I&#x27;ve been on Soundcloud for a looong time and unlike Spotify , it never was a radio but some paid cloud hosting for mp3 with social features. So sound cloud relied on paid customers who uploaded their music on the platform for promotion purposes. I don&#x27;t think they ever had any opportunity to turn into a Spotify competitor. That&#x27;s not how people use Soundcloud.<p>I think however Beatport is trying to be the Spotify for IDM. not sure how it is working for them.<p>Beatport was &quot;the shit&quot; back then and made a LOT of money. The problem with Beatport is that it works as long as djs are compelled to renew their catalogue.<p>it became big thanks to &quot;Electro&quot;, then Minimal techno , then it made Deadmau5 big, after Deadmau5 nothing really happened in the IDM world, so Beatport success kinda went down.<p>Neither Dubstep nor HipHop ever were best selling genres on Beatport. And today, MP3 sells don&#x27;t bring much revenue even for big names. I&#x27;d be surprised if TOP 10 beatport artists sell more than a 1000 units per best selling track today.<p>It used to be different.