Social Sound Review

While investigating the best way to share sound I have reviewed a couple of sites that claim to offer more than the average bear when it comes to being social with your sound.

Odeo
Arranges video and sound content into archives for individual organizations and then into 13 categories. The categories are not curriculum based but rather media based – that is you would find them on your msn or yahoo account.

As a member with a free login you can:
• Create playlists
• Subscribe to channels
• Share content – via email
• Download – video
• Comments can be made on the items

There is no upload feature so the content is completely at Odeo’s discretion and I would say guided by their purse-strings.

Odeo is a place for professionals and corporate types who want to distribute content and who not have to spend time developing any excitement or contact within their community. They have a lot of content and they just need to get it out there. It is relatively hands off. Why not use ITunes instead I say?

Some handy features allow you to leave a review, you can like or not like an item. You can see other subscribers to channels and follow other members. You can take an rss feed of your favourite channels also. You can add rss feeds from your own media sites, but this is at Odeo’s discretion to publish.

Some boring parts are that not everyone has loaded their content into the site but rather it is linked to their own site, the old window roundabout... (yawn). This is not ideal for building a nice community around some common content as you have to leave the nice happy place to get to the good stuff. This is where Odeo falls down in my opinion. I would use Odeo if you needed to promote your audiovisual content to the corporate and higher education networks. This also could done with ITunes and ITunesU.

http://odeo.com/

For information on their respect to copyright see their terms...

http://odeo.com/terms

SoundCloud
On the other hand SoundCloud is an entirely user generated community where all the content is created and uploaded by artists and producers. Can add tags or search by categories. You are encouraged to download, remix and reload content. However you can opt out of this function if you don’t want to share.

Anyone can create an account, and this lets you upload sound files to your tracks, sets or dropbox. The dropbox is mastered by the optional widget you can place on your own site or blog (available in 4 different design flavours, yum!) You can also style your own – see apps and badges below.

As a member you can:
• Follow and be followed
• Favourite
• Create Groups
• Make a Contacts list
• They are currently developing a beta version of find people on other networks with click links to your facebook, myspace, twitter, gmail, yahoo, msnlive contacts lists and it also has a csv import function.
• Comment – and this is the most beautiful element of this application – at any place on a tracks timeline. The comment is visible to everyone who sees and hears the track – the nicest element is that your profile pic is also placed on the timeline : )


Some nice apps that you can access from this site include a place for live streaming for your audio, a music production open source software package and a way to create a pretty and slick website all of your own. Widgets and badges are also an appealing extra with create your own version (colour and size) of your dropbox badge – yay!

The business side – free for 120 minutes worth of content and up to 20 contacts – then there is a price scale after that. €500.00 a year gives you unlimited use that would be around A$725.00.

If you are really keen you can get involved in the developer community and start making stuff for yourself. Of course they have a blog, support and some forums to help you on your way. Oh, and you can also access, send and receive emails. And finally – it gives you access to stats – who downloaded/listened, how many times and where they came from, we do like that.

Soundcloud is usability superior by far and the quality of audio on the site is outstanding. The NFSA would be in good company here. The benefit of being among up and coming artists and predominately tech savy ones is that it will raise our profile to this group. The interface is so easy to use that we would also be educating our audience about future technologies and social media without them knowing it – they would just be having fun.

http://soundcloud.com/

Anything on SoundCloud is subject to their terms of course, basically anything you put up with the public settings activated is immediately ready to be reused and downloaded by all the community...
http://soundcloud.com/terms-of-use


Others out there:
grooveshark
Spotify
guvera
rdio
Last FM
ILike
Vevo
imeem
topspinmedia
Musicovery

Buying music online @:
Beatport
ITunes

Articles of interest:
http://mashable.com/2009/02/02/music-recommendation-services/
http://mashable.com/2009/12/25/music-industry-predictions-2010/
http://mashable.com/2009/11/10/music-facebook-applications/
http://mashable.com/2009/02/09/music-playlist/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bbc_launches_sound_index.php

MAKE SURE YOU CHECK THIS OUT:
This is also an option for social media sound distribution:
http://mashable.com/2009/05/29/twitter-music/


To create a Soundcloud RSS use this nifty flip:
thanks, PickleMonkey for rss