Henrik Berggren was a developer of the growing SoundCloud site (working on the API) and now works at Doberman in Sweden.

Henrik Berggren

SoundCloud

T: One thing everyone wants to know about is SoundCloud..Could you describe your involvement, how you came into the project, how did this project start, who funded the development, how is it doing now?

H: Well I was first involved with it..first of all it’s founded by two Swedish guys, Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung. They are both old schoolmates of mine, we went to the same University and I met them a few years back. They were interested in the web and they have been doing development for the web for some time, and so had I, so it was really a good match from the beginning. We started discussing how frustrated we were with MySpace - I was DJing a lot at the time, Eric is an old producer, and Alex has done a lot of film music and stuff. They had this idea of creating Flickr for music, basically. A place where can share music easily, MySpace was really bad, and there were some other projects but none of them were as good as Flickr is for photos.

SoundCloud

They started the company in Stockholm but after a while they moved to Berlin. At that point I decided to stay in Stockholm because I was a year behind them in school. So I decided to stay on and finish my Computer Science degree but then ended up going down next summer and wound up staying 9 or 10 month instead, working on their API. I lived in Berlin for 9 or 10 months basically and moved back to Stockholm a year ago almost. But interesting stuff has happened since then.

They have grown a lot, they were funded from the beginning by some business angels in Berlin and then I think last spring they raised a big round of funding from a British VC firm called..I can’t remember then name...I think it was 2.5M Euros or something like that. They are doing really really well and I stayed on..I’m not employed with them anymore but I am in close contact with Eric and Alex and another guy named Henrik who is now the chief of their API because I have developed a lot of services on top of their platform. I have always considered their platform to be the most interesting thing about the site because I’m not a musician or DJ anymore, I’m kind of an Internet guy and think there’s a lot of stuff you can do with a musical platform as good as SoundCloud is.

T: And was there any connection with Ableton, I know you mentioned that at one point, or is that not to be discussed or disclosed..Because they’re in Berlin and everyone knows Berlin and electronic music…

H: Ableton was involved, I think they were one of the angel investors, one of the early investors.

T: It’s funny because the way I think about it..It’s fun to think about the connections..I try to think about what determines the success or failure of a project..SoundCloud started in Stockholm but now it’s in Berlin and when I first got a hold of it via an invite back a year-and-a-half ago I thought to myself ‘Wow, this is really a site or application for the Berlin music scene’ because it’s a core community and it grew from there..that was the impression I got..Maybe you can describe the strategy of who it was made for, was there an audience in mind and how did you get it to grow?

H: I wasn’t the founder or anything like that, but I could see that Eric and Alex had a thought-out audience and strategy on how to make it as big as it is today. Their main problem was fixing how to transfer music via the web by artists or producers or DJs or anyone that is working with music professionally. There are lots of music sites out there for consumers but not professionals and that is what they wanted to do. Both Eric and Alex had this history of working with music and had the hassle of dealing with different formats, FTP, YouSendIt, all those crappy services, and they wanted to solve that problem and I think they did a fantastic job of doing that.

All of my tracks by  Henrik

T: Yeah, there are other sites out there, I remember one is Indaba where people can collaborate live but I haven’t seen it taken off like SoundCloud and then I thought that maybe SoundCloud solves a bigger problem. But I think part of what SoundCloud’s strength is is it’s User Interface, it’s beautiful. Were you involved with that?

SoundCloud UI features from See-ming Lee

H: No, I wasn’t involved in that, I only did API things when I was there, but Eric is an old Interaction Designer and has been working with the web for a long time and has a great sense for detail and hired really good people to do the web-based UI which is truly amazing. He knows the browser as his own pocket.

T: Yeah, like the browser is his personal canvas.

H: Something like that.

CitySounds App

T: So what about the CitySounds app? Is that related to SoundCloud, or something you worked on part-time?

CitySounds app

H: Actually the main source of inspiration was an intern we had at SoundCloud, a guy named Johan, a guy who was working there for 3 months. We did a lot of stuff around the API when he was there, and I was currently building some other applications, we built The Cloud Player for example, a Javascript-based player, and he had this idea..he was inspired by Twittervision, like a Google-maps mashup where you can see Tweets, where they occur from…He had the same idea he wanted to do something like that with music. Then me and my colleague David went to the first Music HackDay, which is a 24-hour hacking event that took place in London in the summer. I was interested in location and music together, those 2 datapoints, really interesting mix. So we wanted to do something and I said ‘Let’s do it on a map, it’s gonna be cool, we can make the UI better’ and then David said ‘Let’s do it around cities..’ because cities have this really cool notion to them, they have their own soundscape and people have a really personal connection to a city as well..you live in one, you come from one, etc.

CloudPlayer

T: Yeah, you want to hear tracks from your cities.

H: We designed and built this in 15 hours.

T: You built the iPhone app in 15 hours?

H: No no the web app..Yeah the iPhone app came later, we did just one page where you click on a city and listen to the tracks from there. It’s related to SoundCloud because we use their API to stream all the music. So we’re using the data that comes from the Users, they have a location in their profile, and we stream the tracks from SoundCloud.

T: My main criticism is that the tracks take a long time to load. But it’s just verison 1.

H: Sorry about that We released the iPhone app a couple of weeks back and it’s taken off quite well.

T: Are there specific figures we can broadcast?

H: Sure, sure..We sold around 2,000 apps now, and we haven’t been up, I think not even a month yet.

T: 2,000 in less than a month. So how did you get the sales? It’s obviously a simple app that does it’s job well, but people still need to know about the app. So what happened?

H: We have a little over 60,000 unique visitors to the website each month, so that’s a quite good funnel that leads into iPhone sales.

T: Are they coming to the site from SoundCloud itself?

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

H: No, mainly from Blogs and we get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, for example. We were featured in the Independent as one of the best 25 music sites online, we’ve been featured in CreateDigital, in Lifehacker and a bunch of other sites so there has been a lot of blog traction in the site. And we were featured in the app store in 10 countries, and of course that boosted sales as well.

T: I would think so! Having a site associated with an app is important because you can’t link to iTunes, well I guess you could but having a site is better, you have screenshots of the app, etc. But it’s great because the app does one thing.

H: But the thing is it also does a really important thing. And there aren’t a lot of good music apps on the AppStore today, and it’s a real problem that everyone uses iTunes but they don’t have other music applications.

T: Last.fm?

H: Last.fm isn’t available in many countries.

T: Really? I didn’t know that.

H: Maybe it’s available in the U.S. but not in Sweden. I think Germany, the UK are the only countries in Europe that it’s available. So Pandora isn’t available in Europe either, right, so I mean there is a real gap there in Europe at least for good music apps.

T: So that’s fantastic because you have your app that actually works and it’s independent music, right, I mean it’s coming from SoundCloud…

H: It’s not all independent music, there’s big label stuff as well, it’s mainly smaller and niche stuff.

T: Yeah, it’s not like Lady Gaga.

H: It’s not, but she could put up her tracks there.

T: She should!

H: She should!

T: I argue that she should..I would like to follow her on SoundCloud.

H: I think she would if she knew about it. Let’s shake hands on when we meet her we will tell her about SoundCloud.

T: I should make a big t-shirt or banner ‘Put your tracks on SoundCloud Lady Gaga!!!’

H: I want Soundcloud.com/ladygaga

T: I hope to see that soon because that would be the real music revolution when musicians are posting their in-the-mix tracks for people to comment them. That’s the beauty of SoundCloud because you can have the comments, which are..I wouldn’t think would be used, who would take the time to comment on a hi-hat coming into the track, but they do.

H: People do, and it’s only one part of the platform as well. I regard the API as one of the really key things to the site and service. Imagine the possibilities when you upload a track once and instantly it gets distributed to CitySounds.fm and hundreds of other sites exactly like it, iPhone apps, desktop apps, web apps, everything.

T: That should be the goal, right?

H: That is the goal!

T: People don’t want to do individual syncing of their data.

H: There is a lot of potential to go there and do that. When a lot of artists realize the potential and power of these platforms it’s gonna be really cool.

Upcoming Plans

T: So what’s next for you and your endeavors, where do you see things happening, especially in Europe, what are you working on next?

H: We’re still doing a lot of things with CitySounds, so we are planning a big release for the upcoming big Music HackDay in Stockholm, that will take place in 3 weeks. I’m organizing it together with the guy from Spotify. Spotify is doing great stuff over here as well, they are releasing APIs as well now, so it’s gonna be cool to see what they come up with. A lot of people are flying in, programmers and stuff, so it’s gonna be great. We are releasing a new version of the website on that event and building the next iteration of the iPhone app in 2 or 3 months.

Music Hackday - Stockholm

T: Any Android plans?

H: We have been talking about Android, we’re gonna do it, but it’s gonna be a while though. We are still talking about completing all the stuff we can do for the iPhone app, see how it pans out, see what people think about it, what we can do better, we are testing now with the iPhone and let’s do it even better on the Android.

T: What do you think about Foursquare? That was started here in New York…Are people using it in Europe?

H: Sure, sure, I’m using it all the time! We also see the location-based service war here. Gowalla on the one side, Foursquare on the other, it’s like the Clash of the Titan.

T: Do you remember Plazes?

H: Hey, Plazes were pioneers!

T: They were the first! One of the first.

H: I was using it everyday, even though I only had like 10 friends.

T: I used in back in 2004, when I was in school in California, I sent invites and everyone was like ‘what is this bullshit’..

CitySounds iPhone app

H: They were too early.

T: If you would add one feature to Foursquare to make it better what would it be?

H: Whoah..I would like it to be better at guessing where I am. So I think it leaves a lot to wish for when you have to add a new place, it should guess where I am in what city when I add a new place. Overall UI things I would like heat maps of my friends, they have a lot of stuff still to implement. Of course push notifications when someone checks in less that 500 feet away from me.

T: Well I get notifications when someone checked into Newark Airport which isn’t nearby.

H: Exactly, I turned off the push notifications instantly because they were spamming me.

T: Like if you want to find out where your friends are within X number of km but only restaurants and bars, not offices.

H: Exactly, but as data improves they will do that. But what about your friends, are they using Gowalla or Foursquare?

T: Everyone’s using Foursquare it’s definitely hot in New York City, the only problem is that the same people are in the same places all the time, and it’s like ’so what, should I go meet them there’? It’s a useful useless technology.

H: It’s gonna be useful, like, when critical mass signs up for it.

T: I want intention-based, or ‘I will be here..’ I think there’s a lot of room for what people really do or how they really interact.

H: Have seen Plancast? It’s like Foursquare but where you plan to be, not where you are.

T: Oh, that’s useful.

H: I would like to see them stop fighting and start collaborating instead, maybe they can do this stuff together, like plan and be there, I think it will turn out that way. It’s gonna be cool. I also look forward to Foursquare getting a better presence in Europe in establishing mayorship deals with cafes. You guys have that, right?

T: Mmm, yeah…

H: You guys have that right, when you’re the mayor of someplace you get free coffee or free beer…

T: Well I don’t know I’ve never been offered it, do I have to ask for it?

H: Are you the mayor of a cafe or something?

T: I’m the mayor of where I work so that means I get my paycheck on time, I dunno…They should obviously offer some incentive to restaurants and things, for every 10th check-in you get a free latte or something.

H: I’ve seen that popup on blogs though where they give free coffee to whoever is the mayor or the 2nd most loyal user of whatever.

T: Now here’s this thought, you check-in at a public place, this is so big, it’s like free idea…you check into a public place at an airport, but you check-in as part of Delta, right, so you’re checking in as part of a brand or company at a public place, so you’re affiliating, you have brand awareness, like ‘I’m at Newark Airpot flying Delta to X’.

H: I’m sure there are startups like this already for Twitter, where if you say you fly Delta if you’re at the airport and boarding your flight you get 10% off.

T: That’s one thing I’d like to see on Foursquare.

H: On a personal recommendation level. I don’t want to see it implemented but it’s a good idea.

T: Exactly.

Tags: API, berlin, citysounds, music, soundcloud, stockholm, web application

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under Client Projects, Conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.