ReadWriteWeb

SoundCloud, the up-and-coming social audio publishing platform, is endorsing HTML5's role in the future of the Web. Today, the Berlin-based startup is officially rolling out its HTML5 audio player as the service's default, knocking the original, Flash-based player from that esteemed position.

The new player first went into beta in November, giving those curious enough an opportunity to experiment with it. Now that the bugs have been ironed out and a few new features added, the widget is ready for prime time.

Not even two years after reaching 1 million users, social audio service SoundCloud announced today that it has surpassed the 10 million user mark. The Berlin-based company has risen to become a major force in audio content creation and sharing on the Web, becoming a sort of "YouTube for audio" used by musicians, journalists and pretty much anybody with a need to record and share their own audio files.

To celebrate the milestone, the four-year-old startup has released an audio slideshow storytelling app called Story Wheel. It uses the Instagram API to grab a set of pictures, from which you can select the ones you want and order them. Once the photos are arranged, a brief narrative can be recorded in the browser. The end result is a shareable photo slideshow annotated by you.

In 2011, we collectively listened to 64,876,491,602 songs on the Internet. Whether it was on YouTube, SoundCloud, Rdio or MySpace, the citizens of the Web listened to quite a lot of music last year. Bands and musicians made over 3 billion new fans, who viewed artist profiles over 16 billion times. These are just a few data points recently released by Next Big Sound, a startup that tracks the popularity of music and individual artists across a range of digital music providers and social services.

Digital music only continues to grow and mature, as streaming services explode, Internet radio companies go public and developers begin using the power of open APIs to mash up sounds and services. SoundCloud alone saw 231% growth last year, while Twitter saw a 104% increase in music-related activity.

When it comes to downloading digital music, there is free and then there is legal, but seldom can you have both from the same site, and make money too. Noisetrade.com has been doing this for the past three years.

Certainly, there are lots of other music download sites, and we have written most recently about Soundcloud, as one example. But it is worth looking at what Noisetrade is doing to see what could be the ideal small-business content download site.

What becomes possible when technology cuts out the middlemen in music publishing and distribution? A lot of very strange and sometimes wonderful things.

Berlin based music and audio sharing network SoundCloud has raised a reported $50m more venture capital from the super prestigious Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe reported today. The company had raised about $16m in two previous rounds. If you're not familiar with SoundCloud, now is a good time to learn about the site. It's a vibrant and innovative community, about to either blow up huge or go down in flames with the change that comes from a large and high-priced investment like this.

SoundCloud wants to make it easier to listen to music and other embedded audio files from any device. The popular social audio-sharing service announced today that they've launched an HTML5 player for audio clips, allowing playback on tablets and smartphones.

Until now, the SoundCloud player, like so many of its kind, was built in Flash. The service has native apps for Android and iOS, which are lovely, but not terribly useful when one stumbles across a sound clip embedded on a Web page while browsing from an iPad or iPhone.

The social audio sharing site SoundCloud upgraded its iOS app today, adding a tablet-friendly UI for iPad users. The app lets users find and listen to tracks, comment on waveforms, connect with others and record audio using the iPad's microphone.

Most of the functionality from the service's Web app is here. If you've seen the SoundCloud Mac App for the desktop, this is a very similar experience.

A music discovery app for iOS that went live recently shows just what's possible when digital music services open up their libraries and functionality via powerful APIs. Twist Radio takes the music recommendation engine from Last.fm and uses it to help users explore music from SoundCloud.

The result is an app that lets users discover more obscure, independent and often homemade music, rather than a catalogue of music that's only been formally released by record labels. That's because SoundCloud hosts mostly user-generated music, including covers, mashups and original compositions. Some more established artists and labels have even embraced Soundcloud and uploaded commercially released albums to the service. It's essentially the YouTube of audio.

One of the talking points of Mary Meeker's presentation at Web 2.0 Summit yesterday was the future of sound. Meeker claimed that sound would soon be bigger than video on the Web. Specifically, she name-checked Spotify, Siri and SoundCloud. Siri is already a part of Apple, but the other two startups are independent. One of them could well be the next YouTube, if sound ends up having as big an impact on the Web as video. But that's a very big if...

Immediately after Meeker's presentation, I sat down with SoundCloud's young co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung. I wanted to find out just how Ljung and the SoundCloud team plan to take their service to the mainstream.

SoundCloud may have been knocked offline by a DDoS Attack last night, but today it's back and fully integrated into content curation platform, Storify.

Storify launched its public beta version in April of this year, and quickly became a popular platform for online content curation. Storify allows users to pull information from social media - tweets, videos, photos, links - in order to build stories, and SoundCloud is a smart, seamless way to add original music to the stream. It's an easy way to stitch together a diverse array of content into a news stream, a homeknit story, or just a curious experiment, like the aggregated nyan cat content below.