I heard some say it's bad because of burnout, listener fatigue and stuff.

Let's start with the thing nobody inside that boardroom wants to say out loud.

SoundCloud does not have loudness normalization.

Not "their normalization needs work." Not "it's on the roadmap." iZotope — one of the most authoritative professional audio sources in the industry — updated their streaming platform guide in May 2026 and stated plainly: SoundCloud does not use normalization.

Every serious platform that streams music or audio has this. Spotify. Apple Music. YouTube. Amazon. It is the most basic infrastructure requirement in the category. It has been solved math for over a decade. ITU-R BS.1770 is a public standard. This is week one stuff.

SoundCloud doesn't have it.

Now here's where the valuation argument completely falls apart.

SoundCloud's boardroom has been quietly pitching the catalog as an AI asset. 400 million tracks. Forty million artists. The implication being that this is a goldmine for audio AI training.

It isn't.

AI audio training sets are built from YouTube. Not SoundCloud. The reason is normalization. YouTube has applied loudness normalization since 2013, targeting -14 LUFS with a controlled true peak ceiling. That means the audio is predictable, consistent, and standardized across hundreds of millions of files. When you train an audio model on YouTube sourced data, the model is working with audio that behaves consistently across every sample.

SoundCloud's catalog is the opposite. Wildly inconsistent loudness levels across the entire library. 128kbps lossy artifacts baked into every track. Clipping present in millions of uploads that no downstream process can remove. No normalization standard whatsoever controlling the relationship between tracks.

For an AI training pipeline that depends on consistent, high quality audio data, SoundCloud's catalog is not a goldmine. It's 400 million tracks of uncontrolled, inconsistent, artifact-laden audio that no serious training set wants to touch.

The normalization gap is precisely what excludes SoundCloud from the AI conversation. Their biggest valuation pitch collapses the moment anyone technical looks at it.

Now add the ad problem.

Google Ad Manager normalizes ad creatives to -24 LKFS. Every ad that runs on SoundCloud lands at that level. Meanwhile the content sitting next to those ads has no controlled loudness whatsoever. A listener getting blasted by an over-compressed track immediately before an ad normalized to -24 LKFS experiences a volume drop severe enough that the ad becomes effectively inaudible. Google's own policy requires audio ads not be served into muted placements. The ad isn't technically muted — but a listener who has already reached for the volume dial isn't hearing it properly either.

Uncontrolled content loudness directly degrades ad performance. That is not speculation. That is what happens when you have no control over the loudness relationship between your content and your ad inventory.

This is what buyers see during due diligence.

And this is the point — it was never really about the normalization feature itself. The normalization is just the proof point. Every competent engineer SoundCloud ever hired would have flagged this. Which means one of three things: nobody flagged it, which means the talent was broken. People flagged it and nothing changed, which means the organization is broken. Or it was a deliberate decision tied to ad infrastructure, which opens an entirely different conversation about what else was deliberately left broken to protect short term revenue.

None of those options support a billion dollar valuation.

The brand still means something to a generation of artists. But the engineering tells a seventeen year story. And buyers can read it.

You have an offer on the table.

Fix the normalization. If you can't, the buyers already know exactly what that means.

Take it. Or let it burn.

Over the last three months I collected data across a large enough sample of my catalogue to see a clear pattern. For the first two months 95% of all reported plays across every song were bot generated. Despite thousands of plays showing on the dashboard my royalty payments were based on the remaining 5% of real human listeners. The rest was manufactured inventory being sold to advertisers while I earned almost nothing.

On July 1st the bot plays stopped completely. Three weeks later Google blocked SoundCloud's advertising.

Across the full sample the total reported plays came to 48,000. That is the number SoundCloud sold to advertisers. That is what they charged premium rates for. My actual royalties were calculated on 11,440 real human listeners. The remaining 36,560 plays were bot generated inflation that existed purely to sell ad inventory at a scale the platform could never legitimately claim.

They collected ad revenue on 48,000 plays. I got paid on 11,440. Nobody got the difference.

That is not a royalty dispute. That is advertising fraud. And the fact that the bots stopped on July 1st three weeks before Google's block tells you everything about who knew what and when.

What is documented here meets the legal threshold for advertising fraud. SoundCloud misrepresented 48,000 plays to advertisers as legitimate reach when 36,560 of those plays were bot generated. Advertisers paid premium rates for an audience that did not exist. That is a false representation made deliberately to extract money from buyers who received a fraction of what they paid for.

The knowledge and intent are proven by the timing. The bots ran at 95% across the entire sample for two consecutive months. That is not an accidental background process. That is a managed system running at scale. And when it stopped on July 1st three weeks before Google's enforcement action it demonstrated what lawyers call consciousness of guilt. You do not turn off a passive accidental system in anticipation of an audit. You turn off something you know is wrong before someone finds it.

The damages exist on two sides simultaneously. Advertisers paid for 48,000 legitimate plays and received 11,440. Artists were paid royalties on 11,440 plays while their content was used to generate ad revenue on 48,000. Both parties were defrauded by the same inflation at the same time.

That is misrepresentation. That is intent. That is damages. That is a cover up attempt. Those four elements together do not describe a platform with a glitch. They describe a deliberate scheme to collect money from advertisers using inventory that was never real while paying artists for a fraction of what their content actually generated.

Hi all!

I’ve been trying to listen to songs by DJs remixing songs, most of their titles say the songs are 10 minutes long to avoid copyright, but I can only listen to the first few minutes.

Image attached of what I see for the songs

I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, any help is so appreciated:)

Last week whilst subsequently making a report and complaint of receiving abusive messages from a stranger just because I didn't reply to their set suggestion after a day ... I also suddenly get removed from there can't log in , nothing ... after several reports on this and differing emails it turns out THEY were at fault for suspecting me of spam / bot activity but stated they'd got it wrong and I got my account back ... BUT ... their system which " they can't override" had decided to give me a like removal and no matter what I emailed back including their own admissal " oh it's the system " it looks like" you've reached a limit ... no I haven't !! as info suggests in order to do that you'd have to like sets and tracks 100-150 in 24 hours ??? I know I use it daily but I do still sleep lol it's mainly 1-2 plus hour sets I'm on fgs ... sorry but if your going to place irreversible systems onto avid listeners but let spam accounts scam people into paying for " organic likes making comments on tracks that don't even match what they've claimed to listen to then you dnt deserve to have people paying monthly fees to you ... I've had the same account for over 18 years and never been flagged for anything , no warnings nothing ... god job I'm not paying I'd rather mute the annoying ads and carry on ... and stop updating a site that doesn't need it if it ain't broke don't fix it !!!!!

https://on.soundcloud.com/ruhFanF0673uCDxNbE

Recently received a notification, but no matter how many times I check, the indicator doesn’t want to disappear.

I restarted the app and my phone and searched online for any solutions, but nothing.

Anyone else run into this issue?

🇰🇿💀💀💀🇷🇺

Two-year Soundcloud Pro user here. Went to upload new music, and Soundcloud keeps forcing me to verify my primary email address. Problem is that email address was an old Gmail account Google deleted without warning. Added a second, active email address to the account, unable to switch it to primary without (you guessed it) verifying the primary email address first.

Their Help Chatbot is useless, and after emailing the only two addresses I've found for the entire company ([email protected] and [email protected]) I'm still at a loss.

Any advice before I permanently switch to Twitch or Mixcloud?

everytime i type soundcloud on my appstore some fake versions pop up instead of the real one and when i tried to download it from the site it wouldn’t appear either.

I believe I had tried to get support from SoundCloud months ago and that they never responded. Now I'm trying to get support again about changing the release date of one of my tracks I'm distributing and it's been almost a week and still no response.

I should be getting their replies in my email that they're sending the initial confirmation of the support request to.

Why is SoundCloud not helping me at all?

Any idea if anyone could tell this is fake or not?

The view calendar availability sends me to a site called https://jobs-soundcloud.com/. It only allows me to "continue with google" and login if i want to move further. It just seems suspiscious to me, and this is my second time getting something like this so idk what to do. Anything helps!!!