Presenting the YouTube of Radio: Mixcloud

Posted on 09:00 No Comments
Labels: innovative products

A couple of posts back the head of our team, Carol Patrick reviewed the event 'Innovate 09', click here to read the post. Nikhil Shah was a speaker at the event and has kindly agreed to write a blog post on his company 'Mixcloud' - how it was started, the current success and future aspirations of the company. Happy reading!

The founders of Mixcloud - friends from Cambridge University - were frustrated with how hard it was discovering and promoting radio online. As radio presenters and DJs themselves, they were actively hunting down great shows every day and realised more could be done to help connect this content to listeners.

A year ago they quit their full time jobs and moved into a warehouse in West London to fix these problems. Their vision is to build the YouTube of radio - a definitive online platform for on-demand radio shows, from music to talk.

A few months ago they launched an invite only version of the site to start building the content and community. Demand has been high with invites shared extensively on sites like Twitter. They now have thousands of content partners and presenters, including Diesel Radio, former BBC Radio 1 presenter Chris Coco, leading music blogs such as Curb Crawlers, great record labels such as Border Community and many more.

The shows currently lean towards club music and DJs, given the founders' background in organising clubnights and warehouse parties. However they are already working on expanding the breadth of content and are in discussions with big house-hold names.

Mixcloud have an interesting view on the future of radio and are innovating to disrupt the traditional ways people discover and interact with the medium. They describe the concept as "Cloud Radio" and the content as "Cloudcasts", which are stored in hard-drives in the sky - the "cloud" - and accessible on-demand, anywhere.

Mixcloud is democratic - anyone can upload to the site and the listeners decide who get exposed. It is social - with lots of great features to share and discover radio through friends. Finally it is personal - the team are busy in the lab working on cool radio recommendation algorithms that help users find shows they love.

- A special thank you for Nikhil Shah for this blog post, and if you would like more information you can contact him at nikhil at mixcloud dot com.