14 DAY TRIAL // SoundCloud may be looking to reinvent itself as an audio recording and hosting platform for the web, but it's still mostly used by artists wanting to showcase their songs to fans and maybe get discovered by more.
SoundCloud has built up a reputation as a launchpad for budding artists and is now introducing a way of selling tracks shared on the site aimed at the same audience.
SoundRain is a new project mashing up SoundCloud and the Minno payments platform. It enables any SoundCloud user to add a buy with Minno button to their tracks, built into the player.
"SoundRain lets you sell the songs you have on SoundCloud. We give you the awesome SoundCloud player you love. And we give you a Minno button that lets anyone instantly buy your song," the SoundRain website reads.
Of course, there are countless ways of selling tracks online, even for artists just starting out. What SoundRain offers is simplicity, for the artists and for the fans.
Minno enables users to pay for things like apps and music online. You only need a credit card to feed the account, the individual transactions only take a couple of clicks and all you need to sign up is a Facebook account.
With SoundRain, you can integrate a Minno buy button with the waveform player for each track, even if it's embedded on other sites. Tracks sell for $0.99 and once artists get $10 into their accounts, the sum is transferred via PayPal.
As interesting as the product itself is the fact that it took just over a week from project to implementation. SoundRain was created at Music Hack Day in San Francisco, by leveraging the SoundCloud API. Since then, Minno has worked with SoundCloud to turn it from a hack day project into a working service.