SoundCloud

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

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

User freedom

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

Business model

• 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.
• 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.

Incidents

Generative AI

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.

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. 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.

See also

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Amazon Music