Finance · interview · Service

Soundcloud celebrate

Dubber · 15 April 2009

I met up with Soundcloud’s UK manager, Dave Haynes earlier today. He was celebrating a venture capital investment of 2.5 million euros, announced today.

I talked to him about how independent music can make the most of the service.

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18 thoughts on “Soundcloud celebrate”

  6. Soundcloud has changed the way I receive music files, which is helping me change the way I work and allowing me to spend more time at home and less time in dark a/c studios, which is a good thing.

  7. Dave,

    Firstly, massive congratulations. I hope it means that Soundcloud will go from strength to strength.

    Secondly, the first word I’m going to say to you when we meet at Creative Capital next month is “So…”

    ;)

    p.s. Quality blogging as ever, Dubber. Keep up the good work!

  9. I’ve just watched the soundcloud introduction video. I’m very, very excited to get on this and it’s given me ideas of how to update my site. Brilliant!

  10. From SoundCloud’s terms and conditions:

    “Grant of License

    1. USER hereby grants SOUNDCLOUD and its successors and assigns a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, distribute, stream, download and/or otherwise make USER’s Content available to other users of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website and Services.

    2. USER also grants each and every other registered user of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, distribute, stream, download USER’s content and/or otherwise to make USER’s Content available to other users of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website and Services as set forth herein.”

    Now, I fully understand and support the idea of getting your music heard as widely as possible, but to me these terms are still MUCH too powerful, and severely limit the usefulness of SoundCloud.

    For example, I wouldn’t want to use it to share a rough mix, unmastered version or demo, in case this was later used in some way I wasn’t happy with.

    I would strongly urge SoundCloud to re-think these terms, or at the very least make sure they are clearly set out to new users – most people haven’t read the T&C. Otherwise I for one will continue to suggest people use other ways to share their music.

  11. I really like Soundcloud and the service they offer. However, I find their pro plans very expensive for what you get. 59 euro per month for their top plan just seems too much to me for just moving music and sounds around on the net.

    I’m planning on using Soundcloud to play music and sounds on my website. I really like their player. Although I didn’t know about those terms and conditions. Thanks for sharing Ian!

  14. Hi,
    The granting of license in the terms of use also make all my alarm bells ring, although beforehand it states that “SOUNDCLOUD does not claim any ownership rights”. So what does this really mean? I keep the ownership, but they have the license to do whatever they want with my work? Dave, could you please clarify the terms around licensing if you are still around?
    Regards

  16. @martin @hugo @ian – regarding the T&C’s we don’t assert any ownership over any content that is on the SoundCloud platform. Our terms & conditions were designed so that users could grant us enough rights for us to do the things that they wanted to do with them. That might be sending tracks privately to their contacts and other users. Or it might be adding the track publicly to your profile and embedding it somewhere on the web with one of SoundCloud’s players. Each user has full control over what access rights they set for the tracks.

    Due to this useful discussion and Ian’s comments however we are going to look at our Terms & Conditions and find a way to make this very clear so that anyone new to our service can use it without any concerns.

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