Posts from Music

Easter Eggs

Happy Easter everyone.

I would also like to wish folks a happy Passover.

My topic today are Easter Eggs. Not the kind that kids find hidden in the back yard, but little features that developers hide in the software applications they build.

I love Easter Eggs in software apps and I encourage our portfolio companies to allow this practice in their engineering teams.

Easter Eggs bring whimsy and fun to software, something I feel that is badly needed and much appreciated by users.

And a good example of an Easter Egg, likely a result of today also being April Fool’s Day, is Waldo showing up in my Google Maps this morning. Well done Google.

#Music

First On SoundCloud

Our portfolio company SoundCloud is the first place most musical artists post their music, the first place most musical artists are offered an opportunity to monetize their music, and the first place most listeners discover new artists and their music.

To celebrate that, SoundCloud is launching the First On SoundCloud campaign:

“First On SoundCloud” kicks off with SoundCloud’s first-ever creator advertising campaign spotlighting 10 groundbreaking artists from across SoundCloud’s global community. Spanning hip hop, electronic and pop, these artists represent the more than 10 million creators heard on SoundCloud every month, and the accelerating global shift toward creators building their sound, their audiences, and their careers directly online.

But there is more. Because SoundCloud is for all artists, there is an opportunity for everyone to participate:

Alongside these featured artists, we’re also giving all creators the opportunity to upload and be heard as part of “First on SoundCloud”. Beginning today, you can upload an original track to SoundCloud and tag it #SCFIRST, for a chance to be promoted across SoundCloud, including:

“First On SoundCloud” playlist: Creators uploading their latest tracks to SoundCloud with the tag #SCFIRST will be considered for inclusion in the “First On SoundCloud” playlist on SoundCloud’s homescreen, giving them global exposure to new fans, plays, likes and follows.

#SCFIRST on social: After uploading a track to SoundCloud with the tag #SCFIRST, creators can use SoundCloud’s seamless Twitter integration to immediately tweet their track with the #SCFIRST hashtag. SoundCloud will be randomly selecting creator tweets and tracks to promote to its millions of social followers.

Fast track consideration for monetization in SoundCloud Premier: Creators uploading content with the tag #SCFIRST will also be reviewed for inclusion in the SoundCloud Premier monetization program which offers creators a leading revenue share and additional promotional resources from SoundCloud.

#SCFIRST in SoundCloud newsletters and blog: SoundCloud will also randomly choose creators who upload their tracks using #SCFIRST for spotlights in SoundCloud’s newsletters and blog posts.

Every day, almost 200,000 tracks are uploaded to SoundCloud, close to 10x any other music streaming service.

So when you upload your next track to SoundCloud, tag it with #SCFIRST, and participate in this campaign.

#Music

Funding Friday: Shantell Martin

I support a bunch of artists on Kickstarter’s new Drip service.

One of my favorites is Shantell Martin.

She draws her dreams and makes music and shares her work regularly with her backers.

It’s great to get a little bit from her on a regular basis.

Check out her page and maybe back her and see what that is like.

UPDATE: AVC regular Kevin Marshall just joined Drip today. Good timing. I backed him too. If you want to do the same, you can do that here.

#art#crowdfunding#Music

SoundCloud Home

Our portfolio company SoundCloud, which makes one of the most popular apps in the world, is launching a new Home experience in it’s mobile apps today.

SoundCloud is the first place musicians post their music and it is the first place listeners discover new artists.

In the past, listeners had to use a feed experience (like Twitter) to discover new artists and new music. This experience works well for power users who take the time to curate a following list. But it doesn’t work great for most users.

So SoundCloud is launching a new Home experience today which moves the feed to a second tab and replaces with a curated and personalized experience for users.

Here is what the new Home looks like:

 

If you have the mobile app, you should get pushed an update today or tomorrow with the new Home experience

It is also available on the web at https://soundcloud.com/discover.

If you want to stay current on the latest in up and coming new artists, SoundCloud is the place to do that and it just got a lot better at doing that for you.

#Music

SoundCloud

I have spent much of the last four months working on this and was up most of the night last night finishing it, so I don’t have a lot of gas in the tank today.

But I do plan to write about all of this at some point, maybe soon, maybe not so soon.

It has been one of the most interesting and challenging projects I’ve worked on in my entire career.

And it could not have been for a better cause.

#Music

Go SoundCloud Go

Our portfolio company SoundCloud introduced a new subscription offering yesterday called SoundCloud Go which complements its existing subscription offering called Go+. Combined with the longstanding free service, SoundCloud now has an elegant set of offerings for its users:

SoundCloud is fundamentally different than other streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, Napster and Deezer because it has always allowed anyone to upload their music to its platform (UGC content). About this time last year, SoundCloud added all of the music that these other streaming services have and launched its premium offering (Go+).

You can see the numbers in the above chart. The premium content that Spotify, Apple Music, etc offer is about 30mm tracks. The UGC content that is only available on SoundCloud is another ~120mm tracks.

The UGC content on SoundCloud is not just your daughter’s high school friends making music in their bedroom (which is how many of the current top artists started out). It is DJ mixes, mixtapes, remixes, top artists like Kanye dropping music quickly and easily (which he did yesterday), emerging artists like Chance who are unsigned and have chosen to stay independent, podcasts, and a lot more. It is the most eclectic, interesting, and vibrant streaming music service in the world.

And so if you have always loved SoundCloud for the UGC content, but want it with no ads and offline sync, get SoundCloud Go. Its available here.

And here’s some “UGC” content to start your morning off with, courtesy of Lil Uzi Vert:

#Music#streaming audio

Shout Out To SoundCloud

At the Grammy’s last night, Chance The Rapper, one of the night’s big winners, gave props to SoundCloud in his acceptance speech for Best Rap Album:

Chance talked about the importance of artists staying independent and his shoutout to SoundCloud was a well deserved acknowledgement of the power of platforms like SoundCloud in helping artists get discovered independently of the traditional music system and staying there.

Here’s the Best Rap Album of 2016, in case you missed it.

And if you didn’t know, SoundCloud is a USV portfolio company.

#Music#streaming audio