ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN LATE AUGUST,

SZA tweeted “dumping random thoughts” with a link to a SoundCloud account titled “.” The link turned out to be a collection of three previously unreleased SZA songs, including “I Hate U,” which quickly crossed over to and exploded on TikTok, before it was taken down from SoundCloud. By the time she officially released the song through Top Dawg Entertainment/RCA Records in December, the fan frenzy pushed it to a No. 1 debut on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and a No. 7 debut on the Hot 100 — SZA’s highest solo mark to date, for a song that she called “an experiment on SoundCloud.”

“It was a creative thing — she wanted to put out music for her fans without the pressures of dropping a ‘single,’ ” says Terrence “Punch” Henderson, SZA’s manager and president of TDE. “That’s how we used to do it back in the day: We’d just throw something on SoundCloud to feed the people directly. So doing it now was just a return to that. It was about not doing what the norm is, and the norm now is going directly to the DSPs. It built up a lot of anticipation there, and people wanted to hear it [get officially released].”

For the SoundCloud team, SZA’s surprise release — essentially an exclusive track from one of R&B’s biggest artists — was proof that, no matter how removed from an artist’s early career, SoundCloud can still play a significant role in helping break a song. “That just makes it exciting: an artist that’s as big as SZA comes here, her day one, where she wants her core fan base that has been there from the beginning to hear it first,” says Erika Montes, vp of artist relations at SoundCloud. “It brings some excitement back to where it’s not so strategic, like, ‘We have to plan it out, give it a month in advance.’ Instead, it’s just like, ‘Here it is!’ That’s the beauty of music, just being excited to share things as a surprise one day.”

Still, SZA’s foray back to her roots is not one that many artists have taken of late, preferring to go to the major DSPs, where there’s more money to be made.

“Artists tend to ‘graduate’ from SoundCloud, but I don’t think it’s by choice,” says Daniel “Bird” Desir, CEO of Timeless Music and manager for Internet Money, the production crew behind some of the biggest SoundCloud rap hits by artists like Juice WRLD, Lil Tecca and XXXTentacion. “For the labels, it’s a business, so they want to make sure that you can put your music somewhere where they can get their return on investment. So they’ll stay away from SoundCloud. They’ll tend to say, ‘Let’s just go to the DSPs and make a bigger impact.’ ”

SoundCloud has reinvented itself in the past; its underground roots as the “Wild West of music,” as one artist manager puts it, evolved into the fully licensed, subscription-tiered service with formidable behind-the-scenes muscle that it is today. But at its heart, it’s still a tool for discovery.

Its users can often credibly claim to be ahead of any particular curve in genre shifts, but its reputation as a starting point, not a destination, remains tough to overcome.

“As an A&R, as a manager, I still look for those little niche communities that are on SoundCloud that are growing whatever the next thing is,” says Capitol’s Sounds. “But I think [artists] get to a space where they’ve signed some deals, they’re in some partnerships and now that music has to be monetized, because so much goes into creating it. I think that’s the one downside about it.”

The company is well aware of how it is perceived. “We have a good amount of work to do to help strengthen the brand in a way that helps make it as relevant as it was years back when everybody was consuming on SoundCloud first,” says WirtzerSeawood, who is charged with executing much of that rebranding. “How we message the brand, how we appear in the marketplace, how we talk about how SoundCloud matters, how we make SoundCloud more relevant to younger consumers, how we globalize the brand in ways that can be translated across many different cohorts of users — all those things are really important, and we’re really focused on that.”

Whether the new SoundCloud team can pull it off remains to be seen. There is a mountain of licensing negotiations, technical details and proofs-ofconcept ahead that will determine whether this new iteration of the company succeeds, and whether it can compete with some of the biggest music and entertainment brands in the world. It will roll out new features and products for creators as it builds out from the data gleaned from FPR and the relaunched Repost. It has a partnership with Fortnite, and negotiations for others in the gaming metaverse are in the works as well. Tekno’s first release with SoundCloud is set for early February, and Lil Pump’s first single is slated for later that month, with a major marketing and radio push behind it.

“They’re going to help us a lot. They’ve got a lot of analytics and data that [Pump is] going to be able to capitalize on, and they’re super excited,” Battle says. “If he graduated, I guess this is grad school.”

There are many measures of success, however, and even with all of its ambition, SoundCloud’s executive team is trying to keep it simple.

“The beauty of the independent nature of the future of music is that the artist will continue to be able to have a choice,” Seton says. “And if artists keep coming back to us, then we’re doing something right. Because the whole point is we’re giving them another option, and the nature of the value proposition is that they’re going to have that choice again a few years later, and if we haven’t done right by them, we won’t be able to continue that relationship. And maybe that’s how we should define success.”