SoundCloud:分享你的声音

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These days it is as easy as a click of a button to share your sound recordings online. All you need is a smartphone and a SoundCloud application. Press the record button and all the sounds you and your friends generate will be automatically uploaded to your SoundCloud account.

Ian Hooper and Claudio Donzelli are Musicians.

In the past they would have played countless gigs to get their music out to the public, hoping to one day to secure a record contract with a company that would distribute their work on mass.

Now, with SoundCloud they record their song, either on a smartphone or with professional recording equipment, and upload the material to their SoundCloud account.

They have nearly 15,000 followers around the world who can immediately listen to the songs. There is also a dialogue between fans. Anyone can write a comment, and attach it to the timeline of the recording for everyone to see.

According to Hooper the wide distribution they get through SoundCloud would have been impossible just a few years ago.

"It has helped us really get our music out in to the interwebs, to get it to the ears and minds of the people that we never would have been able to reach before. I mean, if we look at our stats now we are missing just a few countries where our music has not been heard. It is very humbling but it also makes you realize what a powerful SoundCloud is as a tool for music creators."

29-year-old Alexander Ljung, and his friend Eric Wahlforss founded SoundCloud in 2007.

In 2007 both Ljung and Wahlfors lived in Stockholm, working on a variety of projects and writing songs together.

They realized they needed some way of sharing songs, not just publicly but also privately during the writing process. They were disappointed to find no such platform on the Internet. Ljung says,

"We started just by looking at what creators needed and we realized no one else was really looking at this. And actually the real thing that started it was that we needed a specific tool ourselves to be able to send sounds to each other so we needed to build that and then we realized that there were a whole lot of other people that needed that as well."

According to Adam Thomas, communications manager for Sourcefabric, a Berlin-based company which develops free software for radio stations across the world, it was SoundCloud's open platform that made them pick SoundCloud for their project.

"The SoundCloud platform is very easy for software developers to work with. It has what is called an API (Application programming interface), which allows us to integrate our software with their software very easily. That is the number one reason why we actually began using SoundCloud."

While most of SoundCloud's users are musicians and bands without record contracts and on a shoestring budget, major artists are also starting to notice the company.

In the last year a number of established artists like Kylie Minogue, The Smashing Pumpkins and Moby, have started distributing songs on SoundCloud.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.