The vast majority of music I listen to on SoundCloud is released on small labels (<10, <100, or <1000 artists). It is not that hard to release on those labels. There are tens of thousands artists releasing on thousands of labels every Friday.

That being said, I guess I may have some genre bias. Maybe it’s exceedingly difficult to get signed to a small label as e.g. a Midwest Emo Band (bad example because I have friends who released on a small label as a Midwest Emo Band). But you need to put in the effort if you expect me to give you my precious listening time.

Edit: redundancy