In some instances, music and files were taken down due to fear of copyright infringement. Rather, they believed the company was putting more stake into focusing on high-profile artists and licensed music. For instance, the Performing Rights Society for Music (PRS for Music) told Business Insider that it felt it had “no alternative but to commence legal proceedings,” following “five years of unsuccessful negotiations.”įurthermore, users started to lose their faith, feeling SoundCloud had strayed from its earlier focus of supporting DJs. Unfortunately, winds got a lot rougher in the coming years. One year later, Twitter was in heavy discussion to acquire the hot startup, but the acquisition eventually fell through. That same year, Alex and Eric even won the European Web Entrepreneur of the Year award. By 2013, it had a total of 130 million consumers of music coming to its platform. Over the coming years, the company grew at an exponential rate. Within a year, it had over 160,000 musicians signed up with major artists such as the Foo Fighters switching from Myspace to their platform. Since SoundCloud solved some of the music industry’s biggest pain points, its start was an absolute smash hit. Furthermore, it provided features such as commenting on parts of the track (especially relevant for long mixtapes) and analytics services to see how others interact with the track. With SoundCloud, you didn’t have to swap those files, but could directly collaborate on their servers. Back in the day, music was shared through FTP Servers or services like YouSendIt, which was extremely cumbersome due to the file size of these tracks. The company’s initial vision was to allow musicians and producers to share and collaborate around their work in a cloud-based service. And after a year of coding and refining, SoundCloud launched their private beta in October 2008. He even produced an album, which he recalled was “terrible music, very, very bad music.”ĭue to the low cost of living and the big local (electronic) music scene, the pair decided to move to Berlin. Alexander, as he described in a 2011 interview with FounderLY, lost himself in a “huge sort of rabbit hole” of music when he was a teenager. The pair quickly bonded over both their passion for technology and music. ![]() ![]() So Alex, the open person he is, just walked over and introduced himself. Around the mid-2000s, a young Alexander Ljung, who studied Media Technology at the prestigious KTH Royal Institute of Technology, saw himself being troubled by synching the school calendar on his MacBook.Īnd as chance would have it, Eric Wahlforss, his co-founder at SoundCloud who studied at the very same university, shared one key trait with Alexander: he was the only other classmate who had a Mac. Coincidentally, just like with Spotify, the story of SoundCloud started in the Swedish capital of Stockholm.
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