Consumer Rights Wiki

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is a music streaming platform founded in 2007. The SoundCloud website was made public in October 2008.

SoundCloud
Basic information
Founded 2008-10-28
Legal Structure Private
Industry Entertainment
Official website https://soundcloud.com/

Consumer impact summary edit

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

  • User Freedom
  • User Privacy
  • Business Model
  • Market Control

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Freedom edit

  • SoundCloud allows artists to enable direct downloads on their tracks. Listeners of any membership tier can use direct downloads on the website.[1]

Business model edit

  • 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.[2]
  • 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 is 2 hours, 3 for Artist, and Artist Pro users have no limit.[2]

Incidents edit

Generative AI edit

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. [3]

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.[4] 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.[5]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ↑ 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.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 SoundCloud. "What type of subscription is for me?". Archived from the original on 2025-07-27.
  3. ↑ Paine, Andre. "SoundCloud integrates with assistive AI tools to enable direct uploads for artists". MusicWeek. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.
  4. ↑ "SoundCloud Quietly Updated Their Terms to Let AI Feast on Artists' Music". Futurism. 2025-05-09. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.
  5. ↑ Corcoran, Nina (2025-05-14). "SoundCloud Updates AI Policy in Terms of Use After Backlash". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on 2025-08-16.
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