It’s been a while since we heard new user numbers from the “YouTube of audio” startup Soundcloud (though not much of a startup these days), so LeWeb in Paris was as good a time as any to announce them. They’ve hit a market ‘reach’ of 180 million users a month across mobile and web platforms and re-vamped the site with the ‘next’ version after testing out their open Beta for several months.
Coming with the revamp is improved search, recommendation, and sharing. Co-founder Alex Ljung announced on stage that the future of Soundcloud would be mobile, and that makes sense given how much we are able to record now with mobile devices.
Over 10 hours are uploaded every minute, said Ljung.
He went on to announce that its tracks are shared, listened to, or uploaded by 180 million users every month – or around 8 percent of the Internet population.
New features include the ability to “follow” for bands and artists, sounds can be shared more easily, comments are real-time, and there are more notifications.
The news will be a blow for rivals such as Audioboo, which has doggedly mined speech as a niche, while Soundcloud mined first music and then all forms of audio, and iterated with semi-pro features.
The question is will these numbers be enough for Souncloud’s investors? So far Soundcloud has taken funding from Doughty Hanson, Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and GGV Capital to the tune of $63.3 million.
