About us

The people

Why an audio market?

In 2008 I picked up an old interest of mine. Writing songs and recording music. Like so many other people already had, I discovered the ease and joy of creating and recording my own music with the help of modern digital audio software. All I needed was my laptop, a microphone and a decent sound card. All though never very talented, I could still play a few instruments good enough to record, or program using midi, most of the audio that I needed. However, there were things that I would like to have in my songs that I simply couldn’t record or program myself. I remember thinking that surely there must a website somewhere where I can simply order the audio that I need for my songs, but to my surprise, I couldn’t find it. I found tons of sites where I could download “pre-manufactured” stock audio, but except for perhaps drumbeats, those recordings would never fit what I already had produced. What I needed was a marketplace, like ebay, where I could post a “wanted ad” requesting someone to record something the way I described it, using the chords, tempo and melody that would fit my song. I was not looking for someone to write and produce an entire song for me, I just needed a few missing pieces.

At the time I was working as CTO of a startup company that sold a pretty sophisticated software and as part of our marketing efforts we produced a couple of screencasts to demonstrate the product. With limited budget we decided to record the voice over ourselves, but despite our best efforts, since none of us was a native English speaker, the end result just didn’t sound professional enough. I realised that the audio marketplace I had been thinking about could work for more than music, it could be used to request any type of audio. Including voice over. In my opinion there was, and still is, a huge untapped pool of audio resources available online for projects with limited budgets. These resources aren’t necessarily professionals like the people you would meet in real studios, but still people that have the interest, talent and equipment to deliver audio of much higher quality than what you can produce yourself. Think about acting students, music teachers, part time musicians etc and you get the drift.

For about two years I kept coming back to this idea many times, mainly because I kept needing custom made audio but also because I found it weird that the service didn’t exist. So, eventually in 2010 I took the decision to leave my job to go and build the audio market myself. It took me a long time to get the first version ready but here it finally is. I hope you find it useful.

/Bjorn Alm