The web is music to our ears

Isn’t it fun seeing people who used to hate each other now become best friends? Forgiveness, reconciliation… there is so little of that in the world.

But we’re seeing it on the web. We’re seeing it between the web and the music industry.

Remember the bad old days when people were getting sued for downloading music off the web. It was a bad situation that only got worse. After all, suing your customers isn’t the best idea but let’s also face it, illegally downloading music is, well, illegal.

But wow, look at how music and the web have reconciled and now we’re seeing amazing innovation in the music industry on the web.

The ability for an artist to reach a global audience overnight is a main reason why music is rushing to the web. Whether on PC, mobile or tablet, consumers are living online and for an artist, this is a potential audience that is as vast as the web itself (and what artist doesn’t want a web-scale audience?)

Soundcloud is one of the hottest social networks around because it lets artists and users easily share music

“The web is the largest platform in the world,” says Matas Petrikas of SoundCloud. “We can reach anybody on any platform on any device they are using.”

Nico Perez of Mixcloud feels similarly. Mixcloud lets anyone spin-up and broadcast their own radio show to the entire world using the web.

“We want people to think of Mixcloud to be the place the go into in the morning to tune in [to radio]” he says.

Another exciting thing about music on the web is the ability to discover new and exciting sounds that you’ve never heard before.

There are many different music streaming services out there, says Syd Lawrence of Tomahawk, an open sourced music discovery service that lets users discover and (legally) share music from disparate sources.

“Tomahawk is about combining everything. We don’t care where you listen to music, we just care that you listen to music,” he says

So why is this all happening now? An industry contact told me he thinks it could be because music was the first entertainment industry to get disrupted by the web, so it is now the first to really innovate on it.

Maybe. Sounds like music to our ears.

SoundCloud

Mixcloud

Tomahawk