SoundCloud describes itself as an artist-first music streaming and sharing platform founded in Berlin in 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss. Its reported scale now spans more than 400 million tracks, over 40 million creators, and artists in 193 countries, making it a particularly useful source for understanding how discovery-driven listening develops beyond traditional catalog boundaries.
Contents
- Platform history and scale
- Catalog breadth and discovery
- Listener behavior and music age
- Genre and scene growth
- Artists and tracks in the 2025 rankings
- Digital Services Act figures
Platform history and scale
SoundCloud was founded in 2007, according to SoundCloud About. The company says its founding team was Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, and that the company began in Berlin. SoundCloud About characterizes the service as a two-sided music platform built for artists and fans, rather than only as a conventional streaming catalog.
The company’s own descriptions emphasize participation as well as consumption. SoundCloud About says the platform has more than 40 million global creators. SoundCloud Help Center reports more than 400 million tracks from more than 40 million artists across 193 countries. Those figures describe the platform’s current scale as stated by SoundCloud; they are not a separate industry audit.
The platform’s stated audience proposition is unusually broad discovery. SoundCloud About says fans can explore more than four times the catalog of any major platform. SoundCloud Help Center also calls SoundCloud the largest audio discovery platform in the world. These are company descriptions, so they are best read as positioning claims rather than like-for-like measurements from an independent market study.
SoundCloud scale at a glance
| Measure | Reported figure | Source label |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2007 | SoundCloud About |
| Global creators | 40M+ | SoundCloud About |
| Tracks | 400M+ | SoundCloud Help Center |
| Artists | 40M+ | SoundCloud Help Center |
| Countries represented | 193 | SoundCloud Help Center |
Catalog breadth and discovery
The catalog figure has changed over time. In June 2024, SoundCloud reported more than 375 million tracks and 40 million artists in its Recommendations on SoundCloud Report. The later Help Center figure of more than 400 million tracks therefore represents a larger stated catalog than the June 2024 figure, but the two statements use different publication contexts and should not be treated as a precisely measured growth series.
SoundCloud’s artist-first model helps explain why the catalog is not limited to releases that have already passed through major-label or mainstream editorial systems. The service says it is built for artists and fans, while its discovery claim focuses on access to a catalog exceeding four times that of any major platform. For listeners interested in soul music and vinyl, this kind of breadth can include both familiar recordings and community-led discovery paths, although the supplied figures do not quantify the soul or vinyl portions of the catalog.
In 2025, SoundCloud said listeners who discover tracks through Liked By playlists were more than three times as likely to engage with the track themselves. The statement appears in the SoundCloud Music Intelligence Report 2026 and measures a reported relationship between playlist-based discovery and subsequent engagement. It does not establish that the playlist caused the later action.
Listener behavior and music age
SoundCloud reported a marked difference between US listening on its service and listening across the wider industry. In the United States, current music represented 43% of listeners’ time on SoundCloud, compared with about 24% across the industry, according to the SoundCloud Music Intelligence Report 2026. SoundCloud described current music on its service as nearly twice as large a share of listening as across the industry.
The report also said that music older than 18 months took a greater share of listening in the United Kingdom in the previous year. The comparison is important because it points in two directions at once: SoundCloud’s US audience was reported as especially concentrated on current music, while UK listening showed stronger weight for older material. The figures are geography-specific and should not be generalized to every SoundCloud listener.
Reported listening comparisons
| Audience or measure | SoundCloud figure | Comparison or period |
|---|---|---|
| US current-music listening | 43% of listening time | About 24% across the industry |
| Liked By discovery | More than 3x greater likelihood of engagement | SoundCloud’s 2025 statement |
| UK older-music listening | Greater share for music older than 18 months | Previous year, per the report |
The age pattern is relevant to a music culture that values both new discoveries and durable records. Still, the report does not provide a numeric percentage for the UK older-than-18-month share in the supplied facts, so the direction of change is more precise than its size.
Genre and scene growth
Electronic music was one of SoundCloud’s clearest growth areas. SoundCloud said electronic uploads rose from one in four tracks in 2020 to more than one in three tracks in 2025. In the United States, electronic music was reported as the fastest-growing genre for the third consecutive year. SoundCloud also said electronic music represented a 6% greater share of streams than in 2022 and accounted for 7% more of all listening over the last three years in the US.
The report identified a broader dance-music rise in the UK and Ireland over multiple years. It also reported that UK garage streams grew 18% in the US during the past year, while minimal tech house streams grew 19%. SoundCloud said these two scenes were crossing borders, linking the growth figures to movement between regional music communities rather than to a single-country audience.
Other scene-level figures point to fast-moving discovery. The hashtag #DJset increased 39% year over year. UK underground rap streams increased nearly 300% in 2025, and SoundCloud called the UK underground the top-growing scene on the platform in both the UK and US. A separate SoundCloud Stories UK Underground Rap playlist blurb said the scene’s streams quadrupled in 2025. Because those statements use different report contexts, “nearly 300%” and “quadrupled” should be retained as separate SoundCloud descriptions rather than combined into a new calculation.
SoundCloud also reported that the UK underground scene’s streams increased almost 300% for fakemink individually in 2025. EsDeeKid’s listening increased by more than 70 times, according to the SoundCloud Music Intelligence Report 2026. EsDeeKid reached No. 10 on the UK singles chart in November 2025 and broke into the Billboard 200, as reported by SoundCloud.
Jazzy became SoundCloud’s most streamed female electronic artist of 2025. In the US, rock was reported as the fastest-growing genre in the UK context? SoundCloud’s exact statement was that rock was the fastest-growing genre in the UK and added 0.5 percentage point to all listening. Hip-hop was once again the most streamed genre in the US. The supplied report does not provide absolute stream totals for any of these genre rankings.
Artists and tracks in the 2025 rankings
SoundCloud’s 2025 ranking coverage included 10 entries in the published US top-artists ranking and 10 entries in the UK top-artists ranking. The US and UK top-tracks lists also each included 10 tracks. These list sizes describe the published rankings, not the number of artists or tracks active on the platform.
The US top-artists list was led by YoungBoy Never Broke Again, who had three tracks in the US top ten. Among top tracks from new US artists, Netón Vega’s debut accounted for three of the top five. GELO’s “Tweaker” was No. 2 among US top tracks from new artists.
In the UK, D-Block Europe was the most played artist for another year. Skye Newman had three tracks from her debut album in the UK top five new-artist tracks. These figures show how SoundCloud’s rankings distinguish overall artist performance from the separate group of tracks associated with new artists.
The genre and ranking data also show why platform statistics need careful labels. “Most streamed,” “fastest-growing,” “top-growing scene,” and “top five new-artist tracks” are different measures. The supplied SoundCloud Music Intelligence Report 2026 facts do not provide a single common denominator that would support ranking every genre, scene, artist, and track on one numerical scale.
Digital Services Act figures
SoundCloud’s Digital Services Act Report 2025 included authority-order figures for Germany and Spain. Germany accounted for 248 Article 10 authority orders and 248 total orders. Spain accounted for four Article 9 authority orders and four total orders. Across the report, the total number of authority orders was 252: four issued under Article 9 and 248 under Article 10.
The report grouped authority orders by subject. Terrorist or extremist activity generated 221 orders. Financial fraud or scams generated 11, other illegality generated seven, hate speech generated three, child pornographic content generated three, and drugs or narcotics generated two.
Authority orders by reported category
| Category | Authority orders |
|---|---|
| Terrorist or extremist activity | 221 |
| Financial fraud/scam | 11 |
| Other illegality | 7 |
| Hate speech | 3 |
| Child pornographic content | 3 |
| Drugs/narcotics | 2 |
| Total | 252 |
SoundCloud reported a median of five days to notify authorities that an authority order had been received. The median time to give effect to an authority order was also five days. These are medians, not guarantees for every case, and the report’s Article 9 and Article 10 categories should not be interpreted as interchangeable legal procedures.
The same report excerpt stated that user-submitted notices totaled 49,636 for the visible table rows shown. It separately showed 9,320 intellectual-property notices, 1,135 defamation notices, and 19,181 privacy notices in the first three categories alone. Because the excerpt describes visible table rows, the 49,636 figure should be retained with that qualification.
Appeals were also reported: uploader appeals totaled 141,065, while reporter appeals totaled 66. These counts refer to different participants in the notice-and-action process, so they should not be added together as though they represented one uniform appeal population.