SoundCloud is Facebook for music producers and musicians. The site is a social networking platform for artists and fans to share music using an intuitive graphic user interface. Forget complicated FTPs, cumbersome bitTorrents and rigid emails. SoundCloud is the most effective and fastest way to send and receive music and enables artists to collaborate with other artists in the music industry.

It’s not only the concept of the site that is groundbreaking. The tech, usability and design is so effortlessly dreamy that surfing this site can be likened to sipping a Piña Colada on Cloud 9 (only way cooler than the Bryan Adams' song). Unlike its major musical competitor, the ubiquitous MySpace, SoundCloud has no limit on file sizes, the slick API can be embedded anywhere, it allows bands to share songs both privately and publically with a distinct URL and even offers members the ability to comment on specific parts of a track. This makes it fit like a proverbial glove for other fast-paced Social Media platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook.

The site is free and contains no pesky advertising. Premium accounts are also available, offering unlimited contacts (or friends), uploads, analytics tools and other tasty benefits. The ‘Stats-O-Rama’ tool allows you to see who is listening to your tracks, what they are listening to and when they lent an ear. Furthermore, you can even seamlessly integrate the site with your mobile. For example, the iPhone field recording app FiRe, thanks Audiofile Engineering, allows you to sample sounds on your phone and save them.

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

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