SoundCloud Hopes Its Slick Redesign Will ‘Unmute the Web’
Ljung (left) and Wahlforss demonstrate the new SoundCloud features at the company's San Francisco office.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired
SAN FRANCISCO — SoundCloud, the online music-streaming platform and de facto music label for independent artists trying to share their tunes efficiently, announced a complete redesign of its service Wednesday, in what the Berlin-based company called an attempt to “unmute the web.”
The new version of SoundCloud, which the company called “The Next SoundCloud” and launched in private beta Wednesday, offers four new or improved features to the online music platform. Those include a sleeker player (improving on SoundCloud’s signature waveform design), the ability to play sounds continuously and navigate away from a particular track to continue searching the site without the audio stopping, improved search algorithms and tools, and the ability to repost audio in a way very similar to the “reblog” feature on Tumblr.
The improvements, SoundCloud co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung said, were an attempt to make the web more audio-friendly.
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