SAN FRANCISCO -- SoundCloud, the online music-streaming platform and de facto music label for independent artists trying to share their tunes efficiently, announced a complete redesign of its service Wednesday, in what the Berlin-based company called an attempt to "unmute the web."
The new version of SoundCloud, which the company called "The Next SoundCloud" and launched in private beta Wednesday, offers four new or improved features to the online music platform. Those include a sleeker player (improving on SoundCloud's signature waveform design), the ability to play sounds continuously and navigate away from a particular track to continue searching the site without the audio stopping, improved search algorithms and tools, and the ability to repost audio in a way very similar to the "reblog" feature on Tumblr.
The improvements, SoundCloud co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung said, were an attempt to make the web more audio-friendly.
"Sound is a key part of our overall experience of the world and on the other hand, more and more of our experience of the world is happening online," Ljung said while giving a demonstration of the new SoundCloud at the company's San Francisco office. "The problem today is that the web is very silent."
With more than 100 people in offices in Berlin, San Francisco and London, SoundCloud has been something of an (ironically) quiet giant in online sound distribution since it launched in 2007, looking like the hipster YouTube of audio files. Although the service has seen growth in non-music uses in recent years, it has long been loved by musicians, labels and fans for allowing simple uploading and embedding of music across the web. SoundCloud has kept things simple with a clutter-free (read: ad-free) interface and easy sharing on popular services like Twitter and Tumblr. Those services specifically inspired the new SoundCloud features, the company's co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss said, and integrating features popular on those services would make "a quite powerful marriage."
"We have a lot of peer companies that we work with all the time; we're part of the Union Square Ventures portfolio, where you have Tumblr and Twitter and lots of great companies," Wahlforss said. "We work closely with them, we get inspired by them, we inspire them as well, and we integrate with them. I think we share a lot of ideas."
>"We're releasing this uncomfortably early. We're just not disciplined enough to keep this to ourselves."
SoundCloud's latest news comes not too long after its latest influx of cash. The company raised its latest round of funding back in January -- the amount was undisclosed -- led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the firm that has invested in everything from Spotify to Twitter. Weeks later, SoundCloud announced it had hit 10 million registered users and 5 million downloads for its app. At Wednesday's announcement, Ljung said the music service now stands at 15 million users -- not Facebook-size numbers, but impressive for a company SoundCloud's size.
It's no wonder the site's user base has grown. In recent years, it has become the go-to for musicians looking to get their songs promoted on blogs and elsewhere on the web -- largely because of SoundCloud's easy embeds in websites and blogging platforms like Tumblr.
The new-and-improved SoundCloud, which the company claimed would be one of its biggest product releases this year, is just the latest offering from the sound service, which launched an iPhone app in late 2010 and an iPad app about a year later. The apps allowed users to be able to record sounds on the go and upload them to their profiles.
Wahlforss cited the interactivity that became available with Google Chrome, which launched in 2008, as something that pushed browsers to "enables us to do things that we couldn't even think about four or five years ago when this company started." SoundCloud even took a queue from Google's "launch early and iterate" mantra in releasing the new product.
"We're releasing this uncomfortably early," Ljung said. "We're just not disciplined enough to keep this to ourselves."
The company, however, won't be releasing it to everyone just yet. During the private beta, a few thousand people will get invites -- request one here. SoundCloud expects to release a public beta in coming months with a full rollout happening by the end of 2012, fleshing out the company's goal of bringing more sound to the web.
"SoundCloud is leading the way in really pushing that forward as fast as possible," Ljung said. "To get there faster the Next SoundCloud is a major step for us."
