One of the hardest parts about making it in a musical career is putting your work out for the world to hear. In many instances, a person may be talented beyond measure but lacks the opportunity and publicity to make it big. However, in August 2007 a new launch pad for young artists was created. Today, SoundCloud has over 10 million artists and has become a well-known platform. It’s a cost-free way for anybody to begin their music career.

“Soundcloud has no risk to it,” local artist Tommy Kowalski said. “There’s nothing to lose, its either you get a lot of views or you don’t and there’s no loss it’s all free to upload everything so it’s definitely the best way to do it.”

Local artist Kowalski began uploading in 2015 under the name of TCatdoom. Since then he has become increasingly popular. When he was first starting out, Kowalski was only getting around 40 views per song. Flash forward to now, he is getting around 20,000 views.

While SoundCloud started as a path with many opportunities for artists such as Kowalski, the number of artists flooding the platform has made it challenging for new music to be heard. Being able to upload anything is helpful, but with the amount of low quality work put out, the software becomes cluttered.

“There are so many underground artists on Soundcloud,” junior Carson Stenberg said. “So many [artists] aren’t getting the fame that they deserve. People with talent are getting drowned out by the masses.”

Stenberg, known previously as “Csten the God” but recently changed it to “Mr E” began his music career by uploading onto Soundcloud. He found that in order to get any sort of publicity, uploading his work onto other platforms such as iTunes and Spotify is the key to more listens.

But for both artists, the fame is beside the point. They both write purely to get their message out to the world, no matter the platform.

“I’m going to do whatever I want,” Kowalski said. “It’s what I like doing whether I have no views or 50,000 views”           

But with this new ability to start making music, many rush forward to express their disapproval of artists such as Kowalski and Stenberg.

“They’re gonna hate it no matter what,” Kowalski said. “But with the people hating you there’s going to be the same amount of people in favor of you and loving you so you just have to choose [who] you’re going to look at”

Stenberg looks at hate differently from Kowalski, choosing to embrace it rather than block it.

“It’s people that doubt me or people that don’t understand me that make me want to chase my dreams even more,” Stenberg said. “The hate is fuel, I love it.”

The future is an unknown for Stenberg and Kowalski. Both will continue to write new music, while also investing their time in more realistic careers.

“Its kinda just a hobby, I’m not really pushing anything,” Kowalski said. “I mean if people were to come at me with like record deals and contracts I would go for it but I’m not pushing it as much as I could.”