I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora, light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that I enjoy.
But SoundCloud has one big problem holding it back, in my opinion:
Getting a great SoundCloud experience requires a lot of upfront work. To have a good feed, you need to find and follow a bunch of artists and/or 'like' a bunch of tracks (from when I first started: the default feed, or low-data feed, gets stale quickly, and had many songs that did not align with my preferences). This sounds simple, but it's not, as SoundCloud is designed for discovery rather than building/organizing your music library. For example, there is no library-like simple list view, and you can't filter/sort your 'likes' as you can in Spotify/iTunes. Also, the radio-like features are not immediately apparent, making it hard to bootstrap your SoundCloud preferences by passively listening/liking tracks as you go.
Looking to the alluded future monetization: The ads are infrequent, and not at all annoying. Unless they ramp up the ads, it will not be a big incentive to pay for premium.
There is really nothing like SoundCloud if you like EDM or EDM-influenced indie music (think Miike Snow).
you can pay a spotify-type premium for it, if you want to support them just upload to a pro account (even if you don't upload any music). I am going to do that myself as I just realized pretty much 90+% of the listening I do at work while coding is on soundcloud (I also have a subscription to google music, but don't use it as much for EDM)
But SoundCloud has one big problem holding it back, in my opinion:
Getting a great SoundCloud experience requires a lot of upfront work. To have a good feed, you need to find and follow a bunch of artists and/or 'like' a bunch of tracks (from when I first started: the default feed, or low-data feed, gets stale quickly, and had many songs that did not align with my preferences). This sounds simple, but it's not, as SoundCloud is designed for discovery rather than building/organizing your music library. For example, there is no library-like simple list view, and you can't filter/sort your 'likes' as you can in Spotify/iTunes. Also, the radio-like features are not immediately apparent, making it hard to bootstrap your SoundCloud preferences by passively listening/liking tracks as you go.
Looking to the alluded future monetization: The ads are infrequent, and not at all annoying. Unless they ramp up the ads, it will not be a big incentive to pay for premium.
There is really nothing like SoundCloud if you like EDM or EDM-influenced indie music (think Miike Snow).