What happened to the SoundCloud wave?

If you got into French House at any point after about 2012, chances are you found it on SoundCloud rather than through a record shop or a label. That's where the whole thing lived. Producers like DeeJMD, Skibblez, Frenssu, The Phantom's Revenge and DJ EQ all started out the same way, uploading a track, putting it up as a free download and waiting to see whether anybody passed it on.

It worked because back then the platform stayed out of the way. If a bigger account reposted you then their followers heard it, and if enough of them reposted it as well, a track made on a laptop in a bedroom could end up in front of tens of thousands of people without a label, a distributor or a single pound spent on it. A fair few of the names on this site got their start doing exactly that, and plenty of them never went near a traditional release until years later.

Upload that same track today and it would almost certainly do nothing at all. Part of that is the sheer volume of AI generated music being pushed onto the platform, which has made digging through new uploads close to pointless, and part of it is SoundCloud itself, which stopped being a feed of what people were actually sharing and turned into another algorithm deciding what it thinks you should hear.

The frustrating bit is that nothing has really replaced it. TikTok rewards a fifteen second hook rather than a six minute filtered groove, Bandcamp is brilliant for selling to people who already know who you are and useless for finding anyone new, and Spotify playlists are gatekept in a way that SoundCloud reposts never were.

So if the next Frenssu uploaded his first track tomorrow, would any of us actually hear it?