Soundtrap gets love by musicians and Google I/O


    In nice news for a Swedish company, yesterday music-tech startup Soundtrap created by Playwerk was up on stage at Google I/O to make an announcement of their updated music collaboration site. We haven’t covered the company yet, so this affirmation by Google gives us a good excuse to dig into what they’re doing – a polished cloud-based platform that allows musicians to collaborate and jam together on the web.

    What’s obviously cool about this technology is that it allows musicians to connect and jam together with anyone else on the globe, which makes it easier to find collaborators and people in your scene, rather than posting up fliers in your local record shop. Additionally it works as a discovery platform as well – theres a lot of nice unsigned acts that you can dig into that are using their platform.

    The startup tells us some of their key features are full featured guitar and bass amp effects, analog synthesizers and sampled instruments, video chatting, loop libraries, as well as track importing and editing. Basically you can plug in your instruments straight into your laptop (and therefore the cloud), or you can just use your computer’s microphone to get recordings on the web, assisted by Soundtrap’s online instruments. Once you got it there, you can share the music on whatever social platform you like, or even publish it to Spotify.

    With so many features, Soundtrap can also be used as a cloud-based Garage Band for songwriters to use themselves, or as the social collaboration platform.

    Looking at monetization the platform is free for basic usage, with plans starting at $3.99 a month. Pro features allow more projects, no watermarks, and better exporting features.

    This article should have gotten out about 45 minutes ago, except myself and our writer, Rafael, got lost into Soundtrap making some heavy beats over some sweet synth lines. Definitely a startup to check out on this Friday afternoon! We’ll update this article with a link if we come up with anything half-listenable.

    Update: the ArcticStartup family band has broken up due to creative differences.