Swedish Soundation recently revealed that it is releasing a variant of its DAW that is embeddable on websites. This means that fans could, for example, make their own mixes of songs, add their own sounds, and enable new exciting applications for everyone who releases music.
The web and social platforms have created new ways for artists to build strong relationships with their fans. Today, fans can get involved in artists' careers and releases, whether it's buying into songs using NFTs or meeting their idols in the metaverse.
Swedish Soundation has now released a solution where you can embed the DAW directly on a web page, something that opens up for fans to be able to work with the music in a completely different way than before. We asked Adam Hasslert , CEO of Soundation, some questions.
Who is Adam Hasslert?
- I am a hobby musician who put my rock star dreams aside in my teens and instead focused on education and building a company. Was in for a while at big companies like Procter & Gamble and Kinnevik, but in recent years has come back to music by combining it with building technology companies via Soundation.
- When I turned 15, I had to choose between getting a moped or a computer as a present, and chose a Commendore 64. That's when I started coding and, in addition to my degree in economics, I also studied systems science. Today, I code almost nothing as there are others who are so much better than me at it, but I am quite familiar with technology development.
What does Soundation do?
- Soundation's mission is to make it easy for anyone to get creative with music. We do this by webifying music creation and removing as much friction as possible, both in terms of the first phase – getting to test before you even create an account – but also being able to share your project and collaborate during the creative phase. This means that more people learn music. I would say that Soundation is the perfect tool to get started, develop and get creative with music.
- Software for creating music is far behind other types of software. I usually compare with how Google webified office applications and Canva and Figma did the same for graphic design applications. The most popular music studio applications today have to be downloaded and installed, and their plugins, which are very important in music production, can hardly be shared between computers. We want to change that and are today one of the companies driving that development.
You have just released the news of being able to embed your DAW on websites, what does that mean?
- It started as a joke. Could we embed our studio on another web page like you can embed a YouTube video? After some technical challenges, we solved it. So today you can create a project in our studio and post it on your own blog or website by just pasting a few lines of HTML code. Your visitors can then open a copy of the project on your page and remix your project, drag in their own sound clips, record etc. The entire studio is loaded in the user's internet browser.
- As Soundation is a web studio, we also have the opportunity to adapt how the studio should act for each user. Today we have some simpler settings such as loading the first region of a specific instrument, so that the user can start playing directly on his keyboard, loading a specific folder with sounds in the side panel or customizing the image (thumbnail) to be loaded on the web page that the visitor should click on to open the project. But I think it's just the beginning.
How do you think this area will develop in the coming years?
- Companies that sell audio clips or plugins have very limited tools to help them increase their sales. The visitor can listen to a demo song or watch a video, and that's it. With our tools, their visitors can get creative right away. Cut, stretch, drag in your own sounds and see if they fit, test presets, etc. before they make their purchase decision. So we are discussing various white-label solutions with some companies. Companies that sell sample packs, plugin companies and also record companies.
- It is exciting when you think about what users and companies can come up with for areas of use with this technology. We talk e.g. with some AI companies wanting to enable their users to be able to open their AI-created music in a studio to customize it before downloading it. Add there real-time collaboration and have a common workspace to save and collect your songs, sounds and files.