GigaOM » soundcloud

Here today, gone tomorrow: director of Nokia’s mapping platform joins SoundCloud

David Meyer — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:14:07 +0000

This story was updated at 9.25am PT to include comment from SoundCloud, confirming Grande’s new role.

The director of Nokia’s Here mapping platform, Sylvain Grande, is leaving the company to join SoundCloud, GigaOM can reveal.

Grande, who will manage partner relations for the Berlin-based audio platform firm from next week, worked on Here Maps (formerly Nokia Maps) since the end of 2008. He ran the teams – also located in Berlin — that develop Here for Windows Phone, the web and other platforms. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was also “strongly involved in Nokia Maps’ key partnerships (from negotiation to delivery) with Yahoo!, Microsoft and others”.

Nokia tells me Grande won’t have a direct replacement as such. He reported to Thom Brenner, Nokia’s vice president of applications, location and commerce, and various members of Brenner’s team will take over his responsibilities.

The move comes at an interesting time for both SoundCloud and Nokia’s Here platform. SoundCloud has done a great job becoming the so-called YouTube of audio, but is only now starting to get serious about making money. Meanwhile, last month Nokia announced that it is opening up the Here platform to third-party developers, a shift that I reckon points to a strengthening of the platform’s significance for the company.

Grande’s jump to SoundCloud isn’t unprecedented. Indeed, SoundCloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss used to work at gate5, the Berlin mapping company that, along with Navteq and Plazes, was acquired by Nokia to form the underpinnings of what is now Here. Sources tell me at least one other developer from Nokia’s Berlin operations has also found his way to SoundCloud, so there may be some active courting going on.

UPDATE: Wahlforss has confirmed the hire and given me this brief statement:

“We’re very excited to welcome Sylvain Grande to SoundCloud. His proven experience across companies including Nokia and Myspace make him the perfect hire to help oversee our product development. Sylvain will be directly involved with managing our recently launched beta Pro Partner profiles, assisting our music, audio, and brand partners to have an even greater presence on our platform.”

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What if every ‘like’ and ‘favorite’ came with money? Flattr makes it possible

David Meyer — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:01:34 +0000

A lot of people want Flattr — or something like it — to work. Monetizing online content is a continuing problem, and micropayments may provide a solution. Flattr is probably the best-known exponent of these virtual tips, or “microdonations” as it calls them, and a few content platforms such as DailyMotion have signed up to allow their users to make pocket-money off their videos.

However, “flattring” someone has until now remained a slightly clunky business, with the content platform needing to carry a Flattr button and with the user having to remember to click it in order to reward the creator. No longer – changes revealed on Monday make it possible to flattr someone simply by clicking the “like” or “favorite” button that’s already next to their content. At launch, 8 services are supported: Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, Github, Flickr, Vimeo, 500px and App.net.

That’s right: this makes it possible for you to earn money just by being an awesome tweeter.

Cashing in

Let’s remind ourselves of how Flattr works: users budget a certain amount of money that they want to donate or pay each month. Let’s say User X wants to spend $10 a month. Each time User X flattrs someone, that flattr gets added to a tally, and at the end of the month the money gets divided by that number. Flattr itself takes a 10 percent cut, so, if User X flattrs people 100 times in the month, each recipient then gets 9c.

According to Flattr co-founder Linus Olsson, there have been around 1.5 million flattrs performed since the service launched three years ago. Ignoring the fact that some pay a lot and others very little, the average monthly spend per user is around €4.50 ($5.80) and the average flattr is around €0.50. From this, we can deduce that, on average, users flattr around 9 times each month – this is really not much, and it highlights the need for Flattr to make the changes it announced today.

As Olsson explained to me, it was one thing to have a button that blog proprietors could integrate into their own self-hosted site, but it’s quite another thing to handle the content spewed out on platforms such as Twitter:

“The main way of flattring before has been the button, but the problem with the button is with most content sites today it’s impossible to integrate the button. So we have been thinking how to make it simpler to flattr and possible to flattr in places where the button cannot be added.

“The logical way was to use existing like and favorite buttons, which one can argue are empty right now. Now you can make those functions worth something. We see it as giving them the value they should have.”

This integration has not involved partnering up with Twitter and the others; instead, Flattr is simply using their APIs. “That’s one reason we didn’t do this when we started three years ago — it wasn’t possible,” Olsson pointed out.

More widespread, but more subtle

The use of APIs comes with several benefits for Flattr. For a start, it gets the startup around the problem presented to it by Apple last year. Apple rejected a podcasting app called Instacast on the basis that it included Flattr payment functionality – this apparently broke the App Store T&Cs, because it didn’t give Apple a way to claim its 30 percent cut of all in-app payments.

Now, because Flattr’s method of tapping into the core service’s APIs obviates the need for a telltale Flattr button, Apple would have no way of knowing whether the use of an app that’s plugged into Instagram or Twitter, for example, might result in someone making money without Cupertino taking a slice.

The other problem partially solved by the API approach is that of unclaimed flattrs. A Twitter user, for instance, doesn’t have to sign up to Flattr in order to have people flattr their tweets – they do, however, have to create a Flattr account in order to get the cash. So, when they create that Flattr account, authorizing Flattr on their Twitter account will tell the system that, yes, they are the person whom User X meant to credit.

That said, there is an outstanding problem: right now Flattr has no way of automatically informing people that someone out there is trying to give them money; it’s up to the user to tell their intended recipient to sign up and claim their payment (the payment only leaves the user’s account once it is claimed).

Will it work?

As I stated above, there is a lot of goodwill behind the micropayments concept, but also a number of failed attempts to make the concept work in reality.

If you view this as a chicken-and-egg dilemma, then Flattr is very much doing the right thing. After all, you’re less likely to get into being a Flattr user if the person you want to give money to hasn’t made it super-easy to take Flattr payments. Conversely, if there aren’t scores of people using the service, there is little impetus for content platforms to incorporate the Flattr button.

In theory, quietly plugging into platforms such as Twitter and Instagram makes it a heck of a lot easier for the service to gain scale. However, it raises another issue: visibility. If there’s no Flattr button, how is the company going to educate users about the scheme? How will they know that this system is in place, allowing them to reward their favorite content producers?

Olsson reckons the imminent introduction of automated notifications for content creators will help the service spread: “First people get unclaimed flattrs, get a message about them, collect them [then] flattr others.” I’m not so sure. It’s true that the services we’re talking about didn’t sport Flattr buttons in the first place, but I can’t help but feel that some extra marketing element would be needed in order to really educate potential users about the service.

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SoundCloud may finally be gearing up to make some serious money

David Meyer — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:00:21 +0000

SoundCloud is one of those rare European online startups that is cornering its market: if you want to embed or share pure audio, whether it be music or podcasts, you’ll probably use this service. But that said, even if SoundCloud is the great hope of the Berlin scene, its ability to turn a decent profit has remained questionable.

A couple of moves revealed at SXSW on Monday may change that. The first is a drastic simplification and improvement of SoundCloud’s paid-for premium tiers -– the company’s primary source of income – while the second is the introduction of a so-called Pro Partners tier for brands. The Pro Partners tier is not only a serious potential revenue source, but it also introduces a visual element to the site that is likely to trickle down to ordinary consumer accounts in time.

Freemium boost

Let’s look at the simplified freemium model first (bearing in mind that free membership allows two hours of uploaded audio). Previously, SoundCloud had four paid tiers, starting on the Lite package, which offered four hours of audio for €29 ($38) a year, and grading up to a Pro Plus package that included unlimited audio and various analytics for €500 a year.

There are now just two paid tiers for the average user: a Pro package that is priced the same as the old Lite (€29 annually or €3 a month) and offers the same amount of audio storage, but with added analytics and controls; and a Pro Unlimited tier that adds unlimited storage at €9 a month or €99 a year.

In short, becoming a very heavy SoundCloud user just got significantly cheaper and more attractive.

Paving the way for ads?

The Pro Partner program is in beta for now, with early users including Snoop Lion, Red Bull, The Guardian, Kevin Smith’s SModcast and even the Grammys (for the CenterStage talent contest). These brands and musicians are able to promote their profiles in the “Who To Follow” section, and they can also create what SoundCloud calls “moving sounds” — essentially, image slideshows that run behind the service’s trademark soundwave representations. Moving sounds can be reposted just like any normal audio stream, although they don’t work in embedded streams yet.

As SoundCloud co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss pointed out to me, the company has been working with artists and major labels for a while now, but this move opens up new possibilities:

“We’re changing the canvas so it becomes more visual. It’s cleaner and simpler. As an audio partner or a brand you get that canvas to express your identity on. It works for brands who are creators of audio content as well –- we’re only bringing on brands that are creators as well right now.

“Some features — or all even, we hope –- will eventually trickle down to all of the tiers.”

For artists, I can certainly see the introduction of “moving sounds” providing an opportunity for simple, stylish visual expression. The images will need to fit into the bar format used for all SoundCloud sounds, which differentiates the potential results from, say, those slideshows people create when wrangling an audio track into a terrible makeshift YouTube video.

But the real opportunity here will be for advertisers. It is now much easier to imagine a scenario where brief ads are inserted into streaming playlists, in between tracks, with both audio and moving graphics being part of the deal. And, asked whether this is the direction in which SoundCloud is heading, Wahlforss certainly didn’t deny the possibility:

“In general, there is a whole movement of native advertising. We’ve seen success with YouTube with promoted content, so we feel there isn’t anything happening in audio on the native advertising side. We think we’re the best positioned of any service out there to do that and to really work with creators.

“[However] we’re in the early stages right now; it’s in the experimental phase. Right now these pieces of content won’t appear unless a friend of yours reposts the content.”

Wahlforss’s caution is well-advised: SoundCloud may be the de facto user-generated audio platform on the web now -– an expensive game to be playing -– but it is not invincible. People are willing to tolerate ads to some degree, but not if they are too intrusive. Monetizing this platform will mean walking a delicate line.

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Revealed: the finalists for the 2012 Crunchies

Tom Krazit — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:00:44 +0000

The finalists for the 2012 Crunchies have been released, and now it’s time to decide who should rewarded for their technology innovation and leadership over the course of 2012.

The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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SoundCloud’s size does matter, but it’s not the only metric to watch

David Meyer — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:14:56 +0000

SoundCloud is really big these days. Heck, even Barack Obama is on the platform. This makes sense: there is no equivalent service out there at scale, apart from YouTube, which is hardly focused on the audio experience.

So how big is it? On Tuesday, as the service took its ‘Next’ web app version out of beta, it revealed that 180 million people interact with SoundCloud each month through the service’s website, mobile apps and embedded players. It should be stressed that this does not mean 180 million registered users (the last update there was 20 million-plus, back in May), but still. Woah.

And that’s not enough, it seems. As co-founder Eric Wahlforss told me, the revamp is largely aimed at increasing engagement and attracting more users:

“If you go on the front page it’s a more friendly appearance. We’re basically accepting any kind of user – it’s a broadening out.”

How will it achieve this? The biggest new feature is reposting, which should make it easier for sounds to spread. This feeds into the newfound ability to curate sets of sounds – a feature that Wahlforss reckons should appeal to music bloggers and even labels and radio networks.

There are other handy tweaks too, such as the introduction of continuous listening, keyboard shortcuts and a realtime notification infrastructure (the last two there came out of internal hacking projects, of which CTO Wahlforss says he is especially proud).

According to Wahlforss, the rather lengthy gestation phase for Next (it was in beta for seven months) showed a 30 percent increase in overall engagement, with the main metric there being the time people spend listening.

However, the most important metric for SoundCloud is really its number of premium subscribers – and there, the company is staying pretty tight-lipped.

SoundCloud operates a freemium model, with charges ranging from €29-€500 ($38-$654) annually, and that’s pretty much where all its revenues come from. Ask Wahlforss whether ads might invade the service at some point, and you get a swift circling-back to the subscriptions angle. So is SoundCloud profitable yet? “We don’t really comment on those numbers in public. We’re focused on growth.”

Overall size does matter. But it remains frustratingly difficult to evaluate whether that growth is translating yet into the kind of premium subscription uptake that SoundCloud needs for a sustainable future.

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SoundCloud dreams of a day when you can talk to the internet

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 02:34:12 +0000

Although virtually every web service and consumer business is becoming more mobile-focused, a service that focuses on sharing sounds is uniquely suited to being mobile because sound is not dependent on a big screen or features that are harder to replicate on a small device, SoundCloud co-founder Alex Ljung told GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco on Monday. “It’s great for us, because sound is inherently non-visual,” he said. “And you can even put the device in your pocket and still keep listening to it.”

Ljung said that unlike some other music or performance-focused services, SoundCloud’s focus is not just music but any kind of sound — from audio books to recordings of conference calls like Facebook’s earnings call, or the embedded audio that bloggers like venture capitalist Fred Wilson use. “It’s really natural when you think about it, because sound is a huge part of the way we experience the world,” he said. The company’s mobile app recently passed 10 million downloads on iOS and Android.

The size of the market means the potential opportunity for SoundCloud is huge, Ljung said, but it also means that it’s easy to try and do everything all at once, because there are so many potential ways to create and share sound. In addition to mobile, one of the ways the service is expanding its reach is through partnerships with companies like Apple — which built support for SoundCloud sharing into GarageBand — and Flipboard.

The company is also working on a redesign of the service that is currently in private beta. Ljung said that it is much faster, and also has a range of new features, including the ability to share sounds in different ways and to create collections of sounds that share certain attributes. There is also a continuous play feature so that users can listen to something while they are browsing through other content, and there are real-time notifications of new content.

When it comes to the future of sound, Ljung said he dreams about a day when it is just a standard part of how we experience the web: “When do we get to the point where I can listen to the internet and talk to the internet? That’s kind of out there, but it’s what I like to think about.”

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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SoundCloud users can license their audio through Getty

David Meyer — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:27:05 +0000

UPDATED: Although it’s probably best-known as a music platform, SoundCloud has a fast-growing business in other kinds of audio too, from weird field recordings to the spoken word. There are all kinds of sounds in there.

And now that repository is about to pay off for some of SoundCloud’s 20 million users. SoundCloud has just signed a deal with Getty Images that will make it possible for those users to license their sounds to anyone who’s willing to pay – most likely advertisers and other creatives. (Hear more about the future of SoundCloud from CEO Alex Ljung at our RoadMap conference on November 5th in San Francisco).

“SoundCloud’s partnership with Getty Images Music creates a powerful offering to our community of professional and casual creators,” Ljung said in a statement. “Now through Getty Images Music, songwriters and audio creators can broaden their exposure and potentially monetize sounds they’ve shared on SoundCloud.”

The system will be quite straightforward: each user will be able to install a ‘license’ button from Getty Images Music on their SoundCloud players, for tracks that they want to monetize. Those who want to license the track just click the button and send a request.

Beyond that, depending on how much contact information the SoundCloud user has provided, and whether or not they’ve already sent a tax form to Getty, it will take between a few days and a few weeks for the track to become available.

Getty’s rate card details how usage in web or mobile advertising will cost $350, inclusion in corporate marketing will cost $1500, and so on. The creator gets “35 percent of the upfront licensee fee plus 50 percent of Getty Images’ share, as publisher, of any backend performance royalties”.

And what if the user’s sounds get used in something that’s broadcast? Depending on what type of licensing that’s been chosen by the user, Getty registers the track with performing rights organizations and administers the royalties – 100 percent of the ‘writer’s share’ goes to the creator, along with 50 percent of the ‘publishing share’.

Funnily enough, I’d noted before that Getty was sniffing around the Berlin scene, but I’d assumed that the fruits of that interest would be seen first in a collaboration with an image-centric service, probably EyeEm.

SoundCloud is the pioneer and leader in what it does, i.e. being a YouTube for audio. It’s wildly popular, but its monetization strategies appear limited. Audio-player deals and those pro-account subscriptions can only take the firm so far.

Unfortunately, this is still not a new monetization strategy. SoundCloud doesn’t take a cut, nor does it require users to be paid-up members in order to take advantage of the licensing service.

That means it remains possible that SoundCloud will adopt audio advertising, which is something I feel would drive away many users – particularly as SoundCloud does not tend to offer the same kind of continuous listening experience found in the likes of Spotify.

UPDATE: I originally got the wrong end of the stick regarding SoundCloud taking a cut of the licensing fees. To misquote Obi-Wan, this was not the monetization strategy I was looking for.

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Announcing RoadMap 2012: Speakers include Evan Williams, CEOs of Tumblr, Instagram

Om Malik, Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 02:35:56 +0000

We’re super excited to officially announce our second annual RoadMap conference, which will take place on November 5 in San Francisco, and is focused on design in the age of connectedness (get tickets here). Here is the big idea: with the data explosion and always-on connectedness, the world has become so complex, and design and UI are the keys to simplifying, and creating meaning from the connected landscape.

Our initial speaker lineup is packed with a lot of really great thought leaders, who will discuss their ideas around connected devices, new web designs, future platforms, like our bodies and our cars, and how the world will change when everything has a ubiquitous wireless connection. Here are some of our amazing speakers:

Kevin Systrom, Co-founder, CEO of Instagram
David Karp, Founder, CEO of Tumblr
Yves Behar, Founder, Chief Designer of fuseproject
Tony Fadell, Founder, CEO of Nest
Evan Williams, CEO, The Obvious Corporation
Scott Wilson, Founder, MINIMAL
George Blankenship, VP Worldwide Sales and Ownership Experience at Tesla
Steve Case, Chairman, CEO Revolution
Oren Jacob, CEO ToyTalk
Alex Ljung, Founder, CEO SoundCloud
Paul Mascarenas, CTO Ford

We believe the intersection of connectedness and design is going to be a topic of discussion for a while, so we are creating an exclusive book (and e-book) for the attendees of the conference. We have invited many thought leaders and speakers to contribute to this handbook of the future.

Like the 2011 edition of Roadmap, there are limited amount of tickets (buy one early here). And if your company is interested in becoming one of our sponsors, please contact eventsales AT gigaom.com.

Image courtesy of josullivan.59, and emanueleED.

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Musicplayr: cross-platform harmony for web music

David Meyer — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:00:41 +0000

Right now it feels as if the web’s entering a golden age for music lovers, not just because of the advent of new distribution models, but also because services such as YouTube and SoundCloud offer an easy way to embed tracks and even playlists on pretty much any kind of page.

The problem is that most things are in silos and there’s precious little in the way of cross-platform continuity for the listener. Which is why Musicplayr, a Berlin/Cologne-based service that offers just that for most free online music, sounds pretty good right now.

Musicplayr users can pull in content from all sorts of free music platforms, both audio and video, to create a unified playlist. The site’s player is itself embeddable, and on Thursday it got a whole lot prettier: audio-only tracks now get accompanying pictures, and the player window can also now be continuously visible. The startup calls it “eye candy for the ears”.

If you want to run off and check it out before reading further, fire off an email to gigaom@musicplayr.com – the first 200 to do so will get an invite. Yes, it’s not entirely open at the moment, but those who are already in can invite others.

“Technically we only store the deep links – we are not altering or caching this content,” co-founder Thorsten Lüttger told me. “We want to make all three parties happy – one party is the consumers, the others are the labels and the producers-slash-artists. All of them have to be happy. The content owner stays in control.”

Avoiding the GEMA trap

The legality of Musicplayr’s approach has been a careful consideration for Lüttger and co-founder Stefan Vosskötter. However, one party Musicplayr hasn’t even bothered approaching is Germany’s much-loathed music rights collection society, GEMA, a.k.a. the organisation that broke YouTube for Germans. As far as Lüttger is concerned, it doesn’t matter too much what GEMA makes of the startup’s business model when the company is thinking about being a global product.

“We can build this model without Germany as well,” he said. “Technically we are a bookmark service – what we are doing is open. The songs GEMA has taken down from YouTube we [automatically] do not play in Germany, but the moment you cross the border into the Netherlands, we play it for you. It’s something where the German consumer has to suffer and it’s not our mission to solve this problem. It has to be solved between GEMA and those providers; we’re just the middleman.”

Brave words. So if Germany’s not necessarily Musicplayr’s main focus, where is? Western Europe and the U.S., apparently. Lüttger believes services such Spotify, which also offers an embeddable player, have given people a taste of the idea already.

However, he pointed out that Spotify’s player is “basically a download link to their app”, whereas people listening to someone’s embedded Musicplayr don’t need to download anything.

“I believe Spotify is opening up people’s minds that you do not need to own music. This all-you-can-eat flat rate is awesome, and I’m glad they’re successful,” he said. “We are going even further, because we help you archive all freely available content.”

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Pinterest adds support for Slideshare, Etsy, Kickstarter, Soundcloud

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:19:58 +0000

Image-sharing site Pinterest will now automatically attribute content pinned from 500px (photos), Kickstarter (projects), Etsy, SlideShare (presentations) and SoundCloud (sounds), the company announced on its blog. It already automatically attributes content from Flickr, Behance and Vimeo.

In addition, Pinterest enabled in-board play for Kickstarter, Slideshare and Soundcloud, “so you can curate great collections of projects, presentations, and sounds, and play them right there on your boards.”

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