Can you believe it? 2018 is done and we’ve got so much to look back upon. We hit 5 million users in December, and we’ve made major strides forward with our feature set. Next year is sharping up to be even more exciting. January will see the introduction of BandLab 8.0 and a list of features we cannot wait to show you – keep your eyes peeled in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, let’s take a look back at the biggest features we released in 2018.
Looper
We kicked 2018 off with one of our biggest features. The Looper is a beat creation tool available on mobile. We designed the Looper to be a fun and easy-to-use beatmaker for everyone, whatever level you’re at. Functionalities like quantization mean you’ll never go out of time, and a huge bank of effects and Loop packs ranging from Hip Hop to 8-bit to K-pop keep your tracks sounding fresh.
The Looper began with 12 Loop packs. We conclude the year with 50! There’s truly something for everyone no matter what genre you love. We’re not done yet. Expect even more Loop packs to come, and extended functionalities on the Looper like the exciting real-time Looper effects feature.
Hot Beats & more
We launched Hot Beats as a way to connect the platform’s best beatmakers with vocalists and rappers. A rapper looking for a beat? Scroll through Hot Beats and when you find your track, hit Fork and it’s yours to work with. The tracks are handpicked daily for their ability to inspire and foster collaboration.
Today, Hot Beats is just one of many inspirational playlists on BandLab. Its popularity prompted us to start playlists for other genres. Depending on your favourite genres you select on your profile page, you’ll see playlists like Hot Grooves, Top Jams, Metal Essentials, Jazz Grooves and many more to come. Inspiration is just a tap away.
Improved sharing to socials
Promoting your music is just as important as its creative process. We wanted to make it as easy and impactful as possible when you share your music outside of BandLab.
Enter Clipmaker. A tool that lets you trim, crop, resize your revision so it can be shared to look its best on different social networks. So whether it’s for a Youtube video or a 15 second Instagram Story, you’ll get the most optimised version of your song for each channel.
Channels
This year we introduced an outlet on BandLab where you can find all things related to your favourite genre. When you’re scrolling through your Explore page, you’ll find Channels for the favourite genres you select on your profile page. On each channel, you can find the genre’s latest news, trending tags on BandLab, featured collections with handpicked music, and featured communities.
You can expect more Channels for more of your favourite genres in the coming year.
Contests!
The second half of 2018 saw the re-introduction of contests on BandLab. In the last three months, we’ve seen more than 7,000 entries to the contests and more than 400,000 revision plays (and we haven’t even counted December’s entries yet). We’ve seen you sharing your entries, submitting different and multiple entries, and we’ve heard some incredible songs which are worthy of their place.
2019 is going to be no different. We’ll give you more chances to show off your talent and more chances to win. Be sure to keep a lookout next month.
More Loops, Loop Packs, Effects and Virtual Instruments
When it comes to sounds, more is definitely more. And we’ll never stop creating more sounds, Loops, Effects and Virtual Instruments to help inspire you to create more on our Mix Editor. Our sound team create all the Loops, Effects and Virtual Instruments in-house, and we do our best to create a wide spectrum of sounds available for everyone. So aside from the popular genres, we’ve released sounds from K-pop, 80s Horror to Bollywood sounds.
2018 has been a busy year for the sound team. This year, we released…
- 74 Loop Packs
- 2,591 Loops
- 104 brand new effect presets
- 60 new Virtual Instruments.
Thank you once again for being part of this incredible community. It’s only going to get better from here.
BandLab is FREE to use, you can sign up here, or download BandLab on your iOS or Android device.
