The Mysterious (and somewhat problematic) Power of Soundcloud

Everyone is dropping new music this week: from Rihanna and Kanye to Wavves and Earl Sweatshirt. And three of these four artists dropped their new work on Soundcloud. (Rihanna is the only one still trying to make Tidal work.) Not Spotify. Not ITunes. But Soundcloud. So what is the mystery appeal and why are artists opting to drop their work here?

For the longest time, I synominated Soundcloud with things like high school raves and poorly executed homegrown hip-hop. It seemed like a site for iffy wannabe DJs to mash songs that I had previously enjoyed into a bunch of moosh.

In some cases, this is true. As of 2012, the site reached 10 million users, so there's bound to be some shittiness.And to add to that, there are a lot of amateurs on the site. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Soundcloud has given young, or not yet discovered artists, a place to easily upload their music onto a page, and then connect it to their other social medias for promotion. At this point, you might be like "well yea, so does Spotify, and I probably have a lesser chance of running into a 15 year old who thinks he's a DJ because he picked the music at his friend's basement party last week." But unlike Spotify, artists don't need a distributor or a label to upload their music on Soundcloud. So for artists who aren't on a major label, for whatever reason, Soundcloud is a place to directly connect to their listeners.

Dark World, for example, is a collective of Boston semi-teens-semi-young-adults ushering in a new age of experimental cryptic doom rap. Dark World has gotten creds from rappers like Earl Sweatshirt (aforementioned fellow Soundcloud user) and New York underground heavyweight Ratking. The young collective has vibes similar to a younger, sometimes even less user-friendly Death Grips. That sometimes-inexplicable and maybe-unapproachable sound is exactly where Soundcloud's easy upload policy comes in big for these artists.

(Below: Gimme Some Time by Josue--part of Dark World)

(Below: Creme de la Creme by DJ Lucas ft. Lucy--also part of Dark World)

Soundcloud has also given 17-year-old R&B sensation Corbin, better known as Spooky Black, a page that brags 193 thousand follows. It may sound underwhelming, but Kanye's page currently has 489 thousand followers, so a barely-legal teen from Minnesota making Internet-based neo-R&B has 1/4th the number of followers as Kanye West. But it's not just about spooky teens making intimidating sounds. Soundcloud's open for all non-traditionals; Soulection hosts an hour long weekly radio show that mixes anything from N.E.R.D. to Sister Nancy. And their page has 307 thousand followers. Now look up at Kanye's number again.

So in theory, the site uses the Internet for its beautiful democraticizing purposes--everyone participates, everyone wins. But this is the Internet. And the Internet is a market, so it's not that romantic. Just like pretty much every other streaming site, the artist loses.

While Soundcloud mobilizes amateurs' exposure, it does pretty much nothing else for them. The site only started to pay their artists in 2014. And even now, artists still get paid barely anything. On sites like Spotify the stated payout range is $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream. It's like the world's worst unpaid internship--you give a huge company all of your hard work and they promise this will somehow work out for you later. This leads a lot of the artists to create corresponding pages on sites like Bandcamp, where musicians, mostly unsigned, can upload their music, and also suggest a price for their sounds.

As for Kanye West, and his Soundcloud use: Who am I to say? Does Kanye really think his songs deserve no money? Is Kanye's ego smaller than we thought? That's the mystery of it all. Maybe Kanye just likes the idea of a site that lets artists directly connect. Maybe we all do. Soundcloud is a place for the undiscovered to get discovered, and for the generous to share freely. For now, I will continue to listen to teenagers make weird low quality hybrid music, and hope that one day, one of these dumb sites will give them a few dollars.