At Be Better Studios, we have lots of little musical gadgets that we like to play and experiment with whenever possible. Every once in a while, an idea or two takes off and a track is born. SoundCloud gives us an outlet to share these tracks with the rest of the world, and in the process find new and interesting sources of inspiration. In musician circles, it’s probably known for it’s collaborative approach to sharing audio work. The infamous SoundCloud widget made consuming sound files a visual experience, letting people share their thoughts at precise time intervals on the audio file’s wavelength. This simple revolutionary idea has built entire communities of recording artists, pretty much achieving with audio, what YouTube achieved with video.
The result is a cloud ripe and full of some of the best (and worst depending on your taste buds) fruit for fans of music to consume. But just as YouTube isn’t just for film makers, SoundCloud isn’t just for musicians. As a casual consumer of music, there’s a lot this service has to offer. Inspired by many conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues, I’ve decided to write a little article about the many ways a music consumer and not a music creator can use SoundCloud. There just isn’t enough about this on the web.
1. SoundCloud for groupies.
Most artists have some sort of SoundCloud presence. Let’s face it the record industry doesn’t have the resources it used to in order to promote and market new talent. A lot of musicians are left to make some sort of Social Media strategy to promote their works on their own. You’d be hard pressed to find one of these self promoters to not have a SoundCloud account. You can find and follow your favorite artists on SoundCloud and get all their latest demos, promos, interviews, performances, and even exclusive downloadable tracks directly to your SoundCloud feed. What’s more, is you can comment on the different parts you like about their various recordings and you’d be surprised at how many artists will write back.
2. Build your own ‘radio’ station
There’s a couple ways to create SoundCloud ‘station’ that could rival any University or Indie radio station. The first is that by sharing tracks you find by other artists to your feed, anyone who follows you will be able to see these tracks on their feed. If you create an account that just has shared feeds, followers can go to your profile and listen to all the tracks in sequential order.
The second way is more communal. You can start a SoundCloud group and encourage musicians to submit tracks to the group. You can then send people to your group’s url and they can stream the feed of all those tracks. Musicians on SoundCloud like groups because it provides them a way to reach an audience that likes a specific type of music. You can even moderate the group to exclude tracks that don’t fit your “station’s” theme. These features offer a great alternative to the commercial programming ruling our analog radio waves today.
3. Build the ultimate personal collection indie music hosted by SoundCloud for free.
Money a little tight for iTunes, but scared the Feds are going to come take your computer away if you download illegally? No problem, when you find a track you like on SoundCloud, you can favorite it. By doing so, you not only help the artist out by popularizing their work, but it also saves the track to a favorite’s list on your account. Over time, as you collect tracks you like this way, you can grow a huge playlist from your favorites and then stream them from your account. The favorites playlist feature is one that I like and great to put on while writing code or doing work around the house.
4. Discover SoundCloud groups
The SoundCloud groups feature is an excellent way to discover new music within a specific genre. Musicians have been using this feature on SoundCloud to reach specific niche audiences, and these niches can get quite creative. Searching through SoundCloud groups, you can find ones specific to local musicians in your area, collections of tracks with a given theme that span different musical genres (outer space, nature, sports etc…), collections of tracks made with specific instruments, collections of podcasts, collections of unsigned artists, and even collections from record label catalogs just to name a few. It’s quite easy and fun to explore all the different kinds of work that people have uploaded to the cloud.
5. Create Podcasts or Voice Recordings
SoundCloud is great for podcasts. This old form of media distribution is almost as old as the internet. With SoundCloud, you can create entire talk shows, book & poetry readings, news reports, etc.and have a place to upload them. The embeddable audio widget allows you to distribute your show across the web on blogs and other services like Facebook or Twitter. The waveform comment timeline it provides offers an excellent way to interact with your audience.
Every ‘podcast’ or voice recording doesn’t have to be a syndicated talk-show either. If work has you away from your family for large periods of time, SoundCloud is great way to communicate with your family. You can record audio letters or readings of children’s books for your kids. While spinning a tall tale, you can even use the waveform comment timeline yourself to add personalized comments at different points in the story. Your family will love to hear your voice and can even record stories themselves for you to hear while you are away.
There are many apps available on mobile devices that make it easy to create and upload voice recordings to SoundCloud. SoundCloud’s official iOS & Android apps are great for this job as well, but there are many other 3rd party apps that also integrate directly with SoundCloud.
Go here for a direct link to their mobile app for iOS & Android
Go here to browse SoundCloud’s App directory for apps to help you create and record
6. Promote audio recordings on your website or social media feed.
If you have a blog, or a website, you can find all types of audio on SoundCloud that can be used as consumable content. The embeddable SoundCloud widget is HTML5 and not Flash reliant, allowing it to be used on any mobile device including iOS devices such as the iPad or iPhone. And there’s a lot of cool stuff out there to use. For instance Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been uploading sounds of the international space station to SoundCloud and has been very popular for Science and learning blogs. Also, one of the best things about SoundCloud is that the service is using a subscription based model, and therefore is able to keep it’s website and service Ad-free. So unlike YouTube, if you embed a SoundCloud widget into your website, your users do not have to sit through ads.
Many social media services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus also have integration with SoundCloud making easy to distribute audio from SoundCloud through their own distribution channel. As with most services, SoundCloud has an extensive API encouraging an active community of developers to create apps and plugins that take advantage of all SoundCloud’s features. It’s worth mentioning that the official SoundCloud app for iOS and Android offers a great interface for exploring audio recordings on a mobile device.
Go here to browse SoundCloud’s App directory for Apps that integrate with 3rd party services
7. Crowd source music from your employees at the workplace.
While working at the office, music can make the work day more productive and enjoyable. However, it may be that not everyone enjoys a specific radio station or specific person’s mp3 collection. One way to make an office playlist more fun is to create an account on Soundcloud for your office and then have all of your employees create an account. From the office account, follow all of your employees’ accounts. Then when employees share tracks to their feeds that they find on SoundCloud, it will show up on the office account’s feed. Simply stream the office account’s feed and you will have a list of songs made up of all of your employees favorite tracks. This democratic approach is a fun way to keep everyone excited about the music they hear around the office and also encourages them to discover new music from both popular and unknown acts they might never have discovered otherwise.
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These are all just some ideas on how you can utilize and enjoy SoundCloud’s service without being a musician. If you know of some other ways for non musicians to use SoundCloud that I didn’t cover, please share them with us by adding them to the comments.
Links:
SoundCloud.com
SoundCloud.com/apps
Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s sounds of the International Space Station
Follow Be Better Studios on SoundCloud