SoundCloud has always been a haven for the underground. From bedroom producers in São Paulo to experimental noise artists in Berlin, it’s the platform where raw, unfiltered music thrives—free from label contracts, industry rules, and commercial pressure. But that same openness is now being exploited by artificial intelligence developers, many of whom are using music from SoundCloud to train generative AI models—without consent, credit, or compensation.
This quiet extraction of creative labor is sparking outrage across indie music communities. While the tech world frames it as innovation, artists are calling it what it feels like: theft.
SoundCloud: A Non-Commercial Oasis
Unlike Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, SoundCloud isn’t built around profit per stream. Many artists on the platform don’t monetize at all. For them, SoundCloud is a testing ground, a sketchbook, a digital archive of works in progress. It's a place where experimentation is safe precisely because the stakes aren’t financial.
Crucially, much of the content is uploaded under non-commercial or creative commons licenses. Artists often tag their work with “no commercial use,” “demo,” or “for listening only.” In other words: this is not a content farm for corporate data-mining.
But AI companies don’t seem to care.
Data Scraping Without Consent
Generative AI models require massive amounts of data. Music AI systems like Google’s MusicLM, OpenAI’s Jukebox, and a growing wave of open-source projects all depend on training data sourced from somewhere. Increasingly, that “somewhere” appears to include public platforms like SoundCloud.
These companies often sidestep questions about dataset origins. Few offer transparency, and even fewer provide opt-out mechanisms. But tech sleuths and musicians alike have noticed that certain AI-generated tracks seem eerily similar to obscure SoundCloud uploads—ones with low plays and no commercial distribution.
“This isn’t just sampling. It’s replication,” says a Toronto-based lo-fi artist whose unreleased track was mimicked in an AI-generated demo. “And it came from a private link I only ever posted on SoundCloud.”
Legal Grey Zones, Cultural Theft
Because much of SoundCloud’s music is shared under informal or non-commercial terms, it exists in a legal grey area. AI companies argue that scraping publicly available content for training falls under “fair use” or “research.” But that’s a shaky defense when the resulting tools generate content that competes with or commodifies the original.
More troubling is the cultural dimension: SoundCloud is a refuge for artists outside the mainstream—queer voices, migrant creators, underfunded scenes. It’s the last platform where niche and experimental music can live on its own terms. Feeding this into commercial AI engines amounts to a kind of digital extraction: mining independent culture to feed systems built by and for Big Tech.
No Consent, No Credit, No Compensation
There are currently no clear rules requiring AI developers to disclose their training data sources. That means artists often don’t even know their work was used—until they hear it echoed in a machine-generated track.
There’s no consent. No credit. And certainly no compensation.
For SoundCloud users who share their work freely, this feels like a betrayal of trust. What was meant to be an intimate exchange of art among peers is being harvested for profit by entities that don’t respect the community’s values.
What Needs to Change
To protect independent creators and platforms like SoundCloud, we need:
Legal frameworks that require disclosure of training datasets.
Opt-out infrastructure for artists who don't want their work scraped.
Ethical AI development standards that distinguish between commercial and non-commercial content.
Artist compensation models if their work contributed to model training.
If AI developers continue to treat SoundCloud like an unregulated sample bank, we risk losing one of the last true sanctuaries for non-commercial, underground sound.
In a world where music is becoming data, the question is simple: Who owns the soul of the song?
