Comment by tokyodude

I'm not disputing anything you mentioned but I just thought I'd point out that, at least in my experience, Soundcloud has close to instant response streaming audio. Pick a new song it starts streaming immediately. Que a different time and it jumps to that part immediately. Looking in the devtools it's pretty clear they are sending lots of small packets of audio over websockets rather than using the browser's built in audio streaming features as most music sites do. Of course it probably still has the TCP issue if there is an error but in general it's way more responsive than other music sites I've used.