Kaytranada and Kehlani. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” Sheck Wes’ “Mo Bamba.” The commonalities these artists and songs share is neither region nor genre but platform. SoundCloud was their origin point. “It sparked so many careers once upon a time,” says Stonie Blue, a New York-based DJ and cofounder of BIYDIY Records. “Artists could upload their music straight to the community that would lurk there before the main focus was streaming on Apple Music or Spotify.” Since joining the platform in 2012, he was introduced to newbie artists like Sango, Dream Koala, Yeek, and WOLFE de MÇHLS. “SoundCloud,” he says, “always felt like the underground.”
The element of discovery has been SoundCloud’s secret sauce since it launched in 2007. The Berlin-founded company has maintained its relevance by embracing a simple ethos: come as you are. That’s made SoundCloud the for-everybody platform—one that embraces all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art. By setting itself up as a hub for community-oriented music streaming, it’s become a kind of incubator for avant-garde sounds. SoundCloud is everybody’s underground.
That may soon change. SoundCloud has plans to pursue a buyer this year, according to multiple reports, a move the company has been working on for some time. In 2017, SoundCloud nearly shut down when it was reported that the company would run out of funding within two months. Thanks to a last-minute $170 million cash infusion from investment firms Raine Group and Temasek Holdings, and a little help from Chance the Rapper, the company was saved from termination. Raine Group and Temasek are now reportedly seeking a payday of upwards of $1 billion. With news of a possible sale, what hangs in the balance is the possible loss of what has made SoundCloud such a unique platform, and the impact that loss will have on the future of the music business.
“Might sound dramatic but it changed my life,” says Dede Ademabua, the Grammy-nominated producer known as IAMNOBODI. “Wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for SoundCloud. I was able to make a name for myself by uploading songs and DJ mixes that people all over the world connected with. I became a part of [music collective] Soulection through this platform.”
The spirit of the platform was inherent from the beginning. Ademabua, who has worked with Nipsey Hussle, Little Simz, and Bryson Tiller, says community was always at its heart, and what it stood for. “If anything, SoundCloud was about having fun and connecting with like-minded individuals globally,” Ademabua says.
Those connections hit a critical mass in 2015 when SoundCloud rap announced itself to mainstream ears, as upstarts Lil Peep, Smokepurpp, XXXtentacion, and Juice WRLD began to make noise. Even for SoundCloud, a platform notorious for its exhaustive catalog of sounds, SoundCloud rap—rebellious, drug-friendly, and swirling with tales of torment—was like nothing else on the scene. The New York Times christened it “the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip-hop.”
That’s the thing about SoundCloud—it is always breaking genre, looking ahead, and finding experimental grooves to share. Though it did not always succeed—there was an exodus of musicians from the platform in 2013 when the company ignored a redesign flaw that caused a spam issue, to say nothing of users buying likes, followers, and listens—it has attempted to equip artists with the tools for success, even if it couldn’t agree on the best route for compensation. “SoundCloud was there for us because SoundCloud understood, like, we wanna drop a song right now,” rapper Travis Scott said on The Shop in 2020. “We’re not trying to wait for any load-up. We wanna go right now. Our fans and then people adapted to our speed.”
Even as emergent musicians have decamped to TikTok and YouTube for a chance at fame, SoundCloud has sustained itself by continuing to put the demands of its creator community first. “The ability to comment on a song and see where that comment was placed within the song is still nowhere else, and it really makes the community feel alive and not just like some random numbers,” says artist and producer Nelson Bandela. “I feel like SoundCloud and to an extent Bandcamp are the only music streaming platforms that have a true sense of community.”
Years ago, when Bandela began his journey as a musician, he turned to SoundCloud because “it was my radio.” As he grew as an artist, creating music he describes as “space gospel,” he decided he wanted his music to be in conversation with that same community. “I started uploading there once I started making music because of the ease of use.”
What platforms like SoundCloud have attempted to do is give power to artists in an industry that would rather see them stripped of it. The aftershocks at Bandcamp have yet to stabilize—Epic Games sold the company to audio licensing company Songtradr last fall—and with a potential change in ownership for SoundCloud, musicians are being met with fewer options for true equity in the business. (Bandcamp artists are paid 82 percent of every transaction, and SoundCloud allows artists to sign up for a royalties program that entitles them to a portion of their listeners’ subscription and advertising revenue.)
It is still too early to predict how new ownership could reshape SoundCloud. I do believe its loss would be incalculable. What Elon Musk has done with Twitter doesn’t give me hope. Nor does the shrinking of Tumblr, even though that platform’s members always manage to hold on. To lose SoundCloud, a platform that prided itself on discovery, where the pursuit of an original sound felt like a noble cause, would be close to catastrophic. To lose SoundCloud in a world that increasingly favors imitation, theft, and conformity, seems especially cruel.
There again is a taste for originality in our mass culture—evidenced in the success of films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, American Fiction, and Barbie, with the acclaim of novels like Chain-Gang All Stars—that SoundCloud directly speaks from and to. More and more, a reorientation toward innovation and away from cheap appropriation is taking hold. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s hard to imagine SoundCloud absent from that future.
