SoundCloud
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Screenshot
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| Type of business | Private |
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Type of site
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Music streaming, Social networking service |
| Founded | September 2007 , Sweden |
| Headquarters | Berlin, Germany |
| Founder(s) | Alexander Ljung Eric Wahlforss |
| Key people | Alexander Ljung (Founder & CEO) Eric Wahlforss (Founder & CTO), David Noël (VP Community & Evangelist) |
| Employees | 300 |
| Website | soundcloud |
| Alexa rank |
 124 (November 2016) |
| Registration | Required to post and upload content |
| Users | 40 million registered users (July 2013), 175 million unique monthly listeners (Dec. 2014) |
| Launched | October 2008 |
| Written in | Ruby |
SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform based in Berlin, Germany, that enables its users to upload, record, promote, and share their originally-created sounds. SoundCloud's content is evenly split between music and other audio. Founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss are the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief technical officer (CTO), respectively.
SoundCloud was established in Berlin in August 2008 by Swedish sound designer Ljung and Swedish artist Wahlforss. The founders aspired to allow musicians to share recordings with each other, but the concept later transformed into a full publishing tool that also allowed musicians to distribute their music tracks.
A few months after inception, SoundCloud began to challenge the dominance of Myspace as a platform for musicians to distribute their music by allowing recording artists to interact more nimbly with their fans.
In a 2009 interview with Wired, Ljung said:
In April 2009, SoundCloud received €2.5 million Series A funding from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. By May 2010, SoundCloud announced it had one million users.
In January 2011, it was confirmed that SoundCloud had raised a US$10 million Series B funding round from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. On 15 June 2011, SoundCloud announced they had five million registered users, and investments from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary's A-Grade Fund.
On 23 January 2012, SoundCloud announced on their blog that they had 10 million registered users. By May 2012, 15 million users were announced by the company at a press conference held in San Francisco, where a new version of the API was previewed. The usage level for the site was growing by 1.5 million users per month at this stage.
The new API was released to the public in December 2012. To accommodate the proliferation of mobile devices, it provided new features such as: redesigned profiles; more sharing options; real-time notifications; continuous play, which allows concurrent listening and site navigation; the ability to create personal collections/sets; and the addition of real-time indexing to search. The response from users was mixed, and many expressed dissatisfaction with the change. SoundCloud received over 60,000 comments regarding the new layout by 10 December 2012. Also in December 2012, the company's data showed that SoundCloud was reaching 180 million people per month—8 percent of the global Internet—while users were uploading 10 hours of content every minute.
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Wikipedia