Soundcloud already has a pro plan which I see a lot of artists using. Why do they need ads? Do you they not already make enough money? It's not the specifics of what is being proposed here that bothers me. But something about this makes me feel that this will be soundclouds downfall. I don't want to be soundclouds product. I want soundcloud to be the product. I would happily pay for their service (providing they don'…
last I checked, they were a for-profit business. If they believe they can make more money (and thus: profits) by playing ads, that's what they do.
As a for-profit business, it's totally within their rights to gain as much money as they can and they have zero obligations to only have the best of the end-users in mind.
Of course, as ads become more and more intrusive, people might switch to a competitor with fewer/no ads, or they might convert to paid accounts, but assessing that risk, too, is Soundcloud's problem.
My guess is that they feel they are popular enough now to be able to add ads and still be able to keep their user base because Soundcloud is where the artists are (which happened because they had a huge audience, mostly because they had no ads up to now)
It's the natural progression of things.