SoundCloud still isn’t conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins – but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone – hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is on a much lower 300,000 users and focuses on speech.
They had about 3 million in January 2011 and announced five million users that June, eventually hitting seven million by September. It’s now on track to put on a million new members in January.
However, its moving into interesting new territory today, unveiling a new feature it calls Story Wheel.
This SoundCloud Labs project allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story. To illustrate how it works, the co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss have demonstrated with a conversation about their journey to date, which is reminiscent of an old fashioned slide show. Very ‘Kodak moment’.
If you’re unaware of Soundcloud, here’s the skinny. It was launched in October 2008, has had over five million official SoundCloud iphone/android apps downloaded and over 10,000 third party apps have been developed on SoundCloud’s open platform (recent additions include integrations with professional music creation software Pro Tools and Cakewalk).
Author : Mike Butcher
