Listen. Stop what you are doing right now, close your eyes and just listen. Hear the world happening around you. Notice how you focus on a specific sound and it suddenly becomes more detailed and clear. Hear the sound of your breath, hear the blood rushing through your veins when you press your palm to your ear. You live in the sound and you are the sound.
Back in the 1990s I had another life as a music producer in my native Lithuania. Me and my bandmate Kryzius were quite successful in our little country, but by the end of the decade it was becoming painfully clear that we couldn’t grow as artists beyond our home country. There was no affordable way for us to reach new listeners in other countries, and even if there would have been one, our music evolved in a state of a cultural isolation and wouldn’t have fit the European electronic music scene back then.
In 2000 I moved to Berlin and started my second life as a Web developer and designer, building online projects for digital agencies. Secretly I wanted to work on music and sound again, on something that would have mattered more to me personally than a 3-month-long advertising campaign or a government website.
A friend of mine was familiar with my internal struggle and he told me I should get in touch with Eric who I briefly knew from the Berlin art scene. We arranged a meeting, and when Eric has described his vision of SoundCloud to me, I caught myself thinking“This is it! This is it!”.
So in the spring of 2008 I joined a handful of people building the most adventurous project I have known so far, a crew that felt like it came out of a movie script — one specialist per area, everybody’s ready to take over if their help is needed, be it to debug the Git repo or assemble the office furniture. We took risks, we experimented, left our comfort zone and we kept on moving forward. We had a mission to bring Sound onto the Web, to connect the music and audio creators with more people than they have ever imagined.
SoundCloud team circa summer 2008Since then I have worked on so many different things — writing and rewriting the front-end code of our web site, the Flash widgets, the mobile website, hacking on example apps for our API, Product-managing the Web apps, streaming infrastructure, recommendation engines, genre classifications and controlled experiments. Every new project has taught me something new, it gave me an opportunity to work with some of the most talented people in the industry. I am grateful I could learn so much from them.
One question I ask myself - how different is the world now compared to where it was before? Let’s take the concept of a music scene or a genre: they used to be extremely local even a decade ago. Unless you lived in Seattle, London or Detroit you weren’t really a part of an emerging movement. Today, music creators from Japan, Mexico, Philippines and Ukraine can totally and equally be part of the same scene and the same musical discourse. We have managed to build a platform where people who have never met, separated by thousands of miles can share their sounds, their respect and knowledge like equals.
It’s decentralized, participatory, real-time and worldwide.
Now SoundCloud is on its way to becoming one of the largest communities of creative people ever. I believe that it has made and will continue to make an impact on all levels — socially, economically and culturally. And I am proud that I could contribute my time and passion to this phenomenon.
What’s next for me? Starting in May, I am looking forward to a few weeks of quietness and mindfulness, I’ll be observing the spring and watching my daughters grow. Reading books and re-reading my own notes, writing and drawing. And then, I’ll be making things again.
I plan to bring some of the future I was promised in my childhood into our world, and I want to make peoples lives better through smart objects and delightful experiences.
I will be writing on Twitter and Medium, and of course I will continue to post music and frog recordings on my SoundCloud profile.
Like a track in mixer, slowly fading down while the other track is fading in.