SoundCloud is an online music collaboration and large music file management platform.  The company positioned itself as a digital music exchange offering but it’s so much more than that.  The SoundCloud audio player displays the waveform of the track, allowing listeners to view and intercept specific segments of the music and comment on it.  As an artist collaboration solution, artists can share, mix, and remix their music under the Creative Commons licensing designations, enabling the creative process to continue long after the master is ‘complete’.  I particularly like the fact that SoundCloud is a music-oriented digital distribution solution, making it super easy to send and receive music files within a community of producers, engineers, DJs, labels etc. who deal with hefty music files on a daily basis.

Stephen Budd, a council member of the Music Manager’s Forum and founder of Stephen Budd Management, the producer management agency which looks after one of We Are Listening’s esteemed panelists, producer KK (Bjork, Dido, Nelly Furtado), commented on the devaluation of professional music producers at a summit of music producer managers in London this week.

Budd, and his peers, are calling for change in producer agreements due to unreasonable expectations and progressive devaluation of producers’ work, often subject to “on spec” agreements where the financial risk rests on the producers’ shoulders and their agents, no less.

The summit represented a concerted industry effort to brainstorm new business models to ensure the futures of professional producers through a restructuring of royalty shares in a number of areas where producers are professionally and creatively involved.