We’re Joining Forces With Lee Martin, a Music & Tech Ninja
We love it when talented & dedicated people out there build awesome things using the SoundCloud API. And when they do, we make sure to watch them closely and do everything we can to get them to work with us, for our users.
Based out of Los Angeles, Lee Martin is one serious tech/music badass that recently, has developed some quite exceptional ‘digital music campaigns’ for artists such as Band Of Horses or Taylor Hawkins, the solo project of one the Foo Fighters.
Today, we’re proud to announce that Lee has decided to remotely join the SoundCloud team and will be working with us on a number of exciting projects. What kind of projects you ask? Well, it might be yours!
That’s right: Lee will be helping artists, bands and labels to build epic things on the web. That’s not all. The resulting code produced by Lee for these projects will then be made available to the SoundCloud community so they too can use these epic things on the web. Sounds awesome? You bet it is.
Lee! Welcome to The Cloud. Tell us a bit about you: who are you, where are you from, where are you headed?
I’m the kid who went to art school and came out a programmer. For the past 7 years I’ve been ruining rock n’ roll personas by turning artists into nerds. Effectively replacing sex & drugs with tweets & analytics. I’m originally from Chauvin, Louisiana (seriously, try my cooking) but I currently reside in the other LA, Los Angeles.
I recently left my post as “One Man New Media Department” at SAM to pursue an even nerdier future for myself in the world of music/tech. I hope to work with all of the bright minds I’ve met over the past few years at tech conferences and dive bars.
I was surprised to find out SoundCloud was looking for a Cajun chef that also excelled in open API web development so I seized the opportunity.
You’ve build some pretty epic stuff in the past and used SoundCloud to power the audio for your projects. What are the most exciting bands/projects you had the chance to work for/on?
I had the fortune of working on the Them Crooked Vultures campaign all the way back when we were calling it “secret project” in the SAM offices. We accomplished a lot of fun things with secrecy online that I doubt I’ll be able to replicate anytime soon. Then once the news was out, we relied on an extremely open and socially focused campaign to guide us to a successful album release.
If you ever get a chance to work for Jimmy Eat World, take it. These guys get it. We did a ton of progressive things on Twitter back when it was still weird for their Clarity Live campaign. We even made a bit of nerd press.
There are so many more, but I have to give major props to the following. These bands know (or they will now) that if they ever need any nerd genius to call me: AFI, Beck, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age.
What’s your new role at SoundCloud, what kind of awesomesauce can we expect from you in the future?
I’m calling it “Experimental Development.”
Very cool. What’s that?
We’ll be listening to requests from our ever growing artist/label/manager community (1 mil + users and counting!) and work to build open, scalable solutions to those requests. I also plan on pursuing new relationships and doing some killer SoundCloud integrations. Raise your hand if you like custom players… Yeh, me too.
I’m also proud to say that I will be the first on the team to be working remotely out of LA. While the idea of Berlin sounds great… I’ll be staying in California for the time being and hope to become an integral part of SoundCloud’s US (and global) strategy in the future. If there is just as much rock as German electronic music in a year, I’d say this whole experiment was a success.
Please contact me if you have any projects or ideas: lee@soundcloud.com
Your home(s) on the web, where can we find you?
Follow me on Twitter @LeeMartin and check out my personal site at Lee.Ma/rtin for a chance to ask my anything regarding Rails development and cajun cooking.