The Sound of Simplicity

"Sound" from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

I really love Soundcloud. As a place to find and share new music I think it's unbeatable. It's also now fast becoming a place where producers can find samples from field recordings to drum patterns. The ambition to be the archive of sound I think is really ambitious and laudable.

I also love this quote from the Venture Capitalist behind the whole thing:

I met Alex Ljung, founder/CEO of SoundCloud a number of times and each time he pitched me on his business. Each time I said no. Then in the summer of last year, we met at Soho House London and he showed me one slide. It had various media types (photos, videos, long form text, short form text) and underneath each was a large social platform that had been built on and for that media type. At the end was an empty space and it said "sound". That is Alex' vision. To build that large social platform to share sounds. That's what sold me. One slide.

One slide! I love that. As marketeers and agency folks we seem to spend an awful lot of our time trying to make simple things complicated. Perhaps in some misguided view that it better justifies our existence.

I reckon it's time we all spent more of our time trying to make the complicated things simple. And this isn't an easy way out. As Mark Twain said: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Inspired by Neil Perkin