Soundcloud & Hindi Music — Ideal Music Supplement
Disclaimer: This and the articles that follow are an attempt at understanding the music tech industry from a Product perspective. We do not claim to be experts in the field. All we claim is to be students of music tech. We hope this series will help others understand music tech and hopefully appreciate the industry.
TL;DR: If Bollywood is your scene, stay away, for everything else there’s Soundcloud.
Soundcloud is almost a wild card entry to this list. I love them for the plethora of original music that you can find that is non-existent anywhere else(except YouTube!). Soundcloud is the only platform which is accessible and has a long list of Hindi artists posting really interesting music. I am listening to Bindiya by sulk station as I write this.
Whether you are looking for live versions of a random cover or you are looking for that band Meghdhanush doing a brilliant version of your childhood love Shaktimaan’s title track, you’ll find it here.
Soundcloud has it’s fair share of controversies with copyrights and labels. Also with trying to hard to find a business model. They are just finding it’s feet though.
You can’t be too sure of quality though when the quantity is so high. This is the major reason people stay away from Soundcloud. Mainstream music is non-existent. I wonder if Spotify hadn’t backed out of the acquisition deal. Find a scenario here. Brilliant piece. Shoutout to Simon for being awesome.
Ali Zafar’s vocals in Mujhe Tum Nazar se, a rendition of the great Mehdi Hassan, is another pearl in the sea here. It’s not like this is the only indie platform for Hindi music, quite the contrary actually. There’s Bandcamp, Rolling Stones India, ArtistAloud and of course, good ol’ YouTube. They are just too bad to be considered in the league of the major players.
Soundcloud at least comes close to them. EDM and Remixes are huge on Soundcloud and they are what a lot of people come for.
Alright, I might sound like a fanboy here but here’s the truth, I rarely use Soundcloud. Soundcloud is a concept, a dream, the ultimate small artist platform if one ever was. However, it’s not a complete music platform for me. I love mainstream music too. I have to hear my regular music.
Another huge flaw is how I can never find the right music too easily, I have to sift through at least 3–5 songs to find the one I like.
But you know what, it’s worth it when I just have to listen to that one song. It isn’t worth the effort to find my next favorite artist though.
This article is different from my usual articles in this series, and it has to be, because Soundcloud does not fit the usual music streaming app framework.
Here are my thoughts though.
- Everything under the sun and moon is on Soundcloud. I’m not even going to try finding faults here.
- Radios are okayish at best. If I start with an artist, the radios are decent.
- If I start with any other search term like ‘retro’ or ‘Indipop’, it goes haywire.
- Bollywood music does exist on the platform, it feels just wrong because there is no organization at all.
- Soundcloud, however, can be used in conjunction to Bandcamp or other artist discovery platforms. That’s when it shines on it’s own.
- Soundcloud has great potential if it can get proper access to Copyrighted music.
