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SoundCloud.com

SoundCloud
Type of business Private
Type of site
Music streaming, Internet community
Founded September 2007; 10 years ago (2007-09)
, Sweden
Headquarters Berlin, Germany
Founder(s) Alexander Ljung
Eric Wahlforss
Key people Alexander Ljung (Founder & Chairman)
Eric Wahlforss (Founder & CPO),
Kerry Trainor (CEO),
David Noël (VP Community & Evangelist)
Artem Fishman (CTO)
Employees 300
Website soundcloud.com
Alexa rank Increase 107 (June 2017)
Registration Required to post and upload content
Users 40 million registered users (July 2013), 175 million unique monthly listeners (Dec. 2014)
Launched October 2008; 9 years ago (2008-10)
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. Founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss are the chairman and chief product officer (CPO), respectively.

SoundCloud was established in Berlin in August 2007 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 January 23, 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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