Soundcloud: Social Networking for Musicians
Review by Robert Young-Pullman | Published July 2008 | Review Archives

If one more person invites me (and everyone else in their address book) to a cookie-cutter social networking site, I may start taking hostages. Where are all of these "friends" when I need money and my phone's about to be shut off? There's convincing evidence now that the larger, general access social networking sites like MySpace are really just made up of you, teenagers and everyone else on this planet that wants to promote themselves to you, just like you do to them. It reminds me of my (fortunately long-gone) days in high-pressure sales: a bunch of the suits would go out to lunch and we'd hone our sales pitches trying to get one another to foot the bill.

But just like the sillyness of MySpace led to the supposed "exclusivity" of Facebook (protip: Facebook now has more global traffic than MySpace), so the "serious" people are starting to move to more specialized social networks that fit them. SoundCloud.com is one for musicians. Still in beta mode, I received an invitation to try it out. I was surprised to see that most of the team behind it are serious dance music afficionados, and venerable House Music labels like Sonar Kollectiv were some of SoundCloud's early adopters.

Many of SoundCloud's features you've no doubt seen before - embedded music files, contacts, more "friends", etc. But all of the silliness of "showing your profile sum luv lol" to say nothing of glitterpics are pleasantly absent. While the person you're talking to on SoundCloud may not like your style of music, he or she most likely has something to do with the industry.

There are also a few toys - you can tap out a rhythm to a track you're listening to, which will automatically calculate the BPMs. But the best, and possibly scariest, feature is the "drop box". It's basically an email box in which other users can "drop" you a track, but on a social network dedicated to music, this could become a piracy epidemic waiting to happen. The big thing that will decide whether SoundCloud is really different is the venture capital behind them. If they're required to start selling serious advertising, then traffic is king and the temptation to "open" the network up to anyone who wants in will be hard to resist (and that's when the social network of choice for melody makers will be come the social network of choice for pirates). But if they get a chance to grow, SoundCloud could really be the next big thing. For the moment, all is well: you need to be invited by an existing member to join, or send a sufficiently meek and humble email to get accepted. Click on the mainpage at SoundCloud, then select "invite".