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SoundCloud ‘Next Wave’ captures shift in music trends, reflects change in streaming platform

A new wave has broken on the shores of the music industry. This wave has people wanting to literally jump on board, but this time, in the form of a sound wave, discovering music while surfing the internet.

Music is more accessible than ever, uploaded and dispersed through music streaming platforms like SoundCloud, Spotify and Band Camp where discovery of similar artists and tools for creativity are prioritized. Scrolling across one’s feed, a person might run into an artist like Danny of Steezy Prime, who now has upwards of 10,000 followers. He has prolifically produced more than forty emo trap beats in the past two years, and created “Purity”, an internet label featuring production from friends rather than promoting a corporate agenda.

After continuing to scroll, following more artists, one begins adding depth to their feed, essentially creating their own wave of incoming music. SoundCloud aims at analyzing this concept in their newly released series, Next Wave.

The video crew first took to the streets of Los Angeles, where they delved into the suburbs where the goth-rap scene is taking root. Musicians such as Fat Nick, Pouya and Lil Tracy are some major players in this scene. The series highlights how Pouya transformed from his modest start. He now has 5.98 million listens on SoundCloud alone to his song 1000 Rounds.

As coined in the first episode, the “degenerate generation” has found their place on SoundCloud. According to the company’s statement, these artists have gravitated to a sound that “has not slowed down since the first goth rap hashtag surfaced… in 2010.” The series portrays how artists have succeeded using their collaborative platform and where music is heading.

The names featured in the series “represents a change in the relationship between musicians and fans,” said Megan West, SoundCloud Vice President of Content Relations. “Through the high speed of communication online the paradigm has shifted where massive underground followings can form organically overnight without traditional marketing…It reinforces our view that what’s next in music is on SoundCloud now.”

Frankie Denham, known by his 6,000 SoundCloud followers in the emo-rap scene by the moniker Foreign Forest, spoke with me via SoundCloud about the idea of the old norm versus the new scene.

“As more clones develop new sounds are sought after and eventually…come to the table,” Denham said. “It is hard to predict where we’ll go from here, we might dig up a style from the past and revive it like we usually do.”

This exemplifies how the old norm ends up being recycled into the new status quo. Denham expanded, stating what he likes most about SoundCloud is “how inviting it is to most newcomers and how easy it is to gain exposure on the platform,” Denham said.

Next Wave documents how SoundCloud influences this cooperation process, with its site being accessible to newcomers but exclusive enough for established artists. Many SoundCloud artists hold this same sentiment, enjoying the camaraderie.

“[I’ve watched] the scene for a while now…a major key you learn is to observe what wave is currently happening and how can you use relevance in your music to relate to people of the time,” Denham said. “At the current state of SoundCloud and the emo/trap… scene [is] changing.”

An important aspect, he notes, is how watching a current wave happening and staying on top of that can bring “relevance” to your own music while respecting where music has come from; via sampling classic songs in their beats or acoustic projects.

“I love the accessibility [SoundCloud] generates for anyone creating music. I think emo-trap… is constantly evolving — just in the last year it’s turned into a huge scene that used to be super… underground… more artists are popping up that are changing the game completely,” said Caspr, an up-and-coming emo-trap SoundCloud artist.

Marciel, known as 93FEETOFSMOKE, first started producing music on Ableton, which according to the company website offers “unique software and hardware for music creation and performance. With these products… users create amazing things.” As an artist that found his success online, Marciel commends SoundCloud, in tandem with Ableton, for its accessibility to new artists.

“Record labels are going to lose the complete control that they've had over artists in the past. Producers and engineers are also going to get more shine than they ever have… You don't have to sign a deal anymore,” Marciel said.

Sponsored by Toyota, the series exemplifies SoundCloud’s main source of revenue — through sponsors and advertisements. According to their site, “Every time you see or hear an ad, artists get paid. Occasional advertising on our platform allow us to continue to support artists and keep SoundCloud free for listeners."

SoundCloud nearly went bankrupt and offline earlier this year, but with support from Chance the Rapper and the global merchant bank, The Raine Group, they landed back on their feet. Many artists on SoundCloud believe that the series comes as a direct result of a newly driven SoundCloud.

Building excitement for the series, Sound Cloud hosted an invite only, sold-out concert in LA previewing first-week acts Lil Tracy and Fat Nick, as well as DJ Soraya LaPread. The remaining episodes will document the underground music scene (across all genres) in Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, New York, London and Berlin. Each episode aims to uncover the influential shifts and trends across music. The Next Wave series is a microcosm of the global music trends today.

Perhaps Fat Nick puts it best in episode one of Next Wave, “We’ve created a whole new scene. We created it and gave other people platforms so they can like surf the wave, like, ‘here, go take your board and surf it.’ Like we made a wave.”

The Next Wave series debuted July 20. SoundCloud will continue to release episodes through the end of the year. The series has over one million views.

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Works Cited and Links To Interviewed Artists’ Profiles

93FEETOFSMOKE. (n.d.). Retrieved November 07, 2017, from https://soundcloud.com/93feetofsmoke

"Caspr." SoundCloud. Accessed November 06, 2017. https://soundcloud.com/caspr.

Foreign forest. (n.d.). Retrieved November 06, 2017, from https://soundcloud.com/foreignforest

S. (n.d.). SoundCloud. Retrieved November 07, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvgKLo-q2GXzsJBL4gubbw

"SoundCloud Explores Underground Music Scenes in Mini-docuseries, SoundCloud Next Wave." SoundCloud newsroom. Accessed November 06, 2017. http://press.soundcloud.com/156952-soundcloud-explores-underground-music-scenes-in-mini-docuseries-so

"Steezy prime." SoundCloud. Accessed November 08, 2017. https://soundcloud.com/prime.

The FADER. (n.d.). Retrieved November 06, 2017, from https://soundcloud.com/fadermedia

"We make Live, Push and Link - unique software and hardware for music creation and performance. With these products, our community of users creates amazing things." Learn more about Ableton - maker of Live and Push | Ableton. Accessed November 08, 2017. https://www.ableton.com/en/about/.

Statement of Audience Awareness

This feature article covers an up-to-date story about the most current topic in SoundCloud Headquarters and beyond.. It focuses in on SoundCloud’s new Next Wave video series and explores music across different cities. The primary objective of this article is to make the reader aware of new trends in culture and music creativity in the industry, and why a new phenomenon is underway, in the form of new genre hashtags (SoundCloud allows you to select a genre, or make a custom one) and in the form of overnight cult followings of different music groups. I assume the primary readership will be in those who are eager to stay updated on new music content, which includes publications such as The Fader, The New Yorker (a publication that writes about culture, music, and news), the Rolling Stone, as well of course The California Aggie newspaper to name a few. Being a feature piece, I made sure to edit it according to Associate Press Style with a strong lede. I intentionally formatted the article in the journalistic method of the inverted pyramid to draw in the reader and guide them through the information. The whole series was actually co-curated by The Fader, an award-winning site dedicated to staying on top of culture, art and style. The Fader is credited with giving some of the earliest exposure to superstars including Kendrick Lamar, Bon Iver, Kanye West, Outkast and The Strokes and could potentially bring huge success rates to the people mentioned in this article, such as Marciel, Caspr, and Foreign Forest. Demographically, most people interested in Sound Cloud are teenagers and millennials, who tend to vote on the liberal side and are across the spectrum of religions. Anyone in middle school, high school, college, or beyond can find this accessible, as well.

Rhetorical Analysis

On the first page, I believe I succeeded in identifying that, simply because music is popular or unpopular remains irrelevant, but the important aspect for music platforms is to stay up to date on what is tangibly happening in the world. A lot of times, online, a person can get lost in a sort of cyber space, but when a crew at SoundCloud actually visits these different music scenes, they find actual groups of friends coming together to create a different genre of music for people to hear. I also believe I did a good job in interviewing a big name in the SoundCloud scene in Foreign Forest, as well as getting insights from other big names, Caspr and 93FEETOFSMOKE. These quotes exemplify fully what SoundCloud means to people and how all these videos, songs, concerts, and blogs symbolize a drastic change in the youth subculture, music industry, and how people are expressing themselves. Businesses such as SoundCloud have now established themselves, and seen how people simply want the opportunity to create with their friends, and have made it that much easier to explore music. This shows that, before anything else, youth subculture comes first when identifying where music is heading. Because, soon enough, these same people will be the musical role models for the following generation, and the musical progression will evolve extensively.