What good actually looks like on SoundCloud

Every number on this page comes from a stratified sample of 2,000 public SoundCloud profiles, roughly 223 per follower tier, with each artist’s whole catalogue read on 2026-08-28 — a median of 26 releases each. The per-artist median is taken before the cross-artist percentile, so one viral track cannot drag a whole band. We publish the provenance because these figures get shown to artists as “typical for your size”, and a table of percentiles with no stated source is indistinguishable from the guesses it is correcting.

One caveat, stated up front: the sample is snowballed through reposts and follows, so it carries a follower floor and describes working artists rather than the whole platform. These are bands for people releasing music, not for SoundCloud’s long tail.

An earlier version of this page rested on 110 profiles and got three things wrong, which is worth saying plainly rather than quietly editing. It put the repost rate for 1k–10k artists at 0.8% — it is nearer 0.32%, so the busiest band on the platform was being measured against a bar more than double the real one. It had the like rate rising with audience size when it gently falls. And it put plays-per-follower for a 150–400 track catalogue at 0.019 when the figure is 0.154. Small samples are confidently wrong, and the only fix is a bigger one.

Repost rate

The number that matters most, and the one almost nobody measures. SoundCloud has no recommendation feed to optimise for — a track reaches people who are not already following you when somebody else reposts it, and in no other way. A track with a high repost rate travels; one without does not, however many plays it has.

This is the one band that does not simply track size. It rises from a median of 0.09% under 500 followers to 0.35% around 1,000–2,500, then falls away to 0.16% above 100,000 — a hump, not a slope, and the overall correlation with follower count is 0.003. Only 17% of artists clear 1% of plays, so the received wisdom that 1% signals real reach is right about roughly the top quartile.

Like rate

The cheapest signal a real listener gives, which is exactly why bought plays show almost none of it. A like rate far below the band while plays look healthy is the clearest bot signature on the platform.

It is close to a platform constant: 4.3% under 500 followers, 3.1% above 100,000, and a correlation with follower count of only −0.16. That makes it unusually useful, because a number that does not move with size is one you can read without knowing anything else about an artist. About 23% clear 5%.

Comment rate, and the figure everyone repeats

The commonly quoted advice is that a healthy SoundCloud track draws comments on 0.5% to 2% of its plays. Measured across 2,000 profiles, 28% of artists reach 0.5% and only 8% reach 2% — and 17% get no comments at all. The band describes the top quarter of the platform, not the norm. An artist measuring themselves against it is being held to a bar three quarters of their peers never clear, and concluding their music is the problem.

Plays per follower

This one is not banded by follower count, and the reason is measured rather than assumed: the correlation between catalogue size and plays-per-follower is −0.61, against −0.38 for follower count. It tracks how much somebody uploads far more strongly than how good their audience is. Banding it by followers, as our first version did, told every prolific artist their reach was broken.

The spread is 35x from one end to the other. If you compare yourself to anybody, compare yourself to artists who upload about as often as you do.

Followers per account followed

A credibility check rather than a performance one. A ratio near 1:1 on an account with real numbers is the signature of follow-for-follow, and those followers do not listen — which drags every other rate on this page down. Note how hard this moves with size: a median of 0.3 in the smallest tier against 3,922 in the largest. About 18% of the sample sits below 1.5.

How this was measured

Profiles were reached by snowballing through the repost and follow graph, then stratified so every tier fills to the same depth rather than drowning in small accounts. Each artist’s catalogue was read through the SoundCloud API — a median of 26 releases each — and the per-artist median taken before the cross-artist percentile. Every tier is measured; none is interpolated from its neighbour.

Nine tiers rather than four, because the old scale jumped 1k to 10k to 100k and most working artists live inside that first jump — an artist with 1,200 followers was being judged against one with 9,000. The thinnest band here rests on 213 profiles, so none of them is a figure to hold loosely.