Can you remember when you first used Soundcloud? I can’t. But I know that it’s been a part of my life for a very long time. It was often a treasure trove for me when I was stuck at a desk in a job that I was quarter past bored with.

And although I’ve had my fair share of time spent hurling expletives at the screen because the song I was looking for is on Soundcloud except it’s not actually that song but someone just titled it that way for clicks. It makes me mad just thinking about that.

Anyway, last week, there were rumours about Soundcloud shutting down and not even making it to Christmas. Then there was a tweet involving a phone call with Chance The Rapper and it looks like the site is going to stick around. For now.

This whole debacle got me thinking though: we all love discovering new music, right? We all love doing that for free, right? Sorry, Apple Music, I love you but free is better than not. So when are we getting together to brainstorm a similar mechanic for African music?

I know, I know, everyone would just post their friends’ bad raps, right? But what if we all held ourselves accountable for the world hearing them? Oooooh.

Seriously though, imagine if there was a place you could go that doesn’t have a press release paragraph under a video or datafilehost link? Sidebar: you guys really, really should stop hitting the cut and paste on these tired press releases and acting like they are original blog posts. I digress.

I think it’s nice to have tastemakers and people who know music to guide us. Or simply, to do the labour of looking for new, good music so that we don’t have to. But sometimes people over-hype songs that are just plain wack.

So what are we going to do?