Is SoundCloud a good gift for a new electronic musician?

December 24, 2012 9:27 AM

Is there a better gift in the $40 range for a budding dubstep/electro musician (in his 60s) seeking to get the word out than SoundCloud Premium?

This may or may not be relevant: it's a gift for my uncle, who has been working in music for literally 40+ years and has recently developed a passion for dubstep. He's done a bit of dance music in the past, but has never really worked to make a name for himself online.

He's not Internet-ignorant -- he knows YouTube and YouTube channels, and can upload things there, for instance -- but I don't think has a lot of savvy about music self-promotion online beyond that.

I was thinking about SoundCloud Premium Lite as a gift for Christmas, so he can start uploading tracks, tagging them, and see how that goes. But I'm not much hipper than he is in terms of how musicians self-promote online these days, and was wondering if there was something that would deliver even more bang for that buck.

Canadian, so no access to a lot of services like Spotify and Last.fm, if that makes a difference.

posted by Shepherd to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

I'm certainly far from hip, but some friends of mine recently mentioned that a lot of DJ's have been going over to mixcloud from soundcloud.
I know pretty much nothing about mixcloud, but it might be worth checking out.
posted by newpotato at 9:46 AM on December 24, 2012

I think that a premium SoundCloud subscription would be an excellent gift. In general, I think that most musicians primarily use Facebook and SoundCloud for online promotion. Some also use YouTube as well as blogs, like Tumblr. I think YouTube makes more sense for uploading music videos, so it might not be the best choice for your uncle. Facebook pages can serve the same functions as a blog, so it would be simpler to just use Facebook. Overall, Facebook and SoundCloud would be a simple and effective combination.
posted by BrianAdamsID at 11:12 AM on December 24, 2012

Soundcloud's great. It's got the vibe of pre-Yahoo Flickr. I think this would be an excellent gift.
posted by unSane at 11:14 AM on December 24, 2012

For what it's worth, there's a pretty big controversy going on right now among die-hard Soundcloud users due to Soundcloud moving to a twitter-style business model of building a social network database to attract investors, as opposed to the previous model which was focused on content providers networking with each other.
posted by DJ Broken Record at 1:45 PM on December 24, 2012

Is there any merit to using BandCamp?
posted by DMelanogaster at 5:54 AM on December 25, 2012

Bandcamp and Soundcloud are complementary, really. Bandcamp is basically a storefront for finished product whereas Soundcloud has more of a social feel. Most people seem to have both.
posted by unSane at 9:21 AM on December 25, 2012

I think that Soundcloud Premium is a good gift idea - the site is slick! Also, Pitchfork uses it heavily on their site.
posted by oceanjesse at 4:33 AM on December 26, 2012