Sweden’s Soundtrap raises $6 million to expand its online music recording platform

Soundtrap, an online music and audio recording studio, announced today it has raised $6 million to help it expand into new countries and languages.

The latest round was led by Nordic venture capital firm Industrifonden and included money from Peter Sterky, a former executive at Spotify. Soundtrap has now raised a total of $8.5 million.

The idea behind the company was to create a simple, online collaborative recording service for amateur musicians. The cloud-based service works across all mobile and desktop operating systems.

“The key problem we’ve seen as musicians is that you can go into a music-making tool, and it’s too complex,” said Per Emanuelsson, CEO and cofounder.

However, after launching, the service has — almost by accident — become wildly popular with educators, who are embracing it around the world. Emanuelsson said that this success has led the company to create a specific version for educators that complies with rules around the gathering and sharing of student information.

This popularity also led Google to include Soundtrap in its suite of Chromebook education services, giving the app another shot of momentum.

Soundtrap offers a consumer version, which is based on the freemium model but includes a host of extra features and storage for $7.99 per month. The company offers a discounted educational version for $4.99 per year.

The service now has 750,000 users and is rushing to keep up with demand, particularly on the education side, Emanuelsson said.