Soundcloud Raises $50M, Valued at $200M, Mobile Music Industry Still Wide Open
Soundcloud, known as the "YouTube for audio" ranks 281st in Canada and 364th globally according to Alexa. Techcrunch reports they've acquired a new round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at $50 million with a company valuation of $200 million.
Gigaom also reports that the mobile app that SoundCloud released has added another million people to the platform.
Canadians are replacing those iPod docks at house parties around the world with SoundCloud- accessible via your computer or mobile device versus iTunes.
Some Canadian music insiders have also said at various conferences this past fall that a "middle-class" of music is emerging where bands tour around the world and aren't famous but are still grossing $5 million a year.
Soundcloud could be helping lead that charge, taking over from an all but completely written off MySpace in the past few years, where people can upload their own songs to be discovered by a thriving user-base.
While the company has dominated the online space, there's plenty of room in mobile for the music industry.
Peter Jenner said in a Mobile World Live Interview in December: "I don’t think that most artists have put together the fact that the mobile phone has the potential to be what the iPod was...I still don’t think that we’ve worked out the mobile phone music business".
Ideas have slowly come out in mobile music with the world's first app as an album Biophilia by Bjork back in October, this video presented by Asif Khan of the Location-Based Marketing Association at Toronto's nextMEDIA in early December that utilizes RFID technology combining music and fashion, and Techvibes recently reported that Vancouver-based Shirtify now creates t-shirts of the songs you listen to the most on their site.
Khan also expects the digital and out-of-home marketing industry to grow as more marketers realize the potential of offline mobile marketing. Statistics show that out-of-home Canadian advertising expenditure has risen from 3.6% to 4.2% in the past five years. Khan anticipates that figure to grow substansially faster in the coming years.
MediaPost also reports that mobile marketing is set to further explode: "According to a new survey of more than 500 marketers commissioned by AT&T, 88% plan to increase their mobile marketing programs over the next year, with mobile apps (those appearing on smartphones) and mobile barcodes topping the list of strategies they’re interested in deploying. (Only a little more than half are currently using them as part of their mobile strategy)".
While I'm sure there are many other examples yet to be seen or publicized, the latter is good news if you're looking to make a buck or two with new revenue models in the music or entertainment industries where traditional models have obviously fallen by the wayside in recent years.
