I am not saying Soundcloud's current UI is that great, but I think the proposed design in total is a step back from the current one. I think you can make some great improvements with a few iterations from the proposed design. It's a good first proposal, but it needs some extra thought before having a design Soundcloud could actually release to users.

I think it's great Evan (the person who made the proposal) spent time to improve Soundcloud's design, but so the team at Soundcloud did. The downside of Evan is he probable made this all by himself, so he didn't get the luxury the Soundcloud team has of feedback from colleagues/peers.

That's the main general issue there is with most redesigns people do: they lack the experience the product team gathered from users and the knowledge from problems the product team already encountered. And it's just a lot harder when you're on your own, without insights other people have.

Outside people like Evan do have the advantage of having a fresh look on things and experience with the product – something that the product team will lose after a while because they are so into their own product they don't see things anymore (like banner blindness). You can definitely see that in his design: an entirely new direction that the Soundcloud people could definitely combine with their experience and knowledge of the product.

For example, the introduced blur would be a great addition to display behind Soundcloud's current promoted song with the big graphic behind the graph. And there are a couple of other things the Soundcloud design could really benefit from, but the problem is that Evan tried to create an entirely new design without keeping some of the current design's elements that do work good.