Happy Birthday @soundlcloud! You are a game changer!

The e-mail came last night.: Soundcloud was announcing a much expected new release to celebrate its first anniversary. To start with, and so that you know, I am not, in any way, connected with Soundcloud. I was a early user of the service, really enjoyed it and then had the opportunity to meet with Eric (Soundcloud’s CEO) at the Sonar this year. The hands on approach that Eric showed, regarding a project I was working on at the time, was something that build up the idea I had from the company.

It is my opinion that Soundcloud personifies all of the so-called best practices that any company should have: Make mistakes and admit them, give a great support to the user base and interact with it. I have observed, amused, some users on Twitter ranting about something they are not able to do on Soundcloud, for some reason or the other, only to after some minutes be praising the service. Soundcloud listens to the users and that is always rewarded.

One of the things that I really enjoy about this “new” Soundcloud is the way that uploaded tracks will be measured: not by number of tracks but by minutes. Time is the base measure for music and Soundcloud listened and implemented it. This will give more flexibility to artists, in my opinion. The two new players look gorgeous and they are one more reason why artists should also take care of the graphical aspect of their releases.See for yourself below. Another major plus is the secret link feature. This will be great for artists to promote competitions with their fan base. W O O O O T ! (actually PublicSpacesLab is already making one using the Secret Link, check their Twitter)

I am still to test the iPHONE app [I am hoping that it works on the iPOD touch] and I will be playing around with the new statistics.

The only thing that I would like to see implemented and that was not is this: If a user shares his/her tracks privately with more than 10 users the possibility of not accepting them. Jordi, from PublicSpaces Lab, as a great point here: If you are sharing your tracks with 2300 people including labels and netlabels, you are not looking for someone to release your material: you just did.

We will keep giving you the music! (either you like or not )