so I added an album to iTunes on my MacBook, out of 17 tracks it only uploaded the last track, the rest have this dotted line cloud icon next to them. What does this mean and why isn't it uploading the tracks?
If you have icloud music library enabled in the itunes preferences then the "add to icloud" option appears only in the files tha are not uploaded. In your case there would be songs with the option an songs without it.
Thats how I uploaded my library because half of it wasn't in the cloud and was not being uploaded. In the song view you can select to view by icloud status and then just select the ones not uploaded.