Global Meetup Day is coming up on Thursday, May 17. We’ve checked in with our SoundCloud Heroes to hear how they will be connecting around sound. If you’re based in any of these cities, come meet them and other SoundClouders! SoundCloud Heroes will help you with beta sign-ups for the Next SoundCloud as well, so don’t miss out.

As SoundCloud community ambassadors in their cities, SoundCloud Heroes will be involved with organizing other activities so stay tuned. Want to be a SoundCloud Hero? We’re picking up our search so find out how you can get involved here.

Chicago
SoundCloud Hero and podcaster Jaime Black is working with Music Garage to host the meetup. Following a BBQ cookout, meetup attendees will get a chance to interact with each other and use SoundCloud apps at a dedicated station. Another room will be dedicated to a full-on jam session experience with instruments provided by Music Garage. You’re encouraged to bring your own acoustic instruments as well! Get creative with each other and upload sounds in real-time! RSVP here.

Los Angeles
Matt and Will have teamed up to organize the Los Angeles meetup at Biergarten. With Matt as a musician and Will as a podcaster, they encourage all sound enthusiasts of the Los Angeles SoundCloud community to come together. Whether you’re in Santa Monica or in the Greater LA area, stop by for some nosh and drinks. Listen to their spontaneous audio message live from Biergarten below for what to look forward to and make sure to RSVP here.

San Francisco
Nicole will host a meetup at a new local clothing and art space called Hangr 16 in the Mission. Enjoy music by local SoundClouders and meet other SoundClouders with a fun recording activity. Come and you’ll be entered into a drawing to receive a SoundCloud swag package! RSVP here.

Boston

Celebrate Boston’s sound makers. Everyone is a sound maker! SoundCloud Heroes Tea and Chas have collaborated to host the meetup at Indie Ambassador, a music tech startup in Boston. A sound recording experiment will be revealed. It’s a surprise, but you will want to take part. RSVP here and listen to Tea’s callout below.

Syracuse
Jared will introduce two upcoming projects for the Syracuse SoundCloud community to get involved with: a local musicians compilation and Syracuse Found Sound Collaborative–a project to capture ambient soundscapes from around the city. Learn more about this and get a free guided tour of the world-class studio, SubCat Music Studios next door. RSVP here.

Austin
Enjoy a laid-back night at the Cherrywood Coffeehouse where Austin SoundClouders will participate in a listening session. Drop Tim a track you’d like to play at the link here. RSVP to attend.

Portland
Zefora will help lead a discussion on the future of Portland SoundCloud Community events and activities. Portland SoundClouders, what are you interested in doing, hearing and sharing? Bring your ideas to share with others. RSVP here to join.

Seattle
Held at the historic Intiman Playhouse, Alison has organized a night to meet and greet with other SoundClouders in the Seattle area, share ideas for future sound networking opportunities, and connect with others via sound. RSVP here!

SoundCloud Voices is a weekly Community feature focusing on new spoken word creators found on SoundCloud. It might be a podcast, radio show, audio book, interview, audio messages, a poem, anything! Keep an eye out every Thursday for a new post.

It’s been a busy week for us here at SoundCloud. As many of you may have heard, yesterday we announced the ‘Next’ SoundCloud! The newer, cleaner, stronger, faster version of SoundCloud is currently in private beta, but don’t worry ‘clouders…you’ll be able to get your hands on it soon!

SoundCloud is for sound creators and consumers alike, but there are a few awesome new features for those of you looking to find and share new sounds from within the community. To check out all those features and more, head on over to next.soundcloud.com for more.

To celebrate our ‘level-up’ a few favorite SoundClouders sent us some congratulatory messages!

Here’s Baratunde Thurston’s message to SoundCloud, complete with a custom intro theme-song!

Next, Glynn Washington of NPR’s Snap Judgment dropped us a line!

And finally, two of the SoundCloud Community Heroes took a second to tell us why they originally fell in love with SoundCloud.

If you are interested in trying out SoundCloud as a spoken word podcast platform, you can sign up for via this form. Successful candidates will be emailed with further details.

Today is a special day for us and we’re so thrilled to finally be able to share with you what we’ve been working on for a while:

Next SoundCloud, meet the Community. Community, meet Next SoundCloud, the next phase of our mission to unmute the web.

Since 2008, we’ve been focused on building the best social sound platform on the web. Today, SoundCloud has grown to over 15 million with more interests and needs of SoundCloud. With Next, we are taking a first step to reflect this. What you can expect from Next:

See more:

• A more interactive waveform player
• A simpler and more attractive profile

The Next SoundCloud will be available in a private beta immediately. Learn more and request access here:

http://next.soundcloud.com

We will be gradually rolling out access to Next and plan to use the beta to make updates and add additional features to Next based on your input. As always, we’re listening, so please use the feedback form in the About section. We can’t wait to hear what you say.

And finally, thank you to Snoop Dogg and The Bugle for the amazing congratulatory voice messages: