Soundcloud is the best streaming service because it lets you upload your own tracks
SoundCloud attracts a community that wants to find the coolest underground non-mainstream tracks. You can find your first audience here, and with the commenting feature on tracks, you can get great feedback.
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The Argument
Music is an individual experience of new perspectives. People like to listen to music because of its freshness and the way it shed light on experiences that are at once relatable but also unexpected, like that sudden beat drop that sounds nice, or that new interpretation of a breakup that helps you get through yours. Because of this, music platforms should not just be about listening to the biggest names and artists of the world but also about sharing your songs and the messages that are meaningful to you, and only SoundCloud does this.
SoundCloud's best feature is its lack of gatekeepers. Unlike other platforms who pick and choose which music to post and tend only to upload the music of well-established artists, anyone can post their work on SoundCloud. As a result, SoundCloud has become the birthplace of some of the greatest current artists, such as Post Malone and Kehlani. They might not have succeeded otherwise because of the overly elitist and biased barriers in the mainstream music industry. SoundCloud allows up and coming artists to upload songs without having to go through lengthy and overcomplicated processes to gain recognition.[1]
Counter arguments
SoundCloud is a horrible music platform for the large majority of emerging artists that try and make it big, aside from the few that were able to get lucky on the platform. For an artist to make money from the streams of their music on SoundCloud, they would have to pay eight to sixteen dollars a month for a subscription, or what SoundCloud calls a "hosting service."
In addition to that, the terms of use for SoundCloud artists stop them from ever suing or even disputing their earnings anywhere outside of SoundCloud's platform, meaning that, often, SoundCloud withholds money from its artists until they decide to pay them. All this means that to even make money off of SoundCloud, the artists can only pay their fees every month and then wait until SoundCloud wants to pay them.
Also, because of how badly the interface was made, artists can easily manipulate SoundCloud to make their work seem more popular with the algorithm. SoundCloud allows users to repost certain songs they like and also does not have sufficient checks on how artists post their work. This has allowed many artists to get away with making entire accounts dedicated to reposting their music and to posting the same song over and over again to get it more attention. This means that artists who have not discovered these glitches in the interface or just do not have time to exploit the flaws of the platform have a much harder time succeeding on SoundCloud.[2]
Proponents
Premises
[P1] SoundCloud is good because it allows new artists to easily post their music and be heard.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] SoundCloud rarely allows artists to profit from their work and its algorithms are easily exploitable.