I have 2,200 followers in 10 months on Soundcloud and that's just me and my own music. There's no other names on my page besides me and the people I've worked with directly, and occasionally I put up a single repost for like 24 hours or so. It's incredibly easy to get followers on Soundcloud by manipulating the search engine and getting creative with when and where you decide to flood a bunch of peoples' notification bars with a random like / follow, or knowing all the right subreddits / message boards / IRC channels / social media places to drop your music into.

It's even easier when you're a real person who has original stuff that you made on your page, instead of a big list of reposts, and you network / communicate / make friends directly with the people who listen to your music so they develop a personal relationship to your stuff and keep coming back.

My point is that you didn't need to sign a contract with a tiny overseas startup label who isn't going to get you anything but some passersby on their channel, who you might get a small percentage of to notice your name mixed in with a list of other artists. Don't get me wrong, it feels great to sign a contract and be able to say that you're a signed artist, but it doesn't carry much weight if you're more or less signing something that some guy somewhere sent you.

There are countless clones of these small independent 'record labels' starting up because it doesn't take much besides a computer with internet to start them. They go after everyone, especially younger artists who are brand new, but once I hit over 1k followers I started getting flooded with offers like this in my inbox / e-mail that I had on my page. Every time I even googled the name of it, the only thing that would show up would be some random social media sites, I'd never heard of any of the other artists, and there were like 15-20 people 'signed' to the label. The first one or two I was really excited about but then it became apparent that about the only thing they had to offer me was the actual piece of paper I had to sign, and some reposts etc.

The difference between a label worth investing your time, hard work, and most importantly, your own music in -- and one where you should just click "Mark as read" on their message in your Soundcloud inbox -- is how established they are and how they can advance your career in ways you are unable to do yourself.

Did you receive a signing bonus / incentive? ...or are they investing in you financially? For example, did they offer to get you session time in a professional studio nearby you on their dime? Have they offered to have your tracks professionally mastered, or do they have audio engineers on staff who can do that?

If they have taken real steps like that for you, then it sounds like it's a good opportunity. If you signed a contract so you would appear on a Soundcloud channel that has 10,000 followers, and the rest is all up to you, I would find a way of bailing out of that quick.

If you think about it man, just reading the post back, the fact that you had all these questions after signing to a record label is a big red flag on the situation.