SoundCloud For Artists: Prices, Costs, Royalties & Hidden Fees

SoundCloud’s Free Plan

The free plan is called Basic (previously SoundCloud Next).

You can upload up to 3 hours of your music for free on SoundCloud. But, unless you choose one of the monthly plans, you wont be able to monetize your music.

With the free plan, your music will only be on SoundCloud, and you wont earn any money from listeners streaming your tracks.

Tip

You can still add a “buy link” to your track, which enables you to redirect listeners to your website or to any other marketplaces, such as Bandcamp.

SoundCloud’s Monthly Plans

SoundCloud has a total of 3 plans you can choose from, 1 free one (see above) and 2 monthly paid ones:

USD prices: Artist is $3.25/month, billed yearly for $39 and Artist Pro is $9.99/month billed yearly for $119.88

The monthly pricing showed is actually for a yearly subscription which is 40% off. On monthly billing, the Artist plan in the screenshot at €2.99 is €4.99 for example.

Paying monthly is much more expensive and should not be considered.

• Artist (previously SoundCloud Next Plus)

For a flat fee of $3.25 per month (on yearly billing), SoundCloud will send your music to streaming platforms like Spotify and allow you to enable monetization on the tracks you have on SoundCloud itself.

SoundCloud Artist will cost you $39 per year.

The 3 hours track limit still applies in SoundCloud Artist. The 2X and 3X you see on the screenshot means 2 times, 3 times (meaning you can distribute 2 songs a month).

• Artist Pro (previously SoundCloud Next Pro)

SoundCloud Artist Pro will cost you $119.88 per year ($9.99/month) to upload an unlimited amount of tracks.

You now also get 30 7 days free prior to your yearly payment as part of a free trial since October 2023.

So yes, like in my previous article about the Distrokid and Tunecore unlimited plans; SoundCloud also has one.

SoundCloud’s Monetization

Choosing any of the 2 monthly plans, SoundCloud will monetize your music on streaming platforms and on the website itself. You will get 80% of the revenue.

Note

The best thing about this, is that it also includes the YouTube Content ID. Both SoundCloud Plus and Pro will get your music in the YouTube CID and allow you a total (per-track) control over claims right from your dashboard.

This means that you have a total control over which videos (either yours or from other people using your music) you wish to whitelist. Only Distrokid gives a similar per-video control.

SoundCloud’s Royalties

This part is a game changer and very important for the payout comparison. Read carefully.

SoundCloud is a little bit out-of-the-box with a special system of fan-powered royalties.

With any other distributor, you can’t monetize on SoundCloud, only choosing a monthly plan will allow you to do so.

Here is how the royalties work:

• If someone listen to your music and only your music: you get a 100% share of their paid subscription.
• If someone listen to your music and other artists music: you get a certain % based on how long that person has listened to you.

Example: User A spent 1h listening to your music, 1h listening to other musicians. You get a 50% share.

Example 2: User B spent 1h listening to your music, 9h listening to other musiciens. You get a 10% share (1h of a total of 1h+9h=10h is 10%).

SoundCloud’s Hidden Fees

SoundCloud will take 20% of everything you earn.

You will keep 80% of the revenue.

There are no exceptions, or any other fees, on top of this 80/20 split in addition to the price that you already pay monthly for their service.

Publishing Administration

SoundCloud also has a publishing service, where no cut percentage is specified. You can apply by filling a form. I don’t know what kind of “deal” you get, because they do not disclose this information anywhere.

Same Scenario

Situation from the last article:

“Let’s say that your average payout per stream on streaming platforms is $0.003, that means $3 every 1000 streams.

And your average payout per stream on social platforms is $0.001, that means $1 every 1000 streams.

This is your first year and your first album. You got 100,000 streams on Spotify (example of a streaming platform), making your payout $300.

And you got 100,000 streams on YouTube (example of a social platform), adding $100.”

These are now the simplified final results including LANDR (with YouTube CID) from my main article:

• LANDR PRO with my referral link: $364.01
• LANDR PRO: $355.01
• Distrokid: $342.09
• CdBaby: $333.01
• Tunecore: $327.01

SoundCloud’s Payout

In this exact same scenario, here is what you get from SoundCloud:

• You choose Artist ($39/year): you get 400-39-(400*0.2)= $281
• You choose Artist Pro ($119.88/year): you get 400-119.88-(400*0.2)= $200.12

Note: 400*0.2=80, this is the 80/20 revenue split.

Hold on, where are the streams from SoundCloud itself?

Here we are in the important part, about the royalties that you should have read carefully, because I marked it as such.

Repeating this: No other distributor can monetize your music on SoundCloud but SoundCloud itself (ignoring tracks that are locked behind GO+ that some labels can actually send to SoundCloud; some big soundtracks almost get no plays at all behind this).

You got a total of 60k streams that don’t include your SoundCloud streams. I will take a random 10k streams as reference, which may or may not be accurate, but you’ll see the results with that amount.

You have now 10k extra streams, worth $33 that nobody outside of SoundCloud itself can monetize, because it’s on their own platform, with their own custom fan royalty shares.

Note

The average per stream with their custom system is still the same as the competition. This number includes the % they take, so 10k streams are worth roughly $33.

This is what you actually get now:

• You choose Artist: you get 281+33=$314
• You choose Artist Pro: you get 200.12+33=$233.12

The streams you get on the platform itself are very important for the final payout, you can see that only 10k streams added $33 already, 20k streams would add $66, 30k streams would add $99.

Does SoundCloud Takedown Your Music?

Based on a few comments about this that I found. SoundCloud did not takedown the music of people that cancelled their yearly plans.

It is also specified “permanent distribution” in the Next Pro plan, which means they don’t take it down even after you stop paying.

So, unlike Tunecore and Distrokid; SoundCloud does not pull your music off the streaming platforms, if you cancel or don’t renew your subscription.

Warning: If you cancel during the new free trial introduced in October 2023, they do take down the music you uploaded during that free trial.

SoundCloud First Fans

A new feature as of August 2023, SoundCloud First Fans will push your new uploads to 100 people based on their listening taste.

This new feature is part of the Artist and Artist Pro plan for no additional cost.

Choosing SoundCloud for music distribution or not will depend on the amount of streams you have on it. A high amount of streams on the platform will make it better then the competition, a low amount will make it worse.

In almost all cases, there is a little trick that I thought about that will allow you to maximize your earnings:

• First, use LANDR, Tunecore or Distrokid as your main distributor (keep 100% of sales & downloads instead of 80%)
• Then, add SoundCloud as a standalone without distributing your music to other platforms, only to monetize on SoundCloud itself (once you have a high enough amount of streams on it, to break even on the subscription cost)

This is a win-win situation and will allow you to keep 100% (excluding social platforms) while also being able to earn money from your streams on SoundCloud.

To break-even on the Artist subscription ($39/year), you will first need about 12k streams per year (valued at $39) on SoundCloud.

Warning: Free streams on SoundCloud do not generate any revenue. If your music happens to attract a lot of free listeners those 12k streams could as well be $0.

The more streams you have the more accurate what I said before will get. I would not bother before 100k yearly SoundCloud streams at least.