, or beats looking for vocals.

Metric: Chose SoundCloud for their Synthetica campaign and amassed 1M+ plays. Metric created their own interactive app to unlock the album using SoundCloud for streams, which delivered a single to fans only via a private track. By using SoundCloud, Metric was able to provide widget embeds to a range of editorial outlets (MTV.com, Pitchfork, Spin, etc.).

Madeon: Young producer, first found by winning Pendulum remix comp on SoundCloud over 2 years ago. He’s sharing sounds on SoundCloud, now with 65K+ followers, amassing huge plays and remixing artists from Deadmau5 to Killers. He’s getting involved with the community such as his ’24 hour ep’ project inviting other sound creators to create a 3 track ep and sharing their results on our platform.

I recently discovered your Drop Box feature. Can you talk a little bit about the feature – and who stands to benefit most from it?

The Dropbox feature was originally conceived to make it much easier for people to receive sounds. So this could be a music blogger who wants to receive promos from bands or it could be an A&R, music supervisor or label that wants to receive demos from aspiring artists. Fat Cat Records in the UK actually built an entire demo site powered by SoundCloud.

In addition, we have the concept of groups on SoundCloud and these have a DropBox too. We’ve seen some really interesting uses of groups, but notably it’s a great way for a label or artist to setup an official remix contest. Or for a radio station or show to solicit stories, opinions or reactions to news events. 

In May of this year, SoundCloud acquired Instinctiv, a “full featured music management and discovery application for desktop and mobile.” What are the plans for Instinctiv and who is the target-audience?

SoundCloud acquired the technology assets and engineering talent of Instinctiv for an undisclosed amount.

Just recently, SoundCloud partnered with Twitter to allow users to insert audio clips directly into their tweets, thereby allowing other users to listen to the audio without leaving the home feed. Is SoundCloud doing anything specifically to market this service to bands and other musical acts?

As an expanded tweets partner, SoundCloud is very excited about our recent Twitter integration. It’s really amazing to be able to share sounds directly to your Twitter stream allowing anyone to follow both the SoundCloud platform and any Soundcloud content creator directly within the expanded Tweet.Twitter is slowly rolling this feature out to all users and we’ll definitely continue to tell as many people about it as possible as it becomes available. What I’m most excited about is seeing how people use this new feature. One excellent use case is sharing your voice. 

Twitter has been a driving force in bringing artists closer to their fans and encouraging interaction that just wasn’t possible before. And what better way to connect and deliver your message than through voice. It’s so personal, authentic and you can say a lot more than you can in just 140 characters. We have a lot of creators using SoundCloud outside of music: comedians, celebrities, politicians, journalists, etc. Recently, we saw SoundCloud and Twitter being used together in an election campaign. That was powerful. 

SoundCloud’s recent partnership with CD Baby effectively combined the world’s largest online distributor of independent music with the world’s leading social sound platform. Can you talk a little bit about this partnership and what it means for independent artists and fans?

There’s a lot of fantastic independent artists and musicians on CD Baby so SoundCloud is a perfect partner. They’ve integrated with us so that with just a click of a button, their artists can sync the music they sell on CD Baby to SoundCloud for free. By making it easier to be heard, we’re helping CD Baby users grow their fan base and drive sales. 

Where would you like to see SoundCloud 5 years from now? 10 years from now?

As you mentioned earlier, we think the internet is a very silent place. We want to unmute the web by helping anyone create and share their sounds to the world. With over 18 million registered users, SoundCloud is already well on its way to being the largest sound sharing platform on the web. 

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