Fun Friday: Meet Johannes Ziemke
This week Johannes joins the team in Berlin! Say hi and listen to his audio message below!
Fun Friday: Meet Johannes Ziemke by SoundCloud Community Team
Hi Johannes! Thank you for doing this interview with me and taking time out of your busy day. How are ya doing?
Hej Natalie! I’m doing really great, it’s such a pleasure to work here.
You have lived in Germany for a long time, how do you like Berlin and where are you originally from?
I was born in East Germany, more precisely in Erfurt. Although I moved near Cologne about 20 year ago, my girlfriend keeps teasing me about my “Ossi-Vergangenheit”.
Moving to Berlin was something I already considered some years ago. Giving the area and population of Berlin, it’s one of the best places in the world to meet as many interesting people as possible. So just over a year ago I finally moved and I have not regretted it so far. It’s awesome to live in this huge and multifaceted city.
Can you tell us what your your role at SoundCloud is? Also, how do you like working in the Berlin HQ ?
I guess you can sum it up to “keeping everything running smooth”, that’s what we system operators do. It’s actually not as trivial or easy as it sounds. Working in such a fast growing and evolving environment is a really interesting challenge. Our team takes care of providing the best infrastructure to make that growth possible. This is – at least for me – the best place in to world to work right now. I always wished to work together with smart and enriching people like I do now.
How did you get introduced to SoundCloud and what do you love most about it?
In the past time my curiosity for new music grew a lot. Actually I never was that interested in music until a few years ago. In the
progress of catching up and exploring I ran into SoundCloud. Hardly surprising, the first thing I loved about SoundCloud are the sounds. As a music loving person, it’s a great platform to keep in touch with the bands and artists you like as well as discover new, less known artists all over the world. Beside that, the first impression I had of SoundCloud was that – from my technical standpoint as a nerd – everything just felt right. Focusing on creators, building stuff solving their problems, getting these wonderful sounds of less known artists off of these ugly, ad-supported file hosting sites and presenting it in a way to aid both artists and
listeners.
What are your favorite Sounds on the cloud?
Since most of my favorite artists are in the Cloud, it’s a though call to decide which to pick for that.
First I have a soft spot for all these artists on Audiolith – and fortunately they heavily use SoundCloud!
Saalschutz for example have their latest album in the Cloud:
http://soundcloud.com/saalschutz/sets/entweder-saalschutz
Frittenbude, signed on Audiolith as well, is one of my all time favorites. And they also got some awesome tracks here:
Latest tracks by Frittenbude
There is so many cool stuff in the Cloud… And since you are probably tired of German vocals, here is another of my favorite artists.They are doing awesome live performances and their album “Your Horse Likes Me” is one of my all time favorites:
Latest tracks by BONAPARTE
Can you give us a few reasons why it is great working at SoundCloud?
That kind of a leading question, huh? ;) No, you’re right. It’s really great to work at SoundCloud and I can’t imaging who could possibly disagree. I always wanted a product to identify with. Working on a project I really care with people who do as well. I believe in what we are doing and agree on what we are spending time on. Well, mostly – but I even like the arguments because it shows how much everyone cares for what they doing here. Nothing is worse for a companies culture than indifference.
Finally, do you have any fun facts about yourself that you would like to share?
When I was in school, I was totally into (euro)dance and this brainwash was probably the reason why it took so long to develop a real musical taste. With “real musical taste” I mean something else that “Musical preference: Charts”. And now I’m kind of biased regarding 4/4 beats with atmospheric and trance ambient and cheesy vocals.
Thanks Johannes! You can find him below on the interwebz!
http://twitter.com/discordianfish
http://soundcloud.com/discordianfish
http://freigeist.org
http://textkrieg.de