Seriously, Soundcloud has been amazing since I joined it in 2011. I've discovered a lot of great music (there still is) and great people through the platform. I've been to Soundcloud meetups and have gotten to play shows in NYC and LA thanks to soundcloud (and twitter).
But since Soundcloud has gotten bought out by the major labels. It has cracked down on remix artists, and have deleted many people's accounts. My original Soundcloud page was almost deleted 2 years ago, due to copyright infringement policies. So I decided to quit paying for a Soundcloud artist subscription. Before last year I had over 200 sound files on my page. Now its down to 19. Soundcloud has changed, which is fine.. but I'm not riding the wave much longer.
I'm still looking for alternative Soundclouds. I do have art on Itunes, Spotify, Bandcamp and the others, but I'm still trying to find that underground hub for music of every genre. So far I've found yung.cloud, A website very similar to soundcloud, but It seems to learn towards lofi hip hop beats. Audiomack, which is awesome, has both hip hop and electronic music. It has a great look and its app is solid as well. I do upload my music on there. Only thing about that site is their embed player isn't all the way there. And you can't make money off streaming.
This past weekend I found the most interesting site for artists and music listeners alike. It's called resonate.is
The most attractive thing about this website other than it's look is It's business model.
The thing is that Resonate is built around blockchain technology. Which means that that not one entity really owns it. So there's no true owner. Also, Resonate is a music streaming site like Spotify and its clones, but instead of paying a monthly fee to have access to a bunch of songs, its uses a system called #stream2own. This means that you're only playing for the songs that you stream. There's a points system so you buy points and you play as many songs as you want until you run out. The song starts really really cheap. The first stream starts at 0.002 credits, but it caps to the price of a normal download. Keep in mind that $5 gets you 4.0880 credits. When you sign up, resonate offers a yearly subscription of $5. Check out more info on that here. I just made an account with resonate, so far I've only uploaded my latest album "The Return of Chippy".
In fact you can hear the two singles off it, but you have to sign up to hear the rest of the album. I think this websites the best way to support artists so far since artists are getting payed. The only downside to this platform is that there's currently no iPhone app for it. Only Android OS. Hopefully it will be on iOS soon.
You can check out my page at http://bit.ly/resonateisnatekodi
It's still growing but I think it has a lot of potential. Here's their music player below. Public tracks are free of charge. Definitely check out the site to hear my 8bit album "The Return of Chippy" and new exclusives!
Also If you know of any music platform's leave them in the comments!
Thanks,
Nate
Disclaimer: This is all my opinion. I'm not a writer, I'm just a musician and a tech head.