Wud Records: SoundCloud exodus

Posted in News on 08/09/2025

Our SoundCloud exodus has begun.

SoundCloud destroyed our account in error. We have been loyal members for almost eleven years, paying monthly for the highest level account they offer. Not one word of explanation or apology. Only AI-generated automated responses that never quite seem to properly understand the problem, and certainly do nothing to fix it.

We find the total lack of support from SoundCloud completely unacceptable under the circumstances. They destroyed our account! So, our SoundCloud exodus has begun.

This entire debacle has made us feel incredibly uncomfortable with how dependent we are upon that one platform for our music. Losing 3998 followers in one crazy moment was a big hit we had to take.

SoundCloud’s track monetisation policy is something we like. It is a much fairer system than most of the streaming services.

However, their complete lack of response and concern regarding their – presumably accidental – sabotage is simply not good enough. No customer service will likely end in no customers. As SoundCloud are not interested in keeping our account, we shall move it.

887 tracks is the most we will have ever had at SC before the SoundCloud exodus began. This number will start to shrink. The screenshot is what we see. Almost 1% of our followers are back!

Before the SoundCloud exodus began, Wud Records had 887 tracks on the platform, 93 of which were not available to the public. That number will start to shrink. This screenshot is what we see. Almost 1% of our followers are back!

We have begun our SoundCloud exodus by starting to move our music to HearThis, Audiomack, and Audius. We shall be adding more music to Bandcamp, to further increase our resilience to any more bizarre outbreaks of entropy.

Audiomack and Audius are completely new for us and have come highly recommended. We shall see how things go. So far, we have only added the two oldest recordings we have to those platforms – The Blaze Tape by Mark Drower and the Everyones, and Inauguration by Now. Both of these recordings date back to 1982.

The Wud Records HearThis has already existed for a few years and was simply a disorganised dumping ground. Now we have started to organise it.

So far, we have fixed three disorganised Archive albums at HearThis. They are Life, Times and Dreams by Watershed, World Three by Andromeda and the eponymous Prism album, by Prism.

Also we have added The Blaze Tape by Mark Drower and the Everyones, and Inauguration by Now, to HearThis.

We were considering keeping HearThis just for the bands in our Archives. However, we rather like the platform, even though it is much smaller than SoundCloud, so we have invested in them to the tune of a top level membership (which SoundCloud clearly don’t want any more) and are considering adding the rest of our music that is currently on SoundCloud to HearThis as and when we can.

For HearThis, Audius and Audiomack, the plan is to add our music chronologically. The Archive music already at HearThis will be organised and repaired first, and then whatever is left will be added.

We’ve been on the verge of a SoundCloud exodus for a long time by now. We had a number of run-ins with them a few years ago. They do crazy things without warning sometimes, e.g. downgrading everybody’s ‘Stats’ to ‘Insights’.

One of our arguments resulted in Wud Records‘s DM-sending capability being permanently disabled, due to the fact that we kept informing some of the obscure artists whose music we liked that we had added them to a musical discoveries compilation.

What finalised our decision was their robot, Otto. Not a very bright robot, and certainly not very helpful. Marvin would have hated it. We asked Otto if SoundCloud valued our loyalty and membership over the last eleven years. Otto replied that if we were having trouble cancelling our subscription, we might try a few different methods, which it listed to achieve just that.

There was laughter! Yes, it was amusing, and also a bit like SoundCloud were giving us the finger. So be it then. Decision: made. SoundCloud exodus: begun.

It is impossible to predict how long the SoundCloud exodus will take. It requires a fair amount of work to move an album, and then make sure everything is all exactly as it should be when it arrives. We may abandon our playlists at SoundCloud and have a few blank pages at our website for a while, and we may not.

What even is SoundCloud any more? Two unwashed blokes smoking weed in a bedsit and playing Fortnight?

Who knows…

To visit Wud Records at HearThis, please click here.

To see how we are doing over at Audius, please click here.

To check out our Audiomack, please click here.