Not sure what to think of this. SoundCloud has run its course and should just die, leaving space for a new player. There are some around but they can't gain critical traction due to the stickiness of SoundCloud despite having a product which has increasingly gotten worse over time.
For an audio platform, the audio quality is subpar. Terrible discovery. Too many bots & marketing-spammers. No direct monetization scheme for artists. Terrible mobile app (at least on iOS). etc.
I completely disagree on almost every point. As a daily SoundCloud user, the discovery is a mile above and beyond every other platform I've tried, including Apple Music and Spotify. SoundClouds weekly "The Upload" playlist has more good music in it than any other automatic playlist I follow, I cant even remember the last time it had a song on it I didn't like. I'm not sure how some people get such a different experience, maybe only long-time users get the good discovery experience because they've provided the algorithms with more data about their preferences?
My one gripe is that you can only follow 2,000 people! WTH Soundcloud, why place such an arbitrary maximum? It's clearly not a hard limit because occasionally I can glitch my way up to more followers by clicking the button dozens of times (I'm at 2010 now).
For an audio platform, the audio quality is subpar. Terrible discovery. Too many bots & marketing-spammers. No direct monetization scheme for artists. Terrible mobile app (at least on iOS). etc.