The possibilities of the internet are more incredible than ever. The old ways of delivering content (TV Networks, cable, radio) are dying FAST.
And that goes for music too. Remember the revolution of MP3 files? Napster? Mp3.com? But now with a rapidly expanding blogosphere and thriving community networks such as this one, those days seem like a distant memory.
I would estimate that the vast majority of you kind people would agree with this statement: Music is free. Not only is this true symbolically, but NOW it is also meant literally.
Well, maybe not ALL music. HA! Got you for a second! But all kidding aside, anyone can agree that there is a gigantic amount of free music to stream and download off the internet.
Unfortunately now, anyone with a computer has access to software which can make it vastly easier to accomplish than the tools available even 10 years ago. And at 1/100th the cost - even FREE. What that means though is you may have to sift through a virtual PILE of artists to find music which appeals to your own sense of quality. Based on the experimental electronic music I’ve heard (and experienced first hand!) I’m more convinced than ever that “quality” is a subjective term. Quality is what YOU see it to mean. And with this new era of you-choose-what-content-and-when, thank goodness you finally don’t have the meaning of “quality” shoved down your throat. With that kept in mind, I bring you through the proverbial door and reveal to you…
Souncdcloud is a really smart group of people. They knew integrating it with community networking sites would be huge. I have been a Soundcloud user for a few months now and it’s steadily becoming my main source for discovering new music. Soundcloud’s website isn’t laden with ads and has a nice simple interface. Music can be downloaded for free, but the website’s built-in song player is gorgeous and it gives users the ability to comment on the actual timeline of the song. You can even share the same player or “widget” by embedding it into one of your own web pages or blog like I’ve done here.
One of the lessor known but interesting things about the Soundcloud community is that you can share songs to only certain members if you want, lets say for a work-in-progress between collaborating musicians. This gives music producers and artists the ability to share different “versions” of tracks during a song’s development anywhere there is web access.
Integrating your favs from Soundcloud can be done with most of the major community networks such as StumbleUpon, DIGG, Twitter and of course, Facebook.
Souncloud supports artists with a very generous freemium membership. An artist would have to be producing musical content constantly 24-7 to exceed the monthly allotment of uploads, but for full time songwriters who want to amp it up to the stratosphere a ‘pro’ membership might be in order.
So yeah, Soundcloud.com is frikkin amazing. It’s an amazing way to empower musicians, bands, remix artists, producers and songwriters to share their music from a centralized, community-driven download portal with a beautiful and easy to use interface. And, what you find (and maybe even produce yourself!) can be easily shared through your fav social networking site. Amazing indeed.