I'm testing out a new streaming player: www.SoundCloud.com"SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform which allows musicians to collaborate, promote and distribute their music. It has sometimes been described as being for audio what Flickr is for photos, or Vimeo is for video." - Wikipedia
The project came together with hopes of creating a better way for musicians to upload their music and share conversations about it. It then became a distribution platform and much more.
To test out the available content I performed a few varied searches:
Metric (Indie Rock, Canadian) pulled up 500+ tracks, a bunch of which were similar remixed versions of their popular songs. One of its features allows users to comment on portions of the song, as seen below.
Twilight Galaxy (the Gripp remix) - Metric by The Gripp
Hot Water Music (Punk Rock, US) pulled up 90 tracks, of which only 6 songs and 1 album were relevant, the rest of the options were pulled in based on the separate words hot, water and music (searching in quotation marks didn't make any difference). The album postings are as such:
Hot Water Music- A Flight and a Crash by ThankYouSpaceExpert
I searched for a few varied popular Australian bands to see if this tool could be used for promotion in the Oz music scene, but unfortunately most of my searches weren't too fruitful.
Bodyjar - 3 tracks Powderfinger- 12 tracks, 4 relevant. Spiderbait- 15 tracks, but only 3 unique songs.
Finally, after making note of how many remixes I came upon, I searched for house music and techno artists and found that this is the most popular content available on the site, with 500+ remix tracks for each entry.
All in all I really love the sharing features on SoundCloud, they provide embedding into any social platform and allow for the song to be played in the embedded player without outsourcing to another site. The downside seems to be the selection music for my tastes and needs.
The site allows for buying (through Amazon) and some songs are available for download. I'm not sure how copyright infringement works into this and I can't seem to find any justification for it on the site.
Users can add songs to their favourite lists and play them in players on the site, a feature that a lot of music sites are providing (so many in fact, that it's hard to track what you've compiled and where). Personally, I don't use websites for listening to music, I tend to use them to share music through embedding.
According to Alexa.com, the site is popular in the UK, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Belgium and Germany. It's currently ranked #596 in the US, and that's not too shabby.
I used to use Imeem for its embedding skills and since having lost that site, I haven't been able to find anything similar... until now!
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