SoundCloud and its mission to be ‘The YouTube of Audio’

As the headline suggests, SoundCloud has some lofty goals and by all accounts it may be succeeding.
The Los Angeles Times reported recently that SoundCloud had reached 10 million users and 5 million downloads of its SoundCloud application.  This is fantastic achievement considering it only started life in 2008 as a music-sharing site but found its Eureka moment with the realization that most people want to also share other sounds including voice and other forms of audio.
“And it became obvious for us, that when we look at the Web we think of photos, we think of text, we think of videos, so why don’t we think about sound in a broader sense? So, music is obviously a key part for us, but there are a lot of other things happening on the platform as well,” said SoundCloud.
It is not just consumers taking towards SoundCloud. Media giants such as ABC News have launched their own channel on SoundCloud.
The audio-sharing site is completely FREE and is cornering the sound market just as Flickr did with photos and YouTube with video.
“SoundCloud’s recent momentum stems from an explosion in applications and services that make it easier for anyone to record, mix and tinker with music on their Smartphones, tablets and home DJ setups,” said the New York Times.
The website also recently launched a new HTML5 widget to embed recordings and uploads on a user website.
“SoundCloud says the new widget was redesigned to encourage more interactivity around the sound itself and with the listener comments,” said TechCrunch.
“The timed comments are now more usable on this version of the widget, at the request of SoundCloud users. Before, they would pop up over the track as conversation bubbles. In the new widget, they appear beneath the track in a much more readable format.”
It then went further and created a standalone app called Story Wheel which allows users to create retro-styled slide shows with the popular photo application called Instagram.
“We chose Instagram is because it’s the service we use the most for our own photos,” reported The Los Angeles Times.
“We built Story Wheel because it’s something we wanted to see and we thought it was something our users would like to see and use too. And we built the whole thing on the same API that we offer to our developers, who have made more than 10,000 apps on our platform.”
We are interested in your comments on these latest trends in the audio-sharing industry.