From bedrooms with love: How SoundCloud changed the landscape of music
In previous decades, music has acted as a contradiction of itself. On the one hand, by listening to music, you have a direct connection with the artists that you admire. On the other hand, if you wanted to make music, it felt like there was a huge gap between writing songs in your room and recording one. The gulf was too big to cross, especially if you didn’t live in a major city, meaning many people gave up on trying to make it as a musician before even properly realising their potential. A few things in the music industry have acted to lessen this gap, and the creation and development of SoundCloud was a key player.
In his book Mo Meta Blues, Questlove writes about the day Michael Jackson released Thriller. “Toward the end of 1982, Michael Jackson released Thriller,” he says, “That’s both a straightforward fact and the beginning of an amazing, almost magical sociological process. Over the course of the next year, Thriller was everywhere. It became inescapable. It was, for a little while, American life, and during the year that it occupied the centre of popular culture, it united everyone. Who liked Thriller? You did. White people, black people, skinny people, fat people, straight people, gay people, punks, rockers, hip-hop kids, thugs, nerds. You. Everyone alive.”
To be blunt, that uniting feeling that came with Thriller‘s release will never happen again. This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s a bad thing because music is renowned for its communicative ability, so unification being no longer plausible is inherently sad. It’s a good thing because the reason it won’t happen again is that music is more accessible, both in terms of listening to and making it. As such, there is a more extensive range of music available that has changed our listening habits forever, so the “hit” in 2024 is different from the “hit” in 1982.
We need to look no further than SoundCloud to epitomise this. SoundCloud was initially launched in 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss. The goal at the time was simple: to create an app that assisted collaboration in music in the same way sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Vimeo did for photos and videos. There was no online platform available that did this, so SoundCloud, with its ability to embed large files, share them easily and either make them private or public, meant it was straightforward for musicians to go from concept to finished product without the cost-heavy implications of recording studios and record labels.
Of course, it fast became apparent that SoundCloud had more potential than that, so quickly, Ljung and Wahlfross began to develop the site into a viable business, saying, “At SoundCloud we care less about Web 2.0 and more about the needs of musicians and cool labels.”
During this period, the music industry was going through an identity crisis. It was no longer the case that people with record deals attached to big labels would be successful, thanks to the mainstream use of streaming services and the industry’s inability to work out how to monetise music in a newly effective way. It was more alluring for some artists to go independent, and SoundCloud made doing that all the more feasible. People would write a track in their bedroom, buy cheap recording equipment and set to work. And many of the big names we know today initially found success that way.
In 2012, Iza Lach was discovered by Snoop Dogg, Halsey was found through her song ‘Ghost’ in 2014, and now global superstar Billie Eilish was first given leverage on the platform with her 2015 track ‘Ocean Eyes.’ As the platform continued to prove itself as an effective means for smaller artists with little financial backing to get their names out there, its popularity grew.
With the introduction of streaming services and SoundCloud as a means to create and listen to music, we wave goodbye to Thriller 2.0, but that’s not bad. We could never have such a unifying album anymore because of the amount of music that is persistently released and the ease with which people can listen to it means there are too many options for different groups to focus on at one time. The sacrifice of the old-school “hit” is a noble one, though, as in its wake, opportunities for smaller artists and the gulf between wanting to be a musician and being recognised as a musician is smaller.
Writing a song in your room and then putting that song out into the world is no longer a giant leap that only a few can land. Instead, all it takes now is the click of a mouse.
