I'd consider myself a lurker most of the time and I tend to express myself more through actions than posting on the web. In this case, I already do pay - I have a subscription to DI.fm, and was actively looking for something similar on Soundcloud when they rolled out the ads. Unfortunately, as there isn't anything, I've simply started using Soundcloud less in favor of DI.
This isn't the first time I've been frustrated with Soundcloud either. I listen to a variety of electronica that's often hard enough to buy that I was searching for stuff on youtube and bookmarking before I started using Soundcloud. It was only after some months of use and I sizable list of favorites that I found songs on Soundcloud could just disappear from my list with no warning and nothing left behind - which means if I can't remember the name of the song of spend an hour searching, I'm unlikely to find it again. At least with my youtube bookmarks the title and artist are never lost, even if the video is taken down. (I contacted their support about this and got a positive response, but its been a couple months this has happened at least twice since then.)
So for me, at least, Soundcloud is on its way out. And that's really disappointing, because I think on the whole they have a great platform.
I'm more familiar with Soundcloud from the publishing side: I seldom listen, but that's the primary place where I share my music.
The point is, SC isn't built as a service that provides a sound library. Just compare how easy it is to publish a track on iTunes and on SC: there's this huge button in the top that calls you to upload something. iTunes is a shop, it's got everything (actually, it doesn't have a lot of tracks, but you can replace it with Beatport or Juno, doesn't really matter). Soundcloud, on the other hand, is more oriented toward releasing what's here and now. I've hidden and deleted my own tracks a lot of times: sometimes they were WIPs that I didn't want to release anyway, sometimes I decided to remove the track from public access so I can release it on a label later, and sometimes I just decided that a track sucks and should be ashamed of it.
Could it be that these tracks were hidden because of similar reasons? Or, may be, they were uploaded by users who didn't have the rights to these tracks in the first place?
This isn't the first time I've been frustrated with Soundcloud either. I listen to a variety of electronica that's often hard enough to buy that I was searching for stuff on youtube and bookmarking before I started using Soundcloud. It was only after some months of use and I sizable list of favorites that I found songs on Soundcloud could just disappear from my list with no warning and nothing left behind - which means if I can't remember the name of the song of spend an hour searching, I'm unlikely to find it again. At least with my youtube bookmarks the title and artist are never lost, even if the video is taken down. (I contacted their support about this and got a positive response, but its been a couple months this has happened at least twice since then.)
So for me, at least, Soundcloud is on its way out. And that's really disappointing, because I think on the whole they have a great platform.