SoundCloud took a community-first approach to building its business, prioritizing finding artists to post on its service over making deals with music labels to license their music, the approach taken by Spotify. The music industry was still in the process of adapting to a digital ecosystem when SoundCloud emerged; illegal file-sharing was rampant. But when the industry finally began squelching unauthorized distribution of artists’ tracks, SoundCloud was hit hard. D.J.s were also told to take down mixes of songs they didn’t own the rights to, and many of the remixes the site was known for were removed. SoundCloud ‘‘was very much built in the dot-com-era mentality of building an audience and then finding a way to make money,’’ Mark Mulligan, a music-industry analyst, told me. SoundCloud struggled to monetize the service. Artists who paid to be featured on the site balked at having ads run against their music, and when the company introduced its own version of a subscription service, called Go, the response was tepid. How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month?

Generally speaking, the business of music streaming is treacherous at best: Consumers don’t seem to want to pay big money for access to digital music services, so companies must keep the fees low. But the more those subscribers listen to music, the more these services have to pay the labels for access. Even Spotify, which has the largest user base of all the streaming services, still diverts more than half its revenue back to the labels for licensing fees. And the most popular artists — Rihanna, Future, Drake — are all releasing music exclusively through the streaming service that pays them to do so; or in the case of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, through the streaming service they own, Tidal. A start-up like SoundCloud stands almost no chance of competing.

For the most part, streaming services feel sterile and devoid of community. Spotify, Tidal and even YouTube to a degree are vast and rich troves of music, but they primarily function as search engines organized by algorithms. You typically have to know what you’re looking for in order to find it. They have tried to remedy that drawback with customized playlists, but still they feel devoid of a human touch. Serendipity is rare.

By contrast, the most successful online communities, like SoundCloud, have the feel of public spaces, where everyone can contribute to the culture. They feel as if they belong to the community that sustains them. But of course that’s not how it works. In ‘‘Who Owns Culture?,’’ Susan Scafidi writes: ‘‘Community-generated art forms have tremendous economic and social value — yet most source communities have little control over them.’’

SoundCloud’s fan base may soon learn this lesson the hard way. The service’s founder, Alexander Ljung, declined to be interviewed for this column, but after Chance the Rapper tweeted about his interest in saving SoundCloud, the men talked on the phone, which Chance reported was ‘‘very fruitful.’’ Ljung agreed, tweeting that for now, SoundCloud was ‘‘here to stay.’’ Whether SoundCloud can last another 10 years remains to be seen. But the moral of its struggle is clear: As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.