What are the upcoming changes to sharing?

What is happening to contact lists?

Contact lists were something we built in the early days to help you share your sounds privately, and get feedback from friends. As the platform has grown, this feature has proven hard to support, due to technical limitations, and it’s contribution to impersonal mass sharing. We want your sounds to get the reception they deserve, and by making the experience better for you and your recipients, we hope to improve this.

With this in mind, in an effort to make sharing simpler, more personal, and usable, we made the decision to phase out contact lists on new SoundCloud. These changes will occur over the coming weeks. They will still be available for the time being on Classic SoundCloud.

If you’d like to send sounds directly to multiple recipients, we recommend using secret links with a newsletter service, like MailChimp.

What is happening to private sharing?

We know how important it is to be able to share your sounds to friends and get their feedback, especially the ability to do this privately.  We are currently in the process of re-building upload and sharing from the ground up, making them native to new SoundCloud, more reliable, and Flash-free. We’ve often heard from users that they don’t like receiving sounds shared to them and thousands of others, as it feels impersonal, discouraging them from clicking play.

When planning our new upload and share flow, we found that 87% of private shares are to less than 20 people. So in an effort to increase reliability, make sharing a more personal experience, and reduce spam, we will be putting an upper limit at 20. These changes will occur over the coming weeks.

If you’re looking to share to more than 20 people in order to promote your work, try uploading it publicly! It will be pushed to the streams of all of your followers, and with new Reposts and Sets, it’s even easier for your sounds to be shared far and wide by your listeners.

If you currently have a Premium account that provides expanded access to private sharing, it will continue to be available on SoundCloud Classic until your current premium plan ends.

If you’d like to send sounds directly to multiple recipients, we recommend using secret links with a newsletter service, like MailChimp.

What happened to some of the features that I paid for?

If features you’ve paid for as part of your plan are missing from SoundCloud, you can still use them in Classic SoundCloud. To switch back, click ‘More’ in the top right corner, and then click ‘Switch back to Classic SoundCloud’.