myspace can be a good way to draw some attention to your music. it's how i got my first minz release. and being incredibly smart, it took me only 2 years to figure out that it can also be a good way to follow other artists and labels. just add labels and artists to your friends and make sure you receive updates about them. i've only selected to be updated about added tracks and blog posts, but that gives me a healthy daily dose of news. the problem is... myspace looks and sounds crap. enter soundcloud.

soundcloud was set up last year with the goal to create a networking site specifically for musicians. similar to myspace, you can follow artists and labels, but it has far better sound and looks. furthermore, you can upload an unlimited number of tracks in virtually every current audio format, organize them in sets, manage which users can listen or download a track, have detailed stats and receive music easily in your dropbox. and they offer a nice audio player widget. check the discog section of this site to see it in action. so far it does what is says on the tin.

minz @ soundcloud

but soundcloud has some problems. some people say it's slow. slow? last week i spend 25 minutes removing a track from a set and then 15 minutes to log out. i don't call that slow, i call that unusable. things seem to have turned bad when soundcloud went public recently. so maybe their servers are getting too much traffic. i think they really need to solve this issue if they want to sell any pro accounts and keep a loyal base. let's just be positive though, and assume they'll fix this. any other problems?

there are a few things that could be improved in my opinion. i would like to be able to select who can download a track. right now, you can allow everybody or just a few people to listen to a track. on top of that, you can allow those people to download it. but those who can download it are always the same as those who can listen. i would like to be able to specifically select who can download a track, no matter who can listen to it.

ideally, you would be able to upload your 24-bit master once and then decide who can listen to a 128 kbit/s mp3 stream of it, and who can download the original. maybe you should even be able to allow some users to download the hi-res 24-bit master, and others to download an automatically derived lo-res 320 kbit/s mp3. no more hassle with encoding different versions for everybody and their grandmother. just upload the master once and set different permissions for different users. but back to reality.

the dashboard, where you receive updates about those you follow, could also be improved. the 'tracks' section is ok, although i would've liked a smaller player, allowing for more tracks on one page. clicking the play button could then expand the player to show waveform and timed comments. it's nice to have a clean web 2.0 design with big fonts, but i feel that the designers of those sites often haven't thought about what happens when things really take off.

the 'comments' section shows all the comments people make. not just comments about me, but all the comments. so if you don't check soundcloud for a few days, the comments about you are hopelessly buried. personally, i don't give a rat's ass what comments people leave to others, so i would like to hide those.

then there's the 'favorites' section, where you can see what tracks people dig. in theory, this is a nice way to find good music. but in practice, labels understandably use it to plug their artists, thereby clogging the dashboard and rendering the function useless. i don't see a real way to improve this, so i simply don't use it. i do add favorites myself though. it seems more and more artists are adding unmastered versions of cool stuff that is about to be released. adding those as favorites reminds me to buy them when they come out.

the guys at soundcloud should take a look at how myspace handles friends updates. it's not pretty, but at least i can customize it so that i only see what i want to see. and that's important in these times of information overload.

finally, it's easy to complain about having to pay for a pro account. but in all fairness, a free account is already much better than what you get at myspace. and chances are it will do for most users. as an artist, i would probably go for the cheapest of the pro options, at 99 euros a year. considering that i pay about 65 euros annually for a 500gb ftp server, the added service makes 99 euros seem reasonable. soundcloud is enabling musicians to network from the safe environment of their studios and that's worth a price.

unlike myspace, soundcloud feels like a small organization of people that care. they're not here to make as much money as possible, they're here to solve problems they ran into as musicians. and trying to solve it in a way that benefits all musicians. so i wouldn't be surprised to find out they actually listen to comments like these.

in my opinion, their priority right now should be solving the apparent bandwidth issues. and i really hope they do. i, for one, would love to see soundcloud live up to its potential. ultimately, that depends on their user base, and i hope that posts like these attract more musicians and labels to soundcloud.