Soundcloud: audio online collaboration for music industry

At this point, there are many online collaboration platforms. In fact, OpenView has invested growth capital in two companies in this space, CentralDesktop and @task.

Currently, it seems like the trend for collaboration tools, CRMs and other work flow tools is to specialize in a particular vertical since they all have similar functionality.

Soundcloud is just this; a hosted, online collaboration platform geared specifically to the music industry. It allows musicians to collaborate, promote and distribute their music via widgets and apps and has been described as the “Flickr for audio” or a “Vimeo for audio”.

To up their competitive positioning, in January, they announced a partnership with The Hype Machine to allow artists to track listens and pull analytics on who and how the content is being consumed as their tracks are released. The Hype Machine also aggregates thousands of music blogs across the web and creates music genres to get the tracks out to listeners who will like them.

Right now, Soundcloud is based in Berlin but scaling globally and they just announced that they have hit the 1M user mark, congrats!