Soundcloud started dying when they decided to be more like Spotify and less like the independent music discovery service they started out as. Now they have an app and experience that is not particularly good at either.
The problem when you're expanding is you need to have a clear idea of what you are. Because knowing what you are means you can scale by taking advantage of your strengths instead of dumbing it down. Amazon is a great example.
But if you just expand without knowing what you are, you'll end up like Soundcloud.
Also another thing is this idea of "what you are" (aka vision) shouldn't come from some media coverage or VCs or pundits. You should have already had the vision before these people started talking about you. See Snapchat for example, media pundits started calling them "a camera company", and Snapchat itself started believing the hype, and even renamed themselves "Snap". Snapchat is not a camera company. It's a social network that revolutionized private sharing. But they don't seem to think so anymore because they have to match the stratospheric expectation set by their IPO. Instead of expanding their own playing field they jumped into other giants' playground (competing with Apple in AR, competing with Instagram in public photo sharing, etc.), this pattern never ends well historically.
Soundcloud fell into the same trap. Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio", instead of seeing it for what it is. If they had realized they were popular because they were a great service for indie musicians and focused on that aspect it is possible that by now they are more influential than any existing music tech companies. Instead they tried to become "the youtube of audio", which is the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard, it's the definition of "dumbing down" in order to expand.
And now, of course, (and for quite a while) YouTube is the YouTube of audio.
It should have been apparent that it was foolish to try and beat google on that turf. Google beat them easily with a simpler interface and raw performance. The biggest difference, though: The audio quality on YouTube is actually better. Nail after nail in the coffin.
Ta!
Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better.
I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).