My guess is that this default surprised SoundCloud, and that this blog post is an attempt to (1) retroactively rationalize missing this difference with a reasonable-sounding explanation, even though it doesn't make sense at 256 kbps, and (2) create something that their support folks can point at when people complain.

It started first noticing some similar songs that repeated too often. Songs that I actually liked, so after a while I recognized them and their variation too often. Then noticing some of the tags I was usually listening to were filled just by just one or two artists. Looking at the artists themselves, they're publishing a couple of songs per hour, non-stop. They're also clearly stating that the music is generated in the artist info btw.

Problem is, this destroyed completely the "discoverability" for me. Tags are hijacked by hundreds of similar songs you can't avoid. As soon as somebody likes one of these, "related" also quickly starts to loop.

I found no way to block these. You can block users, but this doesn't prevent their songs being recommended to me. Feedback was, so far, ignored.

I can't possibly think they're not aware of this issue, so I can only assume that so far they're getting something out of it...

> Low frequencies take very few bits to encode, and you feel them as much as hear them

yeah then it starts to smell pretty bad.