SoundCloud
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| Basic information | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2008-10-28 |
| Legal Structure | Private |
| Industry | Entertainment |
| Also known as | |
| Official website | https://soundcloud.com/ |
SoundCloud is a music streaming platform founded in 2007. The SoundCloud website was made public in October 2008.[1]
Consumer impact summary
[edit | edit source]User freedom
[edit | edit source]- SoundCloud allows artists to enable direct downloads on their tracks. Listeners of any membership tier can use direct downloads on the website.[2]
User privacy
[edit | edit source]Business model
[edit | edit source]- SoundCloud has three membership tiers for listeners. Free, which is ad-supported, Go, which is ad-free, and Go+, which is ad-free and gives access to locked songs not available with other subscriptions.[3]
- SoundCloud has three membership tiers for artists. Without a paid subscription, SoundCloud limits the hours of music which can be uploaded to an account. The upload limit for the Basic package is 2 hours, 3 for Artist, and Artist Pro users have no limit.[3]
Market control
[edit | edit source]Incidents
[edit | edit source]Generative AI
[edit | edit source]In January 2024, SoundCloud announced integration with AI music tools Fadr, Soundful and Voice-Swap, allowing users to directly post AI generated content to the platform. [4]
In May 2025, an article published by Futurism accused SoundCloud of updating their Terms of Service to allow all content on the platform to be used to train generative AI.[5] SoundCloud later clarified that it's use of AI was strictly to provide “personalized recommendations, content organization, fraud detection, and improvements to content identification”, not to train generative AI models.[6]
See also
[edit | edit source]References
[edit | edit source]- ↑ "About SoundCloud". SoundCloud. Archived from the original on 12 Aug 2025. Retrieved 2025-09-04.
- ↑ McCall, Vivian (2021-01-14). "How to download SoundCloud songs from the website onto your computer, or from the mobile app with SoundCloud Go". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "What type of subscription is for me?". SoundCloud. Archived from the original on 2025-07-27.
- ↑ Paine, Andre. "SoundCloud integrates with assistive AI tools to enable direct uploads for artists". MusicWeek. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.
- ↑ "SoundCloud Quietly Updated Their Terms to Let AI Feast on Artists' Music". Futurism. 2025-05-09. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.
- ↑ Corcoran, Nina (2025-05-14). "SoundCloud Updates AI Policy in Terms of Use After Backlash". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.