The Next Web » Soundcloud

SoundCloud uses service for Social Good – #messagesforamit

Drew Olanoff — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:19:52 +0000

David Noël is the Community Evangelist for the popular audio sharing site SoundCloud, and when he found out that his friend Amit was diagnosed with Leukemia, he decided to use what he knows best to help him out. SoundCloud.

Today, David has set up this page on SoundCloud using its Dropbox integration to help give his friend Amit a vote of confidence for his upcoming battle with Cancer. You can read his blog post about Amit here, originally posted by Amit’s friend Chrysanthe Tenentes, Community Manager at FourSquare. He would like you to simply upload messages for Amit.

Without even signing up you can record a song, a message, a joke, or anything you want and upload it to share with Amit.

After my very public battle with cancer (see: #BlameDrewsCancer), I can honestly say that being connected to people all over the world did help me quite a bit. It cheered me up at all hours of the day, when I was sick and weak, and when I wanted to give up. So clearly, this is an approach that I fully endorse.

Amit Gupta describes himself on his Twitter profile as:

Optimist, entrepreneur, and designer. Founded @Photojojo & @WorkatJelly. Next up: http://mtrl.co/ I tweet about things that are rad! http://amitgupta.com/

We obviously wish “SuperAmit” well in his battle, and we hope that you will take a moment to upload your messages to Amit on SoundCloud.

You can listen to the submissions here.

UPDATE: The love continues for Amit on the internet amongst his friends, and well-wishers. Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing alerted us to this effort by Postagram. You can get a code to send Amit a free postagram. Please do it and wish him the best.

Get an early listen of Blink 182′s Neighborhood with your neighbors via SoundCloud and SimpleGeo

Drew Olanoff — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:46:18 +0000

Blink182 has a new album available via pre-sale called “Neighborhoods” and has a pretty interesting and unique way to listen to it early.

Thanks to a SoundCloud and SimpleGeo mashup, you can listen to the new album in your own “Neighborhood”, which is the name of the feature. Using SimpleGeo‘s GPS technology, it will locate your neighborhood through your browser and drop you in a chat experience with SoundCloud‘s listening technology.

It’s a similar listening and chat experience to what you’d find on Turntable.fm

This is a pretty new way to listen to music before it’s available in stores and Blink182 continues to push the envelope on the way we share and listen to music today. It will be interesting to see if this helps boost sales of the album “Neighborhoods”, available for pre-sale now.

VibeDeck now lets artists sell music from YouTube

Paul Sawers — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:16:31 +0000

VibeDeck is a web service that lets music artists sell their music directly to their fans, without incurring any additional costs.

Launched in beta two months ago following a $2m investment round in June, VibeDeck last week announced it had deployed SoundCloud integration, which lets artists sell tracks, with associated metadata and artwork.

Fans simply click the ‘buy’ link within the SoundCloud player, and they are directed to PayPal, and then allowed to download the music. It’s completely free to use too.

And this week, VibeDeck launches another new service called ‘Sell on YouTube’, which inserts a ‘buy’ link for music associated with a video on YouTube.

The service should be launched into public beta today, and here’s how the service will work.

For those that have already signed up to VibeDeck and uploaded at least one audio file, they will then have to authenticate VibeDeck with YouTube. Then, click on the ‘options’ icon to the right of the track in VibeDeck:

VibeDeck fetches all your available videos from the associated YouTube account, and you then select from the options:

A call-to-action is added in the form of a link-to-purchase below the video, and the payment flow for the fan, and the set-up process for the artist, is similar to the set-up with SoundCloud. Artists keep 100% of sales and payments flow directly to the user’s PayPal account:

So, from the fan’s perspective, VibeDeck doesn’t really play a role in any of the process. But from the artist’s perspective, VibeDeck takes care of everything.

Artists will be able to choose whether fans pay a fixed price, name their own price or download for free in exchange for personal data or a promotional tweet. Lior Shamir, CEO at VibeDeck, said:

“The beauty of this is that the punter is not purchasing YouTube’s compressed audio. Instead, the artist has ‘associated’ a high quality MP3 (320 kbps + metadata/artwork) with a YouTube video. It’s the instant and seamless digital version of going to see a film you love at the cinema and popping into Tower Records on the way out to pick up the movie soundtrack.”

The technology behind the platform could also be used across other industries in the future. Shamir said:

“There is no reason why our software won’t be equally as useful to authors, photographers, designers, teachers, consultants and other proprietors of digital goods as it is today for musicians.”