This attitude that we must all live like neat little economic machines is seriously depressing.
Serving a service like SoundCloud isn't technically challenging or expensive. It's dealing with all of the legal stuff of people uploading music that's under license, people uploading songs that have uncleared samples in them and all that bullshit.
It's proabably ran by 5 engineers working on the service itself, 25 maintaining the DMCA platform and 270 lawyers.
IDK what they do nowadays. I only release a new song every couple of months.
(shameless plug: soundcloud.com/bphogan)
They do that. If you want to hsot mroe than a few hours of music and additional stats you need to pay $10 month. I happily do that and it's a perfectly reasonable business model in my opinion. The problems, as you explained, started when Soundcloud tried to become a general and major label streaming service. A rather bad one compared to Spotify & Co. It's downright silly to go after such a crowded market when you have rather little to offer.
My guess is that there are more than enough artists, labels and users who actually want to pay and use the service to deliver music to their audience and that this was a profitable niche Soundcloud occupied, but the chase for growth made them lose focus.
The creation of new music has always involved exposing penniless people to it and no current music subscription service comes remotely close to that.
One alternative might be integrating peer-to-peer with a music discovery system.
Edit: craigslist and meetup are closest thing to "mass culture websites" and they each get a small minority of users to pay for their operations.
Other people have been mentioning Bandcamp. Seems like signing up as an artist is free, and they market themselves as a way to discover and support new music. Am I missing something, or isn't that the kind of service you're talking about?
Youtubers themselves were screaming about this recently, and almost always with any algo/payout change, and that is pre-Youtube red renegotiations.
I've never really used SoundCloud because the ui is confusing and haphazard and it just doesn't feel like Spotify, which I pay for. Spotify makes sure and shows you the album art etc. My recollection of SoundCloud from when I tried it in the past was some sort of waveform you clicked on to listen and visualize the music.
Soundcloud was more of an independent artist platform, and I think Soundcloud might have been able to get artists to pay for some services like sponsored songs, pay to let users download their tracks, artist page perks.
But it's hard to know if that would have worked. Especially in retrospect.
(1) Video content engages a wider audience and commands more focus than audio content
(2) Video advertisements dropped into video content are more effective than audio advertisements.
But that's a guess with no empirical base.
You can scrape together one hour of minimum wage. This is how the economy works. I'm tired of the freeloader generation ever since Napster. People need money to live, expecting everything free is nonsense.
YouTube is also making zero money, so if that is what they were trying to be, they've succeeded. Difference is, they don't have Google backing them.