Rhetorical Analysis of a Digital Writing Environment

The Internet is alive with the sounds of SoundCloud: A rhetorical analysis of SoundCloud

Introduction

SoundCloud, created in August 2007, was founded by the Swedish sound designer Ljung and Swedish artist Wahlforss. SoundCloud describes itself as “the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere.” (About SoundCloud 2015). These sounds include original songs, podcasts, remixes, broadcasts, new music, etc. If you can hear it, it’s probably on SoundCloud in some form. “SoundClouders”, the nickname SoundCloud gives to their music makers, collectively upload 12 hours of audio every minute, with more than 150 million registered users. (Bloomberg 2015). SoundCloud has firmly crafted its own presence among the musical streaming giants like Spotify, Amazon Prime, Apple Music, Pandora Media, and Google with a focus on spreadability, community, and creation. Users can follow artists ranging from homegrown to Hollywood, engage with other users in a variety of ways, and upload sounds for the entire SoundCloud community to listen. Essentially, SoundCloud is billing itself as the world’s premiere musical social network.

              Why has SoundCloud had so much success with their musical network? It all comes down to the participatory culture and social capital SoundCloud brilliantly promotes. A participatory culture is “one where the level of digital participation creates a social setting in which citizens become active agents in cultural production.” (Rheingold 10). SoundCloud supports this culture through visual rhetoric and spreadability mechanisms designed within the interface of the site itself. Spreadability is defined as, quite simply, the way content can spread. (Jenkins 196). The way content creators promote their content through SoundCloud, as well as the entire sharing mechanism for moving SoundCloud content off their network into others is well worth analyzing.  This directly builds into the second key concept of “social capital” (Rheingold 215-230) that SoundCloud successfully leverages within the environment. Rheingold asserts that any successful platform allows users to create networks where they exchange in a social marketplace where social capital is valued and exchanged in some form.

Thesis

As a digital writing environment, SoundCloud finds success through highly calculated architectures of participation supported with carefully crafted visual rhetoric and the establishment of spreadability inherent through the environment. SoundCloud’s success can also be attributed to its ability to engage users with a network of social capital that encourages users to support uploaders and grow the platform.

SoundCloud’s Architecture of Participation

An architecture of participation is how a platform empowers millions users to create a “participatory culture.” (Rheingold 112). Noted web and communications scholar Howard Rheingold makes it explicitly clear in his book Net Smart that our new forms of communication media (The Internet) allows for unprecedented levels of participation inside a community when the barriers to entry are reasonable enough. This participation can be for countless reasons, such as reputation, altruism, learning, sharing value, and contribution. Services have designed themselves to encourage the formation of this participation culture. Once a service has users actively participating in and creating content, the most important aspect, the aspect of community, becomes entrenched and only serves to benefit the platform as a while. Birthing a participatory culture is anything but easy however. The internet is littered with the withered husks of communities, networks, and platforms that are simply unable to keep users coming back and participating within the culture. SoundCloud’s superb design and social platform have contributed to a vibrant and growing participatory culture very responsible for the success of the network.

Visual Rhetoric of SoundCloud

When a user logs into SoundCloud, they are greeted with a home page that is stylish yet incredibly interactive and encouraging (Hocks 632). Across the top of the page is an interactive banner with a Home Button, a Collection Button, and a very prominent search bar. Right away, the prominence of the search bar sends a message. We want you to explore, to search any content you can think of and find it on our platform. This is a deliberate rhetorical move, hinging on the fact that SoundCloud is a community, not a glorified music collection service. (Note: sounds and music will likely be used interchangeably throughout the essay. Both differ only in the actual content of the sound itself, with music being music and sounds being “audio” as a whole, including podcasts, audiobooks, recordings, news, etc.) If SoundCloud was not actively encouraging a social network like environment, and wanted to function more like a “music library” service such as Spotify or Pandora, the user’s collection of music would be displayed far more prominently. This is highly deliberate. Moving past the search bar is the titular Upload button, followed by the user’s username and icon, with a drop-down profile menu located on it, a notifications and mail viewing button, and a small three dot menu with various “site details” inside of it, such as About Us, Account Management, Settings, and Help Forums. When you scroll down SoundCloud’s pages, this banner stays affixed to the top of screen. No matter where they are on the site, a user can always access a search bar and stay updated with any community interactions through notifications or messages. It’s as if SoundCloud is reminding the user, no matter where they are on the site, you can always find new content and stay engaged with the community. Mary Hocks describes this encouragement of participation as Audience Stance, the way pages actively encourage participation (Hocks 632).

 As we analyze this environment, it’s important to understand the design of the site in terms of color theory and imagery. The primary color scheme of the entire site is defined in Orange, Black, and White. According to color wheel theory, orange combines the energy of red with the happiness of yellow. (Color Wheel Pro 2015). This translates into a color that represents happiness, enthusiasm, determination, and perhaps most importantly, creativity and success. The color black combines well with orange, giving the creativity and enthusiasm of orange a more professional and grounded color contrast. Combined, the colors of SoundCloud have a message. Be creative and positive in a way that is professional and powerful. This visual rhetoric directly contributes to SoundCloud’s ethos as a place for creativity and success.

  

Spreadability of SoundCloud

The spreadability of SoundCloud is crucial to understanding SoundCloud’s participatory culture. Charles Leadbeater said “In the past you were what you owned, now you are what you share” (Rob Coers and Jeroen de Boer 294). Sharing is how users on SoundCloud define their identity and spread SoundCloud through countless other platforms on the Internet.

On SoundCloud, every user has a “Stream” they scroll through. In this stream, you see all of the tracks that people you follow have posted or reposted (Think re-tweeted). This is the primary way users share new sounds with their followers inside of SoundCloud. There are users on SoundCloud that go out of their way to repost up and coming songs or remixes of their own songs. For example, a company called Trending Networks goes out of their way to repost submitted tracks from up and coming artists. This company defines one of the key selling points of SoundCloud. Upload a track, send it to a SoundCloud promoter, and you could hit the big time.  SoundCloud also features “Charts”. The charts are divided into a “Top 50” and New & hot.” In these two categories, users can select between a specific music/audio genre or all genres. These are the most popular sounds on SoundCloud, categorized as the Top 50 most played sounds of the week or as “up-and-coming tracks” that are new and hot.). Users listen to new and hot songs, they repost it, others see this repost and add it to their collection, share it on social media, the whole nine yards. This creates a great participatory loop for SoundCloud. Users will come looking for new tracks, and SoundCloud spreads them to users through the Charts system.

Spreadability is also captured on SoundCloud through the way content is shared through different platforms. By every sound is a share button. This share buttons gives a multitude of options of sharing this sound. The user can message it to other SoundCloud users, a way of privately sharing sounds with users. The user can also choose the Embed feature, which lets users embed the song directly and attractively into a website or blog. This option is perfect for artists with their own websites, allowing users to both hear their content and see the artist’s SoundCloud in one interface. Lastly, users can share it straight to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, G+, Pinterest, e-mail, or generate a link that can be pasted anywhere. You can even choose to share the song at a specific time in the song. Interestingly, the SoundCloud player itself will only show on Twitter and Tumblr. When shared on Facebook or any other platform, a user is taken to soundcloud.com. Having the player directly embedded into the Tweet or post heightens the instant spreadability of the content.

A user can retweet or reblog a post with a SoundCloud link, and any users who see this can start playing and sharing the song right away, further contributing to a loop of sharing and playing and sharing again. The share button on SoundCloud is especially powerful, because it leads to instant feedback and gratification through users having the opportunity to instantly listen to a shared sound, as opposed to shared textual or visual content. If Kanye West tweets his new single through SoundCloud, millions of people will play it through the Tweet and go to the link, and thousands of users will explore SoundCloud and might just decide to become an active member to keep participating in this new community they have discovered. After all, if Kanye uses it, why shouldn’t they use and participate in it too? The entire share button is designed to create “influencers” on SoundCloud. Influencers are “key audience members” with meaningful connections or influence who bring content into a community and ensure the content spreads. (Jenkins 79-81). The concept of Influencers and SoundCloud’s powerful share button come together to form a powerful culture of spreadability and participation.

The Social Capital of SoundCloud

As mentioned earlier, social capital allows users to create networks where some form of social capital is valued and exchanged among users (Rheingold 215-230). In SoundCloud’s case, social capital comes in several forms. SoundCloud’s comment system is very unique. When users post comments, the comment is tracked and shown at the current point of the sound being listened to. For example, a comment about a user’s favorite part of the sound would show up at :37 seconds into the sound, the time when they posted the comment while listening to the sound. This creates an environment where users can receive feedback on any given part of the sound. These parts are the sections of the sound where users reacted the strongest, providing valuable insight for the uploader. The comment becomes a valued form of capital that the uploader receives and analyzes to understand audience perception of his sound.

SoundCloud uses social capital with the concept of viewable play counts and artist compensation. Next to every sound is the total amount of times played. When a user sees a count of 50k, 300k, 1.2 million, the artist receives the social capital of having a very popular sound, enticing users to give it a listen, and of course, potentially like/reblog/share the sound. This unspoken interaction forms the basis of SoundCloud’s social capital network, and builds credibility with the artist that their content is quality. This interaction leads to one of the most important uses of social capital: turning this intangible interaction into real compensation for the artist (Wikstrom 15). Artists can choose to feature Buy buttons next to songs, which can link to a music store, such as iTunes, or even a link to donate money. As the artist gains social capital, users become much more likely to buy the artists’s songs or donate to them. If users are responding well to an artist’s content, with thousands of plays and hundreds of comments, an artist will feel confident in adding a Buy button, because he or she knows there is a captive and guaranteed audience that could very well be willing to spend real money on supporting your content. As Wikstron writes, “the technologies lower the barriers…and the new music industry dynamics are characterized by high connectivity and little control” (Wikstron 16). Only a Web 2.0 platform like SoundCloud could have successfully broken the barriers between artist and audience. The direct interaction users can have with artists is a massive shift in the way the music industry operates. Artists no longer need record companies, and users don’t even need to buy an artist’s songs to actually listen to them. This transition from social to monetary capital is how artists “make it big” on SoundCloud and start to become real independent artists.

Conclusion

The concept of SoundCloud as a musical social network is fascinating. SoundCloud has successfully created a huge network of users who want to upload music, talk about music, share music in SoundCloud, and spread music hosted on SoundCloud through the entire Internet. As a digital writing environment, SoundCloud’s unique participatory culture and network has created a community that rewards success, encourages creativity and interaction, and has made a platform where audiences can really interact with artists away from the mass cacophony of mainstream social media.

References

Daniel Allington, Byron Dueck, Anna Jordanous. “Networks of value in electronic music:    SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place” Cultural Trends Vol. 24, Iss. 3, 2015.

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments”. College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003): 629–656. Web.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning     in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013. Print.

  Rheingold, Howard. Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012. Print.

“About SoundCloud." SoundCloud. Web. 04 Mar. 2015. <https://soundcloud.com/pages/contact>.

Coers, Rob, and Jeroen de Boer. “MUZIEKDINGEN: LEARNING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA AND MUSIC”. Fontes Artis Musicae 61.3 (2014): 290–295. Web.

Walker, Rob. "Can SoundCloud Be the Facebook of Music?" Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 10   July 2015. Web. 04 Mar. 2016.

Wikström, Patrik. The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Print.

Color Wheel Pro. “See Color Theory in Action." Color Wheel Pro: Color Meaning. Color Wheel Pro. Web. 04 Mar. 2016.