Tech That And Party

The Dublin Web Summit has only just stared and already SoundCloud’s Eric Wahlforss looks like a man who’s been on a Bank Holiday Weekend bender with Nikki Sixx, Pete Doherty, Shane MacGowan and Lindsay Lohan.

“No, that was two weeks ago,” laughs the amiable and almost basketball-playing tall 32-year old who’s munching on a roll of Love Heart sweets as we chat away. “The reason I look so wrecked is I just flew in overnight from New York. I spend a third of my life in the air. I’m from Stockholm, live and work in Berlin and stupidly have a girlfriend based in Austria – so straight away that’s a lot of travelling.”
Eric was also in Dublin last year for the F.ounders Conference attended by such fellow ‘net royalty as Twitter, Netflix, YouTube and Skype, and reckons the city’s reputation as a techie hotspot is spiralling.
“People like (Web Summit & F.ounders head honcho) Paddy Cosgrave is doing a tremendous job of putting Dublin on the map,” Wahlforss proffers. “There are a lot of big players like Apple and Google here and – as I’ve just seen from walking round the RDS – an insane number of startups. Dublin is one of those places with a relatively small, focused scene. It’s got its own unique vibe and become a space where people can get to meet and share resources.”
I think we’ll put that down as a B+ on the report card! The Web Summit is all about private entrepreneurship, but how important is it that government engages with what’s going on?
“To be honest, in my world government isn’t so important,” he avers. “As long as they aren’t prohibitively trying to shut things down and interfere. They should really just get out of the way in that case. The privates understand this world better.”
So, that’s “a butt out, mate!” for Enda, who’s due to start his photo op walk-round the Summit in a couple of hours.
What makes Eric’s adopted hometown so special?
“The blend of all its history and legacy together with a creative openness. Berlin is a bit punk, a bit highbrow, a bit arty… a couple of years ago there wasn’t much going on, but now it’s a really interesting melting pot.
“It’s about gathering existing culture and industries into one place and then enabling those things through the web.”
Wahlforss’ technological ‘eureka!’ moment came at the age of ten, when he was given an old Atari computer that he learned to do basic game programming on.
Launched in January 2007 by himself and fellow Swede Alexander Ljung, SoundCloud was a dimes ‘n’ nickels affair until April 2009, when British equity firm Doughty Hanson gave it $2.5 million seed funding. Ten months – and one million subscribers later – they bagged another $10 million from the New York-based Union Square Ventures and were seriously up and running.
“The back story is that I’d been making electronic music for a long time as Forss and had moved to Berlin in 2001 because of the amazing scene there,” Eric explains. “The first time I’d visited was in ’97 for the Love Parade and I got very excited because there were partial ruins around with no structure but a raw creativity. I went to the now legendary Tresor club and thought, ‘This is where I need to be’. It took a while but I got there!
“We had no idea how to raise money for SoundCloud but I ended up working for this guy, Christof Meyer, who after selling his company to Nokia became a business agent. He put together the original round of funding and we found some other local people who were willing to invest at the lower end of the scale. We’re proof that if you’re a little bit aggressive and spot an opportunity you can make it happen, no matter how lacking in contacts and experience you are. Apart from Christof there was no one for us to network with – we just dove in and hoped for the best.”
Coming on like an underground version of Enigma – “Church music has always been in my life – not because I’m religious but because my mother conducts a choir” – Forrs’ tunes were shared on early streaming sites like MP3.com.
“It was extremely primitive and a poor user experience, but we could see the potential,” he resumes. “I wanted to marry that freedom with the structure you get from a record company. I worked with labels before as an artist and still think they have a real place in the value chain. That’s why we’ve always had a very friendly attitude towards the existing industry. I’m not looking to put Sony or EMI, or whoever, out of business – it’s possible to be complementary of each other. We try to help and shepherd them on the path towards creating something new out of all this. It’s a revolution they can be part of.”
Originally a resource for fellow underground electronic acts, SoundCloud turned a corner, Wahlforss says, when big-time German house duo Âme uploaded a tune.
“It was an unreleased track, so suddenly SoundCloud was the only place to get it. After that it really took off in terms of people understanding the idea. 50 Cent brought the urban community in when he used the platform to upload a track he got other people to remix and rap on. That’s when we realised, ‘This goes beyond electronic music. It goes into other genres – and into other countries’.”
Eric believes in the concept of free music, but only if it’s the copyright holders who are giving it away.
“It has to be the artist setting the agenda,” he stresses. “We’re totally anti-illegal music sharing. One of the goals of SoundCloud was to create something better than that experience. Empowering artists is absolutely key for us; give them the tools to experiment with new things.”
What’s his take on his Swedish compatriots Pirate Bay?
“Those guys are crazy semi-illegal rebels, so it’s a different mindset. I know them a little bit and they’re very much working to their own agenda. Having 100 megabits in a lot of homes – not only down but up – plus full-duplex and very good fibre optics makes Sweden a prototype for how the rest of the world will look in five or ten years when they catch up. When you have that radical read-write aspect, you’ll get people like Pirate Bay who want to push things to the limit. They’re extremists, which is certainly not my position. I’m trying to find a reasonable balance. As the ecosystem and the whole economy matures, the growing attitude is that Pirate Bay is not the way to go.”
Eric insists that it’s still a love of music and not juicy share dividends that makes him get out of bed in the morning.
“The biggest and best example of how SoundCloud literally changed somebody’s life is Lorde,” he says with genuine pride. “She’s just replaced Alanis Morisette as the artist whose single has spent the longest at No.1 in the US and her first track appeared on our platform a year ago. My community guy, David, who has his ears very much to the ground was like, ‘This New Zealand girl is on fire!’ It didn’t have much traction at first, but a few months later it was literally everywhere.
“Something I really liked recently,” Eric continues, “was Of Montreal sharing a track and then doing a Q+A directly on the waveform. Fans love that kind of immediate interaction.”
Asked for his musical and techie heroes, there’s nary a nanosecond’s delay. “Musically it’d be DJ Shadow, Photek and more recently Burial. I’m very much into that fragmented, sampled, organic kind of sound. I should really have a less boring answer for this, but tech-wise Steve Jobs by a large margin. Elon Musk is this incredible South African who does the SpaceX stuff and also the Tesla bar. I really love this naïve notion of ‘let’s fundamentally change something really big’ – and then just going and doing it. By now, I feel like we’ve done that. And it started from this fairly naïve idea of, ‘This is the way it should be, so let’s make it happen!’”
And happening it most certainly is.
12 hours of material gets uploaded every minute to SoundCloud, which now has a monthly reach of 250 million people. The latest tweak to the service is integration with Instagram, which allows you to choose cover art for the music you make and/or listen to.
“I don’t believe in change for change’s sake, but you have to keep evolving,” Eric concludes. “With the web moving so fast, it’s easy to become obsolete. My number one job is to make sure that doesn’t happen to SoundCloud.”