135 Million Tracks and the Eternal Question of Which One to Play

SoundCloud has always occupied a different psychic space than Spotify or Apple Music. Spotify is the library. Apple Music is the recommendation machine that knows your taste better than you’d like to admit. SoundCloud is where the stuff lives that hasn’t been cleared for either—the bedroom producers, the DJ mixes, the bootlegs, the demos that were better than the album version. It’s always felt slightly lawless, in the best way.

Which is what makes SoundCloud Go, their paid subscription tier, a slightly complicated proposition. The service launched in several markets earlier in 2016 and finally arrived in Germany in December—somewhat poetically, given that SoundCloud itself was born in Berlin. Offline listening, no ads, full access to 135 million tracks. Nine euros a month, with a thirty-day trial.

I’ve never been fully convinced that SoundCloud needed to be Spotify. The friction was part of the deal—the discovery was chaotic, and that chaos was generative. A clean subscription tier irons some of that out in exchange for convenience you can get anywhere else. But 135 million tracks is genuinely a different number than what the major platforms offer, and if what you’re after is the stuff that lives outside the mainstream catalogue, having it available offline on the train is hard to argue with. Maybe the lawlessness survives the subscription model. We’ll see.