SoundCloud is to music as YouTube is to videos. If the same measures were applied to the latter, everyone would throw a fit.

Another thing is that it essentially bottlenecks creators. YouTube is a medium where someone with a flip phone can accrue millions of views in minutes provided the content is good enough. However, in a medium entirely based around sound, musicians can’t get by in the same fashion.

For those looking to (legitimately) compose digitally, you’re looking at $1,000 dollars for FL Studio (and the useful plugins), alone, before you even consider the prices of the physical hardware you’d need to viably run it. Add in external premium VSTs and you could easily find yourself at $2,000 dollars. It’s a massive cash-sink before you even get a single melody hammered out (unless you’re fine with doing every single song in one take via the demo.)

It’s not that people don’t want to pay the service so much as it is that not everyone can. Given sites like YouTube have been able to stand on their own on things like ad revenue, I don’t see how SoundCloud can’t do the same.