From “We Move Music”
to “EVERY SCENE LIVES HERE”

The June 11, 2009 capture is a short page. An orange cloud sits above the word SoundCloud in the corner, and the header has four buttons: Home, The Tour, Upload & Send and Sign Up. In the middle, an orange box says Watch a Video. Under it: Take the Tour or Sign Up.

SoundCloud was founded in Berlin in 2007 by Alexander Ljung, a Swedish sound designer, and the musician Eric Wahlforss.^[1] When TechCrunch wrote about it in October 2008, it was in private beta and isn’t meant as a consumer site. It was a way for musicians and labels to send each other tracks.

One feature came straight from the record business. TechCrunch described a Dropbox where outsiders could submit songs for review, a digital version of the mailed-in demo tape.^[2]

The small print has a version name. Under the menus, the footer says the visitor is looking at a named release of the site.

The January 1, 2010 capture keeps the headline and the sentence about music professionals word for word. The box above Watch a Video is empty in this replay, and the logo in the header didn’t load. What’s new is a row of four tiles, each with a joke under its name.

The Latest News line has moved on from the widget: SoundCloud releases a major update named Taylor. Miguel, then Taylor. The search menu in the header now has Groups next to Tracks and Users, and the footer sells Premium and a gift: Buy a Gift Premium.

Outside the page, SoundCloud was already more than a mailroom. In July 2009 WIRED called it a threat to MySpace as the place musicians put their music, and reported that Moby and Beck used its player on their own websites.^[3] In May 2010 TechCrunch reported that it had reached a million users.^[4]

Every sound on the site had a page of its own, and one of them is in the archive from 2008 to 2026: Flickermood by Forss. Forss is the artist name of Eric Wahlforss, the co-founder.^[15] His track page says it was uploaded on September 22, 2007, the year SoundCloud was founded, and the page’s code gives the track the number 293.

The track page, January 2010
Under the waveform runs a row of tiny pictures marking the seconds that have timed comments. At 0.01, one listener wrote: The first song I heard by you. Memories... The box Stats for this track counts 9023 plays, 46 comments, 52 favoritings and 1614 downloads. The uploader box under it names Eric Wahlforss above Forss.

In June 2011 the homepage shows a player. Under Your Sound, At the Heart sits an embedded track: an orange play button and a grey waveform crossed by thin blue lines. Under the waveform runs a row of tiny pictures. Each line is a listener’s comment, pinned to the moment in the recording it is about. (We blurred the commenters’ pictures.)

That was the idea from the start. In 2008 TechCrunch described comments that can be appended to specified times in a track.^[2] The page’s code names the track on display: Andrew WK Voicemail Message, shared by triple_j.

Below the player, three boxes explain How it works. The first, Visualize Your Sound, says: The SoundCloud waveform not only makes sound look good, it makes it social. Further down, a new feature: To Be Heard, You Need a Sound. Introducing our latest feature, The Record Button. Premium accounts start from just €29/year, priced in euros.

The code also holds the header for signed-in users. It starts with Hej, stranger, a Swedish hello.

Back on the Flickermood page, the comments had piled up. In the January 23, 2012 capture the waveform is striped blue from end to end, and the heading over the list reads 325 Comments, then 282 timed comments and 43 regular comments. The plays counter says 68452, more than seven times the January 2010 total.

Also on the page, January 2012
Credits that read like a record sleeve: Released by: Sonar Kollektiv, Release/catalogue number: SK006, Release date: Jun 2, 2003. Above them, a note from the uploader: From the Soulhack album, recently featured in this ad, with a link to a TV commercial page on dswshoes.com whose address ends in october2007.

The June 1, 2012 capture swaps the player for a picture of a laptop, a tablet and a phone with a big red REC button. The headline is Share Your Sounds, and the text under it goes past music: Capture a voice, moment or music in seconds or upload audio you’ve already created. Everyone has sounds to share. Now you can share yours. The first button is blue: Sign in with Facebook.

Three drawn columns follow: Create Original Sounds, Share With The World and Connect With People. A line near the bottom points to SoundCloud Local, a series of featured cities.

The same month, the company was testing its replacement. On June 14, 2012 its engineering blog wrote about the recently-released Next SoundCloud beta, built so the music keeps playing while you click around the site.^[5] On December 4, 2012 SoundCloud rolled the new site out to all users at LeWeb in Paris, and said more than ten hours of audio were uploaded every minute.^[6]

Not everyone liked it. Six days later The Next Web ran the headline SoundCloud user accuses SoundCloud of “doing a Zuckerberg” – on SoundCloud. The user was Pete Owen, a premium account holder, and his protest was a recording uploaded to the site he was protesting. The Next Web reported that he argued the musicians who supply the content should be heard, and that the comments backing him stood at 370 and counting.^[7]

The June 2013 and June 2014 captures still show the Share Your Sounds page, with one addition across the top: You're using an old version of SoundCloud. Next to it, an orange button: Get the new SoundCloud. The Facebook button is gone; the page now asks you to Sign up for SoundCloud or Log in.

The small print in the code changed more than the picture. In 2012 the menu for your account lists Tracks; in 2013 the same menu says Sounds, and the search menu offers Explore Sounds. The Try Premium link at the top becomes Go Pro. The page description for search engines changes too, from the world's largest community of sound creators in 2012 to the largest community of artists, bands, podcasters and creators of music & audio in 2013.

June 1, 2015 is the first capture in our set that talks to listeners first. A large photograph takes up the top of the page: young people dancing, with an orange-red glow over them. The words sit low on the picture: Hear the world’s sounds, and under it, Little Simz and millions of other artists share their tracks on SoundCloud. The logo has changed as well: a white cloud next to an all-caps wordmark, on an orange block in the black header.

Scroll down and the order is clear. First comes a band for fans, Hear your favorites again and again, with Build your own collection. Then a black band for artists: Get On SoundCloud, Make uploads happen, and Make your first upload to SoundCloud. Plan your next worldwide release.

This is also the first capture whose code is only the shell of an app. The words on the screen are drawn by JavaScript. Without it, the fallback text in the code includes this message: Your current browser isn't compatible with SoundCloud. Please download one of our supported browsers. The same sentence is in every later capture we checked.

Flickermood’s page went into the app as well. In January 2015 the album cover, a pale blue box with forss and soulhack drawn on it, fills the whole player, and the waveform is white on top of it. The counters moved to a small grey line: 260,748 plays and 1,715 likes. Two years later the cover sits in its own square on the right, the page says 9 years, and the plays read 533K.

On April 1, 2016 the same photograph is cropped into a shorter band, and the headline is gone. In its place is a sentence and a search box: Find the music you love. Discover new tracks. Connect directly with your favorite artists. The box says Search for artists, bands, tracks, podcasts, and next to it, a second choice: Upload your own.

Below that the page sends you to charts, Hear what's trending for free on charts, with an orange button, Explore our top 50. In this replay the chart itself returns an error, and we hid the error message. Then a phone and Get the app: Never stop listening. The last band says Thanks for listening. Now join in.

Three days before this capture, on March 29, 2016, SoundCloud launched its paid Go plan in the United States, with offline listening and no ads.^[8] Its price depended on where you bought it: through the iPhone app, the same plan cost three dollars more. On the homepage, Go isn’t on the first screen.

The October 1, 2017 capture has a new photograph under a purple tint: a person in a striped top, lying back. The headline is Connect on SoundCloud, and the line under it reads Discover, stream, and share a constantly expanding mix of music from emerging and major artists around the world. The browser tab now says Listen to free music and podcasts on SoundCloud. Further down, a dark band calls to artists: Calling all creators, What are you waiting for?

The page gives no sign of the summer SoundCloud had just been through. TechCrunch reported that SoundCloud laid off 40 percent of its staff in July 2017, 173 people.^[9] On August 11 it announced an investment led by The Raine Group and Temasek; Kerry Trainor became chief executive, and Alexander Ljung moved to chairman.^[10] In July, NPR’s Chicago station WBEZ reported that Chance the Rapper had spoken with Ljung and released his new song exclusively to SoundCloud: Big B’s, with Young Thug.^[11]

The song’s own page, January 2019
The cover art is a screenshot of a text conversation. One message says We should drop on SoundCloud. The waveform runs 4:02, and the counters read 12.9M plays, 303K likes and 37.8K reposts. The browser tab: Big B's by "Chance The Rapper" | Free Listening on SoundCloud.

The October 2018 capture repeats the top of the 2017 page: the striped photo, Connect on SoundCloud, the search box and Explore our top 50. In October 2019 the headline stays and the photograph changes, to a crowd of dancers with a woman in rainbow hair on the right. The button under the search box changes too, from Explore our top 50 to Explore trending playlists.

From 2020 to 2024 the archived app didn’t start in our replays, so the captures jump to 2025. One change in those years was in the payouts. Fan-powered royalties began on April 1, 2021, for nearly 100,000 independent artists who earned money directly on SoundCloud. Under them, each listener’s subscription or advertising revenue is distributed among the artists that they listen to.^[12]

Another was on the phone’s home screen. In August 2024 SoundCloud let users pick the app’s icon: free users got the classic orange and black, and subscribers got seven more, chrome, rose gold, silver, soft purple, hot pink, tie-dye, and leopard.^[16]

The April 1, 2025 capture puts the headline in a rounded card over a pink wall and a portrait, with the name Kito in the corner: Where every music scene lives. Under it: Discover 400 million songs, remixes and DJ sets: every chart-topping track you can find elsewhere, and millions more you can't find anywhere else. A thin purple strip at the very top is for artists. It starts Uploading tracks just got way easier and promises they can upload, get heard, and get paid.

The page’s description for search engines, in the same capture, gives another figure: Discover and play over 320 million music tracks. One capture, two different counts, in two different words: tracks in the code, songs on the card.

Below the card come the search box and Upload your own, then a line our 2017 to 2019 captures also have: Hear what’s trending for free in the SoundCloud community, here with Explore trending playlists.

The strip’s get paid soon reached physical records. In July 2025 SoundCloud announced a partnership with elasticStage for approved Artist Pro artists to sell vinyl with no upfront cost, no minimum order requirement, and full control over their music. Artist Pro users could join a waitlist for access.^[17]

The final frame is the live site on October 15, 2026, because the archived 2026 captures didn’t render. The page is black. The headline is set in heavy capitals, EVERY SCENE LIVES HERE., and the sentence under it makes the biggest claim in this story: Discover the world's largest music library, with over 4X the catalog of every major platform: every chart topper you know, plus demos, secret tracks, remixes, and DJ sets you can't find anywhere else.

SoundCloud’s Go+ page shows the arithmetic: 100 million tracks from major and independent labels plus 400 million uploaded directly by artists.^[14] The two buttons are Upload and Explore Go+. A strip above the page sells artists an audience: Get heard by up to 100 listeners on your next upload with Artist or Artist Pro. Artist Pro was called Next Pro until December 2024.^[13]

Further down, Never stop listening and Calling all creators are still there, now in capitals, with a QR code for the app.

2009 · We Move Music2026 · Every Scene

◀ ▶

In 2009 the header’s third button said Upload & Send, and the page promised to move music for artists, record labels & other music professionals. In October 2026 the first of the two big buttons under the headline says Upload, and the strip above the page promises an artist up to 100 listeners.

In between, the page turned toward the people listening. It asked for your sounds in 2012 and offered you the world’s sounds in 2015. Our 2016 to 2019 and 2025 captures end with Thanks for listening. Now join in.

The orange stayed through all 13 captures. The cloud sits above the name in 2009 and beside it by our 2015 capture. And the waveform that crossed the 2011 homepage still spans the player on the Flickermood page in 2017, nine years after its upload, and on the Big B’s page in 2019.