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Comment by forkLding | Hacker News Reader

This should have been an opportunity for Soundcloud actually, a lot of underground musical artists and an opportunity to connect via a large community platform to spread word.

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Yes, but also a ton of unlicensed music (most of which came by way of remixes/DJ mixes), which they can't license it to soundtrack cos. Spotify owns one (major investor, created by an employee) called Soundtrack Your Brand. Pandora offers one as well.

Thats true actually and I've seen SoundCloud plagued by theses issues but there's always plenty talent that get accepted such as Lil Yachty or XXXtentacion or even Chance the Rapper who all started on SoundCloud, I think SoundCloud has the capability to filter out the easy hits to market and partner with

If it was obvious what the "easy hits" were, I'm sure many labels would be competing for them.

Not really, Chance the rapper, Lil Yachty etc had huge amounts of listens etc on SoundCloud which is why they became famous, they werent being signed by labels despite their heavy recognition. Chance the rapper went independent, like the thing is that labels only sort of pay attention to SoundCloud, the major medium is still YouTube, but we even see musicians there with followings and millions of views not being signed.

Not trying to sound ass-hurt but if theres a big platform of dedicated listeners and theres a lot of people with millions of listens, wouldnt those be easy hits?

That's a good point. It looks like there is a bit of it going on: https://soundcloud.com/cosstores

Agreed. As long as you weed out the copyright infringement, this would work really well, considering that many artists that are popular today (chance the rapper comes to mind) started on Soundcloud.

very true

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