Inside SoundCloud: How it Integrates with Other Apps, and Why That Matters to Music Creators

June 24th, 2012 by Trenton

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This is not a time to be shy about your sounds.

Into integration: Henrik Lenberg, VP of Platform for SoundCloud.

The clouds officially started parting for people who create songs – or just love them – when SoundCloud was launched in 2008. That’s when founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss got so much right with this essential tool.

An aptly self-described social sound platform, SoundCloud has been making life infinitely easier for producers, artists, DJs, labels, music supervisors, radio stations, engineers, fans and whoever else musical that you can think of. This is a one-stop for creating, recording, promoting and sharing sound, and the more you use it, the more indispensable it gets – whether you’re giving or receiving.

The company now counts over 15 million users, and is growing at the rate of 1.5 million per month. But the user base isn’t the only thing that’s expanding – so is the universe of musical and social media applications that integrate at a high level with SoundCloud. Its extremely intuitive operation and elegant functionality are making it a first call music sharing app for developers that are serious about enabling producers and artists to share and move files.

Helping to make that happen at a high level is Henrik Lenberg, VP of Platform for SoundCloud. From the San Francisco office, Lenberg keeps his eyes open for smart new SoundCloud integration ideas, and works hand-in-hand with savvy developers to make them a reality.

The result is anything from streamlining artist submissions for MusicXRay, to the killer “Beat the Clock” contest they just concluded with Ableton, where contestants had just 24 hours to submit their own remix from a free Live Pack.

Making matters more interesting, SoundCloud just launched The Next SoundCloud in May – made to be an even simpler, faster and more social platform — and currently in private beta.

As SoundCloud becomes intertwined with more and more applications, the potential benefits for producers, artists, engineers, and creators are almost infinite. We spoke with Lenberg about how a SoundCloud-integrated app is born – and what more lies in store.

Why is it important for SoundCloud to integrate with other apps and platforms?

Sharing sounds on a social platform brings enormous value for sound creators. We know this from the rapid growth we’re seeing and all the positive feedback we get from our community.

Our aim is to bring sound sharing and social elements closer to where the sound creation happens, and we hope this will make it easier and more valuable for people to create and share sounds. Apps are becoming increasingly connected and we’re bringing the social network for sound creators to any sound creation app. Examples of apps that can share sounds to SoundCloud are Ableton Live, Avid Pro Tools and Apple GarageBand for iPad.

In addition, we want to help our users share and promote their sounds across the web. We’re tightly integrated with the major publishing platforms (like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr), and services like Headliner.fm and MusicXray help artists reach new fans. By opening up the platform to thousands of developers in the wider community, we allow for unexpected innovation and tweaking to happen.

The ability to share sounds gives people a reason to record. Sharing sounds is as easy as hitting record, stop, and share on your smartphone.

Big things can happen every time SoundCloud combines.

So what does SoundCloud look for in a partner?

We prefer to work with partners that share our vision to make sound creation social and unmute the web. We’re also fans of innovative companies with great products, both design- and technology-wise.

When we decide what partnerships to spend more time on, we look at the possible impact of a partnership and whether an integration makes sense from a product and brand perspective.

What partnerships do you tend to avoid?

Since the platform is open, we can allow any type of integration that won’t violate our terms. We have the terms mainly to protect our users and make sure we maintain a sound developer community — respect and attribution are the pillars for our platform policies. We also work hard on supporting all developers and constantly improving our resources.

Once an integration project is underway from there, what’s the general workflow for how it unfolds?

Some partners have a very clear vision for what they want to do, and then we usually give them feedback and help them realize that vision. In other cases, we bring more ideas and direction for what can be done. The great thing about having an open and easy to use API is that partners can iterate very quickly and usually quite independently.

What’s the difference between someone using your open API, and partnering with Soundcloud on a deeper level – what are the possibilities that unfold in the latter scenario?

The cool thing is that it’s the same API. We announced our next version of SoundCloud, all our products are running on it, and its the same that any partner can use. The difference is more about our involvement working on the product, and from there we may be doing an official announcement, or a marketing agreement.

For instance, the “Beat the Clock” competition that we worked on with Ableton — once you have a partnership like that, you can do something cool around it. They did a free Live Pack with sounds from artists like M83, and then everyone had 24 hours to build something with these sounds.

That’s the coolest thing we can do: something that involves their community and our community, where everyone shares. We can’t do that with everyone, so we pick people with a strong brand, where we know there’s a big overlapping audience.

"Beat the Clock" proved to be a creatively fulfilling partnership with Ableton.

If a company wants to work with SoundCloud on an integration, how should they pitch him and your team on it?

Drop an email to api@soundcloud.com and tell us about your ideas and how you see your app/service working with SoundCloud.

We read all emails and do what we can to support and point you in the right direction. All the info you need can be found on our developer pages: http://developers.soundcloud.com/.

So what’s an example of a recent SoundCloud integration that followed this workflow?

Tabletop is a groundbreaking music studio for your iPad and the latest version includes a community feature where users can share their creations and listen to songs made by other Tabletop users.

The community part is powered by the SoundCloud API and points out a new direction for how music making can be more social. Get the app for free, and hear what other people have created with the app.

Flipboard has added SoundCloud as a supported service which brings sound to this modern way of browsing media from different publishers and other sources. It’s a great example on how sound can be used for news and other stories along with the text and video media stream. Far beyond traditional radio. The app has an audio category with featured sound creators.

You’ve just introduced an integration with Twitter, that allows SoundCloud tracks to be played right inside a tweet. Why was that a particularly important integration for both sides to pull off? 

We’ve been working with Twitter on bringing sounds to the improved experience on Twitter.com. Now, if users tweet SoundCloud links, our HTML5 widget is automatically embedded in the detail view for the tweet.

This is important because a lot of people are using Twitter to share their sounds to their followers. Using our mobile apps (iOS, Droid) is also the easiest way to create and “audio tweet” — easily record a message to all your Twitter followers.

SoundCloud believes sound is becoming essential in a similar way people use text and photos to share their experiences. With this integration, SoundCloud is unmuting Twitter. It’s giving creators yet another platform to have their sounds be more social and opens up the possibility for direct feedback and interaction on a sound.

Stimulating stuff! So how is the act of app/platform integration itself evolve moving forward?

The big shift in sound creation is the transformation from an individual to social process, and we’ve just seen the beginning of this massive change.

Another face of massive media-sharing change: Instagram.

I think it will soon be as natural to share a piece of music or a story by uploading it to SoundCloud as it is to share a photo on Instagram or a video on YouTube today. Sounds will become a more and more natural part of the web, especially the mobile web where it’s much easier to create and consume sounds than e.g. text and video.

We want to lead the way in unmuting the web and bring sound sharing to a wide audience — far beyond the traditional music and broadcast industries.

Last question: At its core, SoundCloud is a relatively uncomplicated platform. What happens when you can go public with a simple offering, as opposed to something more complex?

Look at things that change society, like email. That’s a very simple idea: You just send text to somebody. But that totally changed how companies operate.

It’s just about getting it right, and making it really easy for people — making the sharing part really a part of the core experience. We’re totally focused on optimizing that experience, and at the end it doesn’t have to be super-complicated.

I think that’s something music app makers could learn a lot from. How do they get to the core of their concept? Look at the guitar — there’s been a ton of expressions done with guitars, and it all starts with the same six strings.

That’s the type of quality we want to have as a network. It’s a simple structure, but there’s been a ton of use cases. That’s because the users make it come to life.

— David Weiss

…Want a closer look at these integrations in action? Here’s how SoundCloud and some of its friends are grooving together. In SonicScoop style, we’re letting you know who’s based in NYC and in LA, but of course you can go steady with SoundCloud from anywhere in the galaxy.

Partners in NYC:

Tumblr
SoundCloud users can easily share sounds they record to Tumblr (or have e.g. all their newly uploaded sounds posted to Tumblr automatically). The  sounds integrate with different Tumblr templates so that Tumblr users can listen to sounds on Tumblr.

Foursquare
SoundCloud’s  mobile apps give users the ability to “check in” their sounds on Fourquare, which also adds a sounds URL to the checkin data on Foursquare.

headliner.fm gets the connection.

Headliner.FM
When Headliner.FM users create social media promotions, they can easily add a sound which significantly increases the engagement for the tweets or Facebook posts.  SoundCloud is also used to power the preview tracks from each user, so that other users can preview their songs before accepting a promotion.

FanBridge
Integrated with FanBridge so users can stream sounds in their custom Facebook Page plus get stats on plays everywhere on the web.

Virb
Easy to connect and add sounds to users’ custom website.

HiiDef (Flavors.me and Goodsie)
Users add their sounds to their Flavors page or sell downloads with Goodsie.

The Hype Machine
Hype Machine is tracking SoundCloud embeds across blogs so that they can pick up on what’s being hyped right now.

exfm
Compatible with SoundCloud embeds across the web.

MusicXray
SoundCloud is powering all the sounds, e.g. when a user is submitting a song for industry review.

Agile Partners
Their popular AmpKit app can upload guitar recordings directly to SoundCloud.

Aviary
Possible to import and export sounds to/from their online sound editors.

Jango
Possible to submit sounds from SoundCloud to Jango Airplay if users want to place their songs for Jango radio rotation.

Shapeways
People can customize their iPhone case with any sound from SoundCloud and have it 3D printed by Shapeways.

Tunecore
Import sounds for distribution to iTunes and more.

Partners in LA:

Gobbler
Users can connect Gobbler to their SoundCloud account and manage all of their sounds. For instance, upload multiple sounds with drag and drop, or make batch edits of meta data.

Gobbler and SoundCloud are on board together.

Mobile Roadie
Connect a SoundCloud account and bring the sounds to the custom mobile app.

VibeDeck
Allows users to sell downloads of their songs.

Polychord
Create music and upload directly to SoundCloud.

ShareSquare
Build a mobile website and add your sounds.

SonicScoop uses SoundCloud too! Behold the latest Input/Output podcast, featuring our review of Pro Tools 10: