But that mix, #170, would prove to be a turning point for the budding label. Weeks after it was uploaded to SoundCloud, Joe Kay woke up to a notification that his Soulection account had violated the streaming platform's terms of agreement and that two episodes hosted on the site—#170 and #171—had been removed for violating copyright. The two flagged shows counted for two strikes—one more, and Soulection's account, along with an audience of over 150,000 faithful listeners, would be permanently terminated. "Our biggest following comes from SoundCloud," Joe Kay says. It was a loss the label couldn't afford. Coming amid announcements of SoundCloud's new partnerships and evolving policies, Soulection's takedowns highlight the tense interdependence between independent labels and music distribution platforms. The internet has cracked the music industry open in some ways, but in others it's still locked tight.

SoundCloud was founded in 2007 as a tool for music distribution that allowed artists to upload, stream, share, and comment on audio files with ease. Arriving in the era of MGMT and M.I.A., when new music moved via sloppily coded MP3 blogs, MySpace profiles, and unstable anonymous services like Hulkshare, SoundCloud's smart, distinctive design stood out. The musician Beck, one of the platform's pioneering advocates, made headlines for himself and the site by uploading weekly DJ sets in 2009, then a novel idea. Web developer Lee Martin, with whom Beck has worked closely, put him onto the service. "For a mixtape that's 40 minutes long, SoundCloud allows you to comment on different parts of the track," Martin told Wired at the time. "That's incredible." SoundCloud streams and downloads were reliably hosted and easily embeddable, which made blogs happy, and their widgets featured prominent stats for plays and likes, so it was clear if a track was blowing up—both to the songs' creators and trend-forecasting fans. Users could subscribe to artist accounts directly, eliminating the need to check external sites aggregating the same material, and in 2013, the site introduced a feature that allowed users to repost someone else's SoundCloud track on their own page—a retweet for beats— essentially allowing anyone to start their own frictionless music blog within SoundCloud.

But despite its now 175 million users, last year SoundCloud posted a $29 million dollar loss. There was another looming threat, too: copyright. Much like YouTube, SoundCloud was built on user-generated, often amateur, content. While their policies are clear, their policing is often lax. SoundCloud hosts countless remixes and DJ sets, like Soulection's, which violate its terms of use by featuring uncleared source material, and there are constant straight-up uploads of songs by people who clearly don't hold copyright; right now, the most played Nicki Minaj song on SoundCloud ("Anaconda") was uploaded by a Brazilian Katy Perry fan account, while 19 million hits on Nicki's song with Jessie J and Ariana Grande have gone to an Egyptian uploader named Mahmoud Abd Shalaby. It was inevitable, then, when Bloomberg reported this July that the platform was in talks with the major three record labels, Universal, Sony, and Warner. In exchange for not suing, the Big 3 would each take a three to five percent stake in SoundCloud and a percentage of future earnings. Last week, the company confirmed the first agreement from these talks, announcing a partnership with Warner Music Group around it's new ad-supported platform "On Soundcloud": in addition to owning that three to five percent stake, Warner will collect royalties whenever their material is streamed on the platform.

Around the same time that these label negotiations were first reported, SoundCloud began rampantly flagging accounts for copyright infringement. "The labels were basically like, 'Either we're shutting you down, or we're going to own a part of you and police it ourselves," speculates Jacqueline Schneider, Soulection's director of strategic communication. Soulection had personal relationships with SoundCloud staff, having used the platform since the label's inception, but the wave of flaggings came without warning. As reported on DoAndroidsDance, Universal had even begun shutting down tracks directly, without SoundCloud's involvement. That sounds like what happened to Soulection's mixes #170 and #171. "[SoundCloud] didn't even tell me which song it was for," Joe Kay says, but he has a hunch. "I played the Lido remix of Disclosure's 'Latch' two weeks in a row. I didn't realize [Disclosure's distributor] Universal had shut Lido down for uploading that remix himself. I put so much time into every show, and for one song out of 85 to have a show taken down really pissed me off. That's when I realized that there was a crazy shift."