5 reasons why SoundCloud is the best way to get music onto blogs

Right from the moment SoundCloud was conceived, we had one goal in mind. To make it as easy for you to upload and share your music. The vision was that you could put a track up on SoundCloud and make that the one place from which you could weave your music across the rich tapestry of the web. An essential part of that tapestry is the blogosphere. We think that SoundCloud is the best way to get music onto blogs and here’s 5 reasons why.

1) SoundCloud is beautifully simple

It’s so easy to get started. Set up a free account and upload your music in any audio format. You can add as much or as little metadata as you want including a description, buy links, video links, and release dates

2) Our players are the best in town

Our classic waveform player is now ubiquitous across the web. You’ve probably seen it quite a bit recently. But we’ve added two other players* specifically with bloggers and websites it mind. There’s the minimal player which we stripped back as much as possible. It’s literally just a play button next to artist name and track title. And there’s the artwork player. You’ve probably guessed already… it’s literally just your artwork, with a play button. So it looks beautiful on the page and the blogger doesn’t even need to add any cover art themselves. It’s right there, as the player.

3) SoundCloud plays nice with The Hype Machine

SoundCloud is the only service that has a streaming music player that The Hype Machine can detect across the blogs that it aggregates. This means that a music blogger can grab your music from SoundCloud and can customize and embed a beautiful player in a post, knowing that it will still show up on The Hype Machine. And it’s much nicer than having to send them an MP3 link or re-hosting it on one of those nasty generic file sharing sites.

4) Geek out on stats, stats and more stats

Let’s be honest, who doesn’t like geeking out on stats? Who’s playing your music, which blogs are raving about it, what are your most popular tracks, how many times has that free track been downloaded? SoundCloud can now answer those questions. You can see how many plays/downloads came from which blogs and where in the world those listeners are*. And because The Hype Machine now plays tracks back directly from your SoundCloud account we know how many times it has been played there too.

5) It’s easy for bloggers

We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for bloggers to share your music. Many are already using our private or group dropboxes to receive music. Just some of the things we’ve done include making it possible to share a player to Blogger with just a couple of clicks, working with WordPress.com to have an official integration, allowing customization of our players, and of course the partnership with The Hype Machine. Of course we can’t force anyone to write about your music, but we can make it as easy as possible for you to share the music if they do want to.

*some features require premium accounts