From a consumer perspective, SoundCloud lost my interest when I heard it's 128 kbps transcoded mp3 you're getting when streaming songs.
No thanks.
No thanks.
You can hear the bad quality by comparing it to a high quality version of the same song on good speakers.
How much are you looking for ? and how much are you willing to pay for that ?
I am paying for music storage, but playback should use source quality at all times. Exceptions are when the track is uploaded in a lossless codec like WAV or FLAC. Then it should be OGG compressed. If you use MP3, at least use 192 kbps or better 320 kbps.
Example: https://clyp.it/ allows 320 kbps streaming and it costs 0$.