SoundCloud Spotlight
In 2007, a particularly spartan internet site named SoundCloud was born from the problem-solving efforts of two masters students at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm who simply wanted to create a better way for people to share sounds. Three weeks ago, this same enigmatic start-up announced a fifty million dollar Series C investment led by Silicon Valley venture capital titan Kleiner Perkins, ultimately valuing SoundCloud at $200 million.
For almost any other young firm, such a development might lead to wild celebrations, social media blitzes, and ostentatious marketing campaigns. Not SoundCloud, however, which seems to be proceeding with business as usual. From this attitude it is apparent that SoundCloud’s business as usual is in fact quite unusual. There seems to be an aura of muted perseverance behind the company, whose user base recently surpassed ten million strong. In our global technology environment where outsized, bombastic personalities reign, SoundCloud has managed to remain an almost clandestine force in the web audio industry, still skirting under the radar in the weeks following their recent capital influx.
Adidas’s “all soundcloud” video featurette on the company’s two founders, Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung, sheds some light on the deftly humble characteristics of SoundCloud. “There were so many broken things on the web,” observes Wahlforss, reflecting on SoundCloud’s origins. “In some ways, that’s where it started.” Setting out to build a free, functional platform through which people could seamlessly share their sounds has been an ongoing process, but through it all SoundCloud has deliberately held fast to its mission statement. “The first thing that just came to my mind right away was selling music,” responds Wahlforss when asked about the “worst feature idea” for the site they ever had.
Creation, facilitation, and humility define SoundCloud, not prestige or profit motive. It’s slowly becoming clear that SoundCloud is perfectly content as a discreet industry leader. I only discovered SoundCloud a few months ago, and I fall smack in the middle of their target user demographics. Had I known earlier, I never would have exhausted so much time on Bandcamp, a site whose primary function is to sell music. Unlike Bandcamp, SoundCloud in the words of Wahlforss attempts to comprehend all of the ways people “use” sound and then “mould (new sonic) behaviors” to make “things that never have been seen.” What a fantastic project.
SoundCloud operates from the standpoint that it has so far having achieved nothing, and that deferential quality has served as an incredible advantage. Now, with its newly acquired fifty million, will SoundCloud catapult from start-up darling to industry torchbearer, or it will prolong its beloved grassroots status? Sometimes the meek do inherit the earth.
Robert Glasper Remix Contest
One of my favorite jazz pianists, Robert Glasper, has teamed up with music creation and collaboration service Indaba Music to post a remix contest for the song “Move Love” off his upcoming album, Black Radio. This is a fantastic, interactive marketing idea that more and more major musicians are supporting, facilitating creativity while promoting their own music brands. My remix is in the works!
Ok, 9 hours later…enjoy!
Discovr Music App
YouTube has been the mainstay of what I’ll term “music discovery” since before I entered college, overshadowing the much-maligned MySpace, but in the last several years new outlets have emerged to challenge YouTube’s primacy. The former is SoundCloud, a simple but fantastic site that one blogger recently predicted could become the “YouTube” for internet audio. As soon as the service improves its search engine capabilities, I definitely see that happening. SoundCloud touts a massive collection of original music and DJ remixes, and serves as the best option for up-and-coming artists to publish and share their music. Bandcamp is another viable option, offering the additional ability to sell your music and process such transactions. Last week I came across another category of music discovery engines: recommendation apps Discovr & Groovebug. Sadly I possess neither an iPhone nor iPad, thus Groovebug remains uninvestigated, but Discovr offers a Mac OS version, which I begrudgingly purchased from the App Store for $4.99
The Discovr interface is sublime. Upon searching for an artist – I used Dwele as an example – the app produces a floating avatar in the center of the window representing that artist. Double-clicking leads you to a profile page with the artist’s bio, discography, press, and (in the next update I’m told) that artist’s Twitter feed (Tweets are already integrated into the iOs version). Pretty awesome.
Backtracking to the main page and the app’s true crux, a single click on the artist’s avatar spawns five or six “spokes” connecting that artist to related acts. For example, from Dwele we are introduced to Jill Scott, Eric Roberson, Raheem DeVaughn, Bilal, Musiq, and Frank McComb. As far as I can tell, the program’s algorithms are not too advanced, as restarting the discovery process with the same artist yields the exact same connections each time. In essence, Discovr creates a virtual music map joining similar musicians together in a web of floating circles. It’s a profound project, but not without drawbacks.
For starters, the program struggles with what can become a limited screen size. Lacking any auto-resizing options, it quickly becomes difficult to fit the map of artists within the program’s display window. In other words, the program is practically maxed out after clicking on 5-10 different artists. I have only toyed around in Discovr for several days, but another downside seems to be the limited number of artists in the program’s database. When searching for artists with whom I was already familiar and engaging the program from there, I was rarely introduced to a musician previously unknown to me. I also wonder about the subjectivity of the musical relationships between artists. Is Dwele that similar to Jill Scott? A $4.99 price tag ($1.99 for the mobile app) serves as another barrier of entry, only because we as app consumers are accustomed to freebies. My main concern with the product rests on its playback ability. While Discovr directed me to Dwele’s music videos, albums, et al, I could only preview his tracks upon playback. If Discovr could somehow integrate full on-demand capability (perhaps via API integration from one of the many great on-demand music services), then I believe it could become an extremely popular app. As of right now, I can’t say how often I’ll use it. All of that said, Discovr Music is a very intriguing product in what could be a rewarding niche within the music app market.
Michael Kiwanuka – Tell Me A Tale
Song of the day, courtesy of Elias
Dwele – Weekend Love Cover
Start searching for music on Soundcloud. It’s the bomb diggity.
Kendrick Lamar – Section.80
I shy away from most hip hop music nowadays, which pains me. My suburban white adolescence was riddled with scenes of head-bobbing to 2Pac, Biggie, Snoop, Dre, Nas, Blackstar, and Common. Unfortunately, the hard-hitting and lyrically-provocative mainstream jams of the 1990s and early 2000s have been replaced by catchy, house-inspired drivel in the vein of Lil Jon, Soulja Boy, and Young Jeezy. It should be noted here that over the past decade, the entire music landscape has been in flux, which has among other things complicated our understanding of what is “mainstream.” Indeed, good hip hop has never disappeared and is more easily discovered than ever before. Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80 represents exactly that – good, underground hip hop from an independent label – and proves that, despite what mainstream rap productions suggest, many artists are still committed to music with a social message.
Section.80 quickly grabs our attention, with an opening song entitled “Fuck Your Ethnicity.” No interpretation needed there. “Don’t mistake me for no fuckin’ rapper,” Lamar chides midway through the song. By discussing subjects like ethnicity and the rap industry itself, it’s clear that Lamar did not set out to craft your everyday rap album. The track “No Make-Up” continues Lamar’s mission to deliver original, alternative messages. Focusing presumably on his girlfriend, Lamar questions whether make-up truly improves beauty. “Damn girl, why so much?” he asks her as she gets ready to go out. “Don’t you know your imperfections is a wonderful blessing?” Lamar is not content to blindly accept cultural norms, in this case arguing that true beauty lies beneath the makeup we so frequently apply.
One of my favorite songs on the album, for its historical criticism, has to be “Ronald Reagan Era.” Reagan, according to Lamar, harvested an environment of every-man-for himself depravity, breeding drug use, fear, and horrific violence. “Welcome to vigilante 80s,” Lamar begins the track. “The children of Reagan,” Lamar flows emphatically, “raked the leaves off your front porch with a machine blow torch.” Hailing from Compton, Lamar speaks firsthand on the hardships that hit inner-city Los Angeles and other metropolitan areas as a result of Reaganomics’ impalement of governmental services. I agree wholeheartedly with Lamar’s lambasting of Reagan. Say what you want about William Henry Harrison, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, or even George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan was our worst president of all time. We still have not recovered economically or socially from the damage he wrought.
The eighties under Reagan did give us great musical art, including socially-conscious, sometimes politically abrasive hip hop from performers like Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Public Enemy and N.W.A. Lamar molds himself from their paradigm, assessing ours as an overdrugged generation in the track, “A.D.H.D.” Young people these days “pop Vicodin,” and sip cough syrup “like it’s water,” but which begets which, we wonder, the drug addiction or the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Lamar does not explicitly say, instead linking once again a cultural affliction to the Reagan era: “we crack babies because we born in the eighties.”
Not all of the album tackles social problems, however. Lamar dives into more introspective and meditative lyrics on two other fantastic tracks, “Kush & Corinthians” and “Ab-Souls Outro.” The former ruminates on the meaning of life and our purpose as human beings. “Be different, do different things,” Lamar urges. “Don’t do it like he did cause he ain’t what you is.” Under his verses rests an enigmatic, rumbling soundscape of piano, vibes, chimes, and guitar in C Minor, comprising my favorite beat on the album.
“Ab-Souls Outro,” Lamar’s diatribe on life in 21st century America, stands out as the most powerful song on the album. Here Lamar bears all, his thoughts on politics, economics, race, and the future. It’s a mishmash of profound words. I’ll excerpt some of my favorite lines. “I’m on the brink of my career while my peers struggle for employment…the president is black but you can’t vote for skin, you vote for the better man…we might not change the world but we gon’ manipulate it…Odd Future’s aight, but our future’s not, that martial law shit drop we gon’ all get got…(and finally)I’m not the next socially-aware rapper, I am a human motherfucking being over dope-ass instrumentation.” Check out the entire song lyrics here. Section.80 is a must-listen hip hop album of 2011. Well done, KL.
Stockholm Steve 