March 11th, 2013

SoundCloud’s New “Moving Sounds” Feature Holds Promise For Ads, Viral Content Like Tumblr’s Gifs

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Audio platform SoundCloud announced changes to its subscription plans today, as well as a new plan aimed at content and brand partners. The company had previously offered five different tiers to its service, making things somewhat confusing for more casual and pro users alike. It’s now dropping its available plans to just three for individual users: free, Pro and Pro Unlimited. There’s also one… → Read More

November 10th, 2012

How Jaiku Made Prezi Focus On The US Market

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Editor’s note: Peter Arvai, founder and CEO of Prezi, is working to help people share ideas.

Just months before Twitter launched in 2006, a company launched in Helsinki, Finland — the land of Nokia, ruler of mobile phones. The company’s idea was simple: Make it easy to publish short messages via mobile phones. Ring a bell? For the Internet-savvy community in Northern Europe, it was Jaiku… → Read More

October 9th, 2012

SoundCloud Partners With Getty Images Music — Users Can ‘Sync’ License Tracks For Commercial Use

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In a tie-up with the stock photography and digital media giant Getty Images, users of SoundCloud can now offer their tracks for commercial licensing, providing another avenue for monetization for musicians and sound artists who use the platform to host their creations.

Likewise, it gives “media, advertisers, designers and creatives” a new way to license fresh material — that’s because, in what… → Read More

August 13th, 2012

Monetization Baby: SoundCloud Planning To Let Users Sell Tracks? Adyen Chosen To Power Payments (Updated)

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Adyen, the Dutch Internet and mobile payment startup, is trumpeting a big client win today: Its single-click payment solution has been selected by social sound platform SoundCloud. But that in itself isn’t really all that newsworthy. The real story, as we understand it, is that SoundCloud users will soon be able to start selling tracks through the platform.

(Update: In a case of one company’s… → Read More

July 10th, 2012

Now With Sound — Social Collections Platform Booklets Integrates With SoundCloud

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Booklets, the ‘social collections’ platform that enables users to create and share HTML5-powered collections of text, images and — now — sound, has added integration with neighbouring SoundCloud (both startups are headquartered in Berlin).

In addition, a new private sharing feature has been unveiled, making it possible to share collections with select friends-only.

Targeting both consumers… → Read More

May 9th, 2012

SoundCloud Gets A Major Makeover, But Only Private Beta Users Can See It (For Now)

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Most people probably don’t stick around social music service SoundCloud’s site to ogle its design, but apparently the team felt there was plenty of room for improvement.

To that end SoundCloud, who not long ago raised a $50 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, officially pulled back the curtains on their handsome new interface in San Francisco earlier today. → Read More

April 23rd, 2012

Official.fm Launches Its New Music Promotion Platform

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These days, it seems SoundCloud is the player to beat in the music platform space. It’s been called (among other things) the “Flickr for audio” or the “YouTube for audio.” Evidence of this lies in the fact that the company raised $50 million in January at a $200 million pre-money valuation — they must be doing something right.

Instead of competing with SoundCloud, Official.fm is taking… → Read More

January 5th, 2012

Announcing The 2011 Crunchies Finalists And Tickets On Sale Now

Crunchie Award photo by Susan Hobbs

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks… → Read More

January 2nd, 2012

SoundCloud Raises $50 Million Round Led By Kleiner Perkins

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SoundCloud has raised a new fundraising round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The amount was not released but TechCrunch understands it to be $50 million. This would give the company a $200 million pre-money valuation. GGV Capital also participated in this round. The social sound platform which has seen high growth in the past year will use the funding to expand more rapidly… → Read More

December 17th, 2011

Five European Startups To Watch

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Silicon Valley is famously, and rightly, proud of its place as the spiritual home for startups. And it has an inspiring and awesome track record that’s tough to beat.

However, as the recent Le Web conference proved, European tech hubs like London, Berlin and more recently Paris, can now also lay claim to breeding world-class entrepreneurs. There’s a sense that Europe is finally getting its… → Read More

November 23rd, 2011

Saul Klein’s List Of Europe’s Next Billion-Dollar Tech Companies

Where will the next billion-dollar startups come from? The tech world and most VCs tend to be parochial, looking at Silicon Valley, maybe New York, and a few other hot markets like China and Brazil. But what about the Old Country?

Yesterday, I was having coffee with Saul Klein, a partner at Index Ventures and co-founder of Seedcamp. He believes that in every major city across Europe… → Read More

September 17th, 2011

SoundCloud, Deezer And Rhapsody Revealed As Facebook Music Launch Partners?

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I love Yvo Schaap, even though I’ve never met him in person.

Wanna know why? Because the man keeps on digging up interesting stuff by simply perusing code, and then alerting us.

Schaap found the embeddable +1 button and a a link to the Google Games logo before either of them was publicly released, and now he may have identified several companies that will be partnering with Facebook for the… → Read More

August 2nd, 2011

VibeDeck Adds A Free eCommerce Layer To SoundCloud

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Last month, we wrote about Vibedeck, which had just raised $2 million in funding for its eCommerce platform for musicians. As we wrote then, though VibeDeck is still in early development (having launched in beta 2 months ago), it’s value proposition is that it’s slick and easy to use. And the startup’s goal is simple, too: To be a low-cost eCommerce resource for small to medium size bands — or… → Read More

June 23rd, 2011

Flattery alone will only get you so far – SoundCloud users can now get paid via Flattr

Flattr, the social micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, has added Soundcloud integration to make it easy to add the Flattr button (and start receiving payments) to any SoundCloud player, including those embedded anywhere across the web. Interestingly, SoundCloud already has an existing arrangement with Flattr competitor BuySimple.

Flattr’s support for SoundCloud follows a… → Read More

June 11th, 2011

The Music Runs Through Our Veins

Many years ago, as an avid Knight Rider fan, I would use a handheld cassette recorder to record the audio portion of the show so I could hear it on road trips. Pretty bizarre, yes, but we didn’t have a VCR. I’d do the same when a popular new song came on the radio, waiting patiently to hit “record” and write the music to cassette tape. Over time, this turned into copying CDs, downloading… → Read More

May 31st, 2011

Disrupt Backstage Pass: So What, Exactly, Is Social Music? (TCTV)

One of the most interesting panels at last week’s Disrupt featured a discussion about social music between Steve Jang the co-founder and CEO of Schematic Labs and Alexander Ljung the founder and CEO of SoundCloud.

Jang and Ljung are both developing apps and services that enable us to share music, sounds and our musical taste. Jang’s product is Soundtracking, an iPhone app that allows us to… → Read More

May 31st, 2011

Minno Rebrands As BuySimple, Partners With SoundCloud, Raises $700K For Micropayments

Online payment methods are old and in the way. Sure, whether or not the world will have a generally-agreed-upon payment system is up for debate, but it seems that a new era of micropayments is here — hopefully to stay. With the political and regulatory inertia around bank and credit card-related payment tools, there is room for a third party without these hangups to bring a new perspective to… → Read More

May 4th, 2011

SoundCloud does a Google and launches SoundCloud Labs

SoundCloud, the audio platform, has unveiled SoundCloud Labs, a new site to house experimental projects and features developed in-house, including via its open API.

The idea of creating a separate space for cutting-edge development branded as Labs isn’t a new one, of course, mostly notably employed by Google. But in SoundCloud’s case it perhaps makes even greater sense since the service was… → Read More

May 4th, 2011

SoundCloud Does A Google, Launches SoundCloud Labs

SoundCloud, the audio platform, has unveiled SoundCloud Labs, a new site to house experimental projects and features developed in-house, including via its open API.

The idea of creating a separate space for cutting-edge development branded as Labs isn’t a new one, of course, mostly notably employed by Google. But in SoundCloud’s case it perhaps makes even greater sense since the service was… → Read More

May 3rd, 2011

SoundCloud Passes 4 Million Users, Partners With Headliner.fm To Give Bands A Killer Promotional Tool

By now, you may have run across a SoundCloud audio track somewhere out there in the wild, wooly Interwebs — perhaps during one of your mad, late-night music searches. In which case, you’re familiar with the tell-tale signs: The scrolling orange cursor, the messages tagged mid-song, and that distinctive social waveform layout.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, SoundCloud is the… → Read More

tunesBag raises €250k, hooks up with Dropbox for music streaming

tunesBag, an Austrian music sharing startup that has been around for quite some time, has just raised €250,000 through a government fund and an undisclosed investor. The platform itself is, like many others, a cloud-based iTunes where you can sync your local music library via the cloud to a variety of devices. But the startup has recently added a nifty feature that lets users connect their… → Read More

March 8th, 2011

ThingLink joins forces with SoundCloud to let users add sounds to images

ThingLink, which provides tools to let users embed links into images, has partnered with SoundCloud to add audio as an option.

The idea is that those who work primarily in audio – musicians, bands, sound designers etc. – can now include images in their work, perhaps as part of a promotional campaign, flyer or as album art work. But also, given SoundCloud’s recent pivot to become a more mainstream… → Read More

February 10th, 2011

Post-pivot, SoundCloud reaches three million registered users

SoundCloud, the audio platform originally targeted at music makers but now a wider consumer play, has announced that it’s reached three million registered users.

And considering that the Berlin-based startup was at a million users as recently as last May – pre-pivot, if you will – the change of direction would appear to be paying off or at least hasn’t affected the company’s growth trajectory… → Read More

February 10th, 2011

Post-Pivot, SoundCloud Reaches Three Million Users

SoundCloud, the audio platform originally targeted at music makers but now a wider consumer play, has announced that it’s reached three million registered users.

And considering that the Berlin-based startup was at a million users as recently as last May – pre-pivot, if you will – the change of direction would appear to be paying off or at least hasn’t affected the company’s growth trajectory… → Read More

February 8th, 2011

R.E.M. Stands For R.E.M.I.X. (The SoundCloud Singles)

R.E.M.’s upcoming album Collapse Into Now is coming in March, but the band is already getting the buzz going with a little crowdsourcing experiment. A couple days ago, the album’s producer released some tracks from the song “It Happened Today” in files that can easily be imported into Garageband, the music mixing software that comes on new Macs. Fans are invited to remix the song and upload their… → Read More

January 8th, 2011

Confirmed: Index And Union Square Invest In SoundCloud

As we hinted predicted four days ago, SoundCloud was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It’s confirmed today on their blog that both firms have made undisclosed investments.

SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on… → Read More

January 4th, 2011

Is SoundCloud raising funding again via Index and Union Square?

SoundCloud is courting more investment in the form of offers from Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures, if German startup blog Gruenderszene is to be believed. We’ve reached out to the company for comment. It’s likely that SoundCloud is looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and… → Read More

December 21st, 2010

SoundCloud Adds Android Version Of Its Mobile App

Berlin-based startup SoundCloud, which is slowly moving from a music focused site to one where anyone can record and share audio, launched its iPhone app recently. It’s now dropped the Android version and it’s available in the Android Market now, for free. There is no significant difference with the iPhone app which we reviewed here. → Read More

December 2nd, 2010

Mixlr exits Beta – now targets everybody not just DJs and musicians

Mixlr, which we previously described as a UStream-for-audio, has exited Beta and with it a wider remit: No longer is the live audio streaming service aimed at just DJs and musicians but now targets the likes of conference organisers, journalists, podcasters and public speakers too.

It’s a pivot not dissimilar to that made by SoundCloud recently, a service that Mixlr both competes with and… → Read More

December 1st, 2010

SoundCloud launches super-cool ability to record on site and in iPhone app

Today, SoundCloud, an audio platform that has concentrated on music makers so far, makes a significant pivot into the wider sphere of audio sharing. Up until now SoundCloud has done a pretty incredible job of attracting well known artists to its platform such as The Foo Fighters, Kylie, Deadmau5, Moby and Caribou, who have used it to effectively socialise their music. But today Soundcloud releases… → Read More