SoundCloud launches Go: a subscription service
I am a long-time user of Soundcloud that has recently stepped back from the service. As an EDM enthusiast, the service is the best place for finding up-and-coming talent and great remixes that you can&#x27;t find anywhere else. The killer feature is the personal stream. Once you&#x27;ve started following a large enough pool of artists and labels, there is no better mechanism for wading through the pool of mediocrity to search out those rare gems.<p>Unfortunately, Soundcloud&#x27;s method for organizing your content really breaks down under heavy use. I have over 1000 songs liked, and scrolling through the like list, dynamically fetching ten songs at a time, is a huge pain. Playlist creation and maintenance is even more cumbersome and limited than Spotify, which is saying something.<p>Worst of all, the usefulness of the stream, arguably Soundcloud&#x27;s most unique and valuable listener-facing feature, really breaks down the longer you&#x27;re using the service. Most heavy users I know end up following over a few hundred artists&#x2F;labels&#x2F;channels, accumulated over years of use, and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unbearable. The sad thing is that the breakdown is purely a UX problem. The webapp is an infinite-scroll nightmare: forcing you to start at the top of the stream every time and fetch tracks 10 at a time. It doesn&#x27;t clean up after itself, so after an hour of slowly chipping away through your feed, the browser gets so slow and unresponsive on my top-spec Macbook Pro that I often give up and don&#x27;t bother trying to listen to new tracks that have been posted to my feed over 18 hours ago. Of course, as I now check Soundcloud less and less frequently, that means I am missing a ton of content.<p>On top of that, due to Soundcloud&#x27;s reputation as solely a promotional tool within the artist community, you end up wading through a ton of 1 - 2 minute previews and other low-quality throwaways, and songs that you like can disappear from the service at any time, without notice. You cannot build a stable music library on top of the service. In fact, I used to have a process where I&#x27;d look for new songs on Soundcloud, and if I found something good, look it up on Spotify and save it within my Spotify collection, because I knew it wouldn&#x27;t just disappear on me after a few months. Once Spotify upped their discovery game and the available EDM content grew, I removed Soundcloud from the process entirely.<p>Soundcloud used to be the best game in town for music discovery, especially EDM, but they let that slip over the last few years of struggling to monetize and Spotify&#x27;s constant progression has now really chipped away that advantage. I&#x27;ve signed up for this GO service, but I highly doubt I&#x27;ll keep it past the 30 day free trial. $10 a month for offline download and removing ads? As far as I can tell,  my stream is the same mess as it was before, and they don&#x27;t even distinguish between GO-exclusive and free tracks. I don&#x27;t see anywhere where I can find GO-exclusive tracks within the app at all, actually.<p>New music discovery is hard and the big players (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play) still haven&#x27;t fully cracked it, at least for specific-niche enthusiasts like myself. When the Soundcloud stream is working well, it is the best interface I&#x27;ve used for finding new music I like, but the complete lack of focus and neglect on that front from this initiative means that I probably won&#x27;t be coming back.