The Long Tail of the Cloud

SoundCloud is a music sharing platform. It is based around different users uploading and sharing their music either publicly or privately. It evolved from a small remix context of professional and semi-professional artists to 2.6 million users worldwide. The environment is heavy on social networking features such as messaging, comment-ability, and tagging. Overall, it looks as slick as iTunes but is more geared towards the social dimension of music as opposed to sales alone.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/tag/soundcloud/

On January 10th, SoundCloud founder Alexander Ljung announced a fresh round of funding. Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures invested $10 million in SoundCloud late last year.

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/faq/

I think that this sort of investment is an example of Chris Anderson’s concept of “the Long Tail.” For any particular industry, the Long Tail is composed of the vast amount of niche and amateur content. The head is of made up of the “hits” (mainstream or popular products). The theory supposes that if consumers are given enough choice, demand will shift toward the broader niche oriented tail. (ex. Netflix, Amazon)

This is especially the case for the digital music market. The production and distribution of music can be accomplished incredibly cheaply and easily these days. In conjunction with today’s genre-mania and the nearly “infinite shelf-space” (Anderson) of the digital domain, niche music seems to be where things are going.

SoundCloud has more than doubled its user-base since last May. My guess is that a majority of this increase took the form of indie and amateur artists who are contributing to an ever-expanding niche universe. Major label and mainstream artists are slowly trickling into the SoundCloud community.

The All Things Digital article seems to point to SoundCloud as an example of a promising music streaming platform; promising enough for a $10 million investment. SoundCloud and it’s latest investors will likely seek to expand and develop their niche-oriented music environment in the spirit of the Long Tail. The social dimension of the platform is it’s strong point, so changes are likely to reflect this. Online exclusives and interactive content from artists well-known as well as obscure will probably continue to supply much of the “value” of participating in the SoundCloud. Efforts to make SoundCloud a more tightly integrated and mobile friendly experience can already be seen in the free SoundCloud app (available at the Mac App store) as well as in its relationship with a host of other music apps like Freestyle, improVox and Virb.

There’s a lot out there and there’s something for everyone; you just need ways to find it. So far, SoundCloud has provided an exciting platform for exploring the social dimension of music. It will be interesting to see how SoundCloud evolves over the course of this coming year.