> In December 2025, SoundCloud announced it had discovered unauthorised activity on its platform. The incident allowed an attacker to map publicly available SoundCloud profile data to email addresses for approximately 20% of its users. The impacted data included 30M unique email addresses, names, usernames, avatars, follower and following counts and, in some cases, the user’s country.

That's from the haveibeenpwned email which I received because of course I'm part of that 20%.

Remember to have unique passwords for each website kids, ideally with a password manager.

Recently I decided to evaluate it for serious use and start posting there again, only until their new uploader told me I need to switch to a paid plan, even though I triple-checked I was well within free limits and under my old now unused username I uploaded a lot more (mostly of experimental things I am not that proud of anymore).

It looks like their microservices architecture is in chaos and some system overrides the limits outlined in the docs with stricter ones. How can I be sure they respect the new limits once I do pay, instead of upselling me the next plan in line?

Adding to that things like the general jankiness or the never-ending spam from “get more fake listeners for $$$” accounts (which seem to be in an obvious symbiosis with the platform, boosting the numbers for optics), the last year’s ambiguous change in ToS allowing them to train ML systems on your work, it was enough for me to drop it. Thankfully, it was a trial run and I did not publish any pending releases.

If you still publish on SoundCloud, and you do original music (as opposed to publishing, say, DJ sets, where dealing with IP is problematic), ask yourself whether it is timr to grow up and do proper publishing!

SoundCloud is European, so most of the dark patterns used by American companies to offer "free" service are not available to them, and they are required by law to actually delete data instead of pretending to delete it.

So if you had over three hours uploaded, it seems reasonable for them to restrict the service. If you had <= three, then it would a problem.

I don't use SoundCloud, but if profiles didn't have contact information like Email Address on them then it could be meaningful to now connect those two dots.

Like, 'Hey look, Person A, who is known to use email address X, kept Lost Prophets as one of their liked artists even after 2013!'