[snickmy]

This is a great analysis.

I would separate it in two categories.

1) the bad UX when having a big library 2) the 3rd party developer experience.

Starting from 2) I'd say SoundCloud has been fairly open in their early stage, and a lot more conservative later on. I'm not sure what's the direction they are going to take in the future. If I was running SoundCloud, I'd keep the API as a playground, not for production use, and I'd try to fix the major issue in my product instead of leaving room for someone else to crack that business.

Regarding 1) you are absolutely right. It boils down to 3 major areas of the product: classification, recommendation and search. Big players are working on that, but they are all implementing some sort of social driven collaborative filter (which is sad, if we think about how personal is the listening experience). Soundcloud should try to have a more hybrid approach introducing some more advance machine learning neural network technique to get rid of the 'cold start' effect and have a better targeting of the 'long tail' of their 125m tracks. Once they have the 'data' layer done, they should complement with a product UX experience, including curated playlists, radios, personal automatic generated playlist, and an overall better UX experience for the user-listener segment of their audience.