Dave Haynes

An essential part of any new music service should be the ability to share the music. Whether it’s collaborative playlists on Spotify, embedding a widget or just sharing a link it must be as easy and as simple as possible.

Recent tweaks to the SoundCloud ‘Share’ function include a newly improved (and viral) Facebook player and a super simple 3 click ‘Share on Myspace‘ which sure beats the hell out of having to copy and paste the HTML code.

One of my favourite features of online jukebox Songza is the “> Twitter this” button, something that SoundCloud was lacking.  But now that SoundCloud is open to the public I put this suggestion forward on a quick email to our dev team today. Exactly 1hr and 9mins after hitting send this appeared on the Share-box above each track on SoundCloud…

which resulted in this:

It’s just one perk of working with such a good team of people!! If that’s what can happen in just over an hour I can’t wait to see what SoundCloud will be like in 6 months.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The celestial jukebox arrives - Spotify launches!

Last night I found myself at Shunt for Netaudio London, a small but interesting festival for netlabels. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but as SoundCloud was hosting the Wi-fi Media lounge I headed up on the Saturday (a little wearily after just getting back from Amsterdam) to hook up with fellow SoundClouders Alex and Nils who were both over from Berlin.

Shunt itself is one of the most stunning venues I’ve been to in recent years, a members-club comprised of a large sprawling maze of railway bridges right next to London Bridge station.  After a particularly fraught journey to the actual venue itself it felt a little like entering a strange deam heading down a long dark tunnel into the bizarre mix of audiovisual installations, quirky spaces and laptop DJ’s. Chance meetings Jonas and Martin D from Last.fm only actually heightened the surreal dream-like experience but by the time I left I wished I could have stayed longer to soak up more of the atmosphere.

If it wasn’t for the suprisingly annoying lack of mobile phone reception once inside, the space would make for an awesome (un)conference. I’ve heard that Shunt might be closing in the near future to make way for a shopping centre so make sure you find an excuse to get there before it closes.

This week I found myself again in one of my favourite cities for the Amsterdam Dance Event. Now you could be forgiven for thinking that putting the world’s dance and electronic music industry together in a city like Amsterdam and then adding a full schedule of club nights over 3 nights wouldn’t be particularly conducive to getting much business done. But you’d be wrong. I’m consistently suprised by the amount of deals and real business getting done at this well-organised conference, which for me seems to be getting larger and more rewarding each year. The mission this year… to get the word out about the newly opened SoundCloud. And I’d say that mission was pretty successful! A handful of photos are up on my Flickr.