I think at its Origins, Soundcloud was great… But they failed to keep a good balance between Freedom and Marketing, Pro and Listeners, Network and Scammers, Own Right on Tracks and Rights algorithm detection, Music genre recommendations for Listeners, Network recommendations to Pro on music genres and label, Bandcamp business model (sort of) including for Pro to sale music directly with Paypal or something, And also keeping the DJ and Dj Set with some special conditions/discussions with label.
Where Soundcloud failed (to me) is in to BE on multiple side of the Music, that’s where Soundcloud need to be the King. Instead they going to the Streaming model where Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music and Tidal are … and somehow impossible to beat on their ground.
I mostly just use SoundCloud to dump my songs onto so I can listen to them later. Other people can listen if they like- at their own peril, of course.
And it would be disappointing if I have to actually load the songs onto my phone after each created track. A sacrifice for saving the sharing for the completed creation, I suppose
I use Soundcloud extensively as that’s where many artists and record labels place example tracks that are then embedded into various reviews I host in another guise… if Soundcloud dies, at the very least those will disappear, and then I’ll have to search all over Bandcamp and/or YouTube to sort out new links. Which would be tedious.
I agree, it was very simple to use in the beginning. There weren’t even groups to follow, you just followed your favorite noise makers and network it from there. Commenting was fun too, but it turned into spamarama later with all the changes.