I went through and deleted a bunch of accounts a while ago, SoundCloud being one of them. It looks like I don't show up in the breach. It's nice to know SoundCloud actually deleted my data, I'm never totally sure what happens on the backend.
Only 20% of accounts were breached, so that's an optimistic conclusion.
For some services, like Anthropic/Claude's stubborn refusal to let you remove your payment method, deleting isn't even an option.
In theory, it's a legal requirement based on GDPR and CCPA as well as many other new digital rights laws across Europe and many states in the USA. SoundCloud is probably big enough to do that correctly otherwise e.g. the GDPR penalty is a highish percentage of the company's total revenue which gives the laws a good amount of "teeth".
An email–only breach seems to cheapen the value of HIBP. It's not telling me if my password was leaked.
"The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles".
So they've scraped public data. Why care?
Hackers stole information of 29.8M accounts (~20% of users). SoundCloud is downplaying the data beyond email address as "publicly available", but the data wasn't scraped. "Profile statistics" aren't public either. Their main response[0], seems to focus on passwords and payment details being the only risky data. They even imply email addresses are public.
> no sensitive data was taken in the incident.The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles (not financial or password data)
[0]: https://soundcloud.com/playbook-articles/protecting-our-user...
Maybe the two public data points weren't connected before?
I don't use SoundCloud, but if profiles didn't have contact information like Email Address on them then it could be meaningful to now connect those two dots.
Like, 'Hey look, Person A, who is known to use email address X, kept Lost Prophets as one of their liked artists even after 2013!'
Yeah or this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26386418
SoundCloud is a weird place, people in entertainment have certain strong incentives. They figured out who I am, figured out all the email addresses I have, jacked the account attached to my SoundCloud, stole my account. I still to this day, don't know how they pwned my email (tfa was on but it didn't trigger suspicious activity it let them login without triggering it, no clue how they got the password either and the password is secure enough that it's too hard to brute force, and it's not in a pwned db). Based on what was in my soundcloud inbox when I got access again, someone paid a fair amount to have this done... and now I have to go change my email again I suppose.
Organized crime stealing usernames was apparently a thing for a few years back there, interesting it wasn't limited to Twitter.
But, why care? (Yes, we can “care” that there was a leak - but… why worry? what new risk exists today that didn’t yesterday?)
The data in the leak (other than follower count, etc) was already available for purchase from Zoominfo, 8sense, or a variety of other data brokers or other legal marketplaces for PII.
I suppose the risk now is that the data is freely available and no longer behind a data broker’s paywall?
I'm confused, where were scrapers/data brokers/Zoominfo etc. were getting email addresses for SoundCloud accounts?
They don’t. I’m confused why that info is valuable.
People pitching scammy “I can make you famous” services to aspiring musicians. Happens all the time, there’s a whole industry dedicated to it.
Let's say you have a $SOCIETAL_TABOO streak and let it out via a soundcloud account that isn't identifiable as you without your email.
Now it is.
Now I can blackmail you or haunt you.
(I'm sure there's other examples, tl;dr people are deanonymized, there are uncountable reasons why people choose anonymity)
> The data in the leak (other than follower count, etc) was already available for purchase from Zoominfo, 8sense, or a variety of other data brokers or other legal marketplaces for PII.
?
Isn't that a huge GDPR violation?
You are 100% correct based on article. Not good that you're gray, and your parent of "who cares it was already available and scraped" is the top comment.
> the impacted data included 30M unique email addresses, names, usernames, avatars, follower and following counts and, in some cases, the user’s country
Importantly, 20% of the total userbase it seems:
> In December 2025, SoundCloud announced it had discovered unauthorised activity on its platform. The incident allowed an attacker to map publicly available SoundCloud profile data to email addresses for approximately 20% of its users. The impacted data included 30M unique email addresses, names, usernames, avatars, follower and following counts and, in some cases, the user’s country.
That's from the haveibeenpwned email which I received because of course I'm part of that 20%.
Remember to have unique passwords for each website kids, ideally with a password manager.
Whilst thats important advice, as far as I can tell it wouldnt help here as no passwords are breached. I had a few of our domain users on this report and as far as I can tell theres nothing actionable.
Also, never give out a direct email address, always an alias.
and include a nonce. user+SoundCloud@gmail.com is obviously guessable. user+SoundCloudheuerue64@gmail.com ain't getting guessed.
If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like, aside from the email addresses, all the data leaked was already publicly available on users’ SoundCloud profiles. The only novel aspect is linking that public data to the accounts’ email addresses.
That step makes a big difference though.
A lot of "rap gods" are about to be exposed as "Kevin" from suburbia.
Thankfully the only artist I listen to on there has been known as Bryce from the suberbs for two decades:
Lil B is probably fine, but he is the biggest name I recall coming out of SoundCloud. He blew up all over the 2010s, he was the Kanye of Cloudrap too because he took dressing styles and changed it all up similar to Kanye.
Shout out to lil b and those parties at Berkeley he would perform at in ‘12, ‘13.
Those were the golden sound cloud years.
I was big on tumblr, but he wasn't my style of rap, but I respect him for what he was able to pull off.
There's a few big names: Post Malone, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, Khalid, Bad Bunny
This Kevin was still quite impressive
SoundCloud is the worst company, so hostile to former paying users! I am a hobbyist songwriter and have posted my rough mixes (Apple's Music Memo app which adds drum and bass automagically with two clicks & then mix it in Garage Band) on my SoundCloud for more then ten years. I signed up for their Artist Pro account and was a member for of such consistently for a few years at $17 a month. Once you cancel they then hold all your music hostage by hiding it and later threat to delete it. Horrid!
A former paying user is not a customer. If you don't pay, why should you receive service? I buy a pizza at this pizza shop every week, but I still don't get free ones.
SoundCloud is European, so most of the dark patterns used by American companies to offer "free" service are not available to them, and they are required by law to actually delete data instead of pretending to delete it.
> I buy a pizza at this pizza shop every week, but I still don't get free ones.
Do they take the leftovers from your fridge when you stop buying?
The analogy was bad. You're effectively renting space in their fridge. In that case, absolutely.
If I haven't bought pizza for two months, they use their magical ray, reach into my fridge and turn the leftovers into mold.
SoundCloud used to be good prior to the redesign.
Recently I decided to evaluate it for serious use and start posting there again, only until their new uploader told me I need to switch to a paid plan, even though I triple-checked I was well within free limits and under my old now unused username I uploaded a lot more (mostly of experimental things I am not that proud of anymore).
It looks like their microservices architecture is in chaos and some system overrides the limits outlined in the docs with stricter ones. How can I be sure they respect the new limits once I do pay, instead of upselling me the next plan in line?
Adding to that things like the general jankiness or the never-ending spam from “get more fake listeners for $$$” accounts (which seem to be in an obvious symbiosis with the platform, boosting the numbers for optics), the last year’s ambiguous change in ToS allowing them to train ML systems on your work, it was enough for me to drop it. Thankfully, it was a trial run and I did not publish any pending releases.
If you still publish on SoundCloud, and you do original music (as opposed to publishing, say, DJ sets, where dealing with IP is problematic), ask yourself whether it is timr to grow up and do proper publishing!
This sounds like a classic consistency vs latency trade-off. Enforcing strict quotas across distributed services usually requires coordination that kills performance. They likely rely on asynchronous counters that drift, meaning the frontend check passes but the backend reconciliation fails later. It is surprisingly hard to solve this without making the uploader feel sluggish.
The difference between Artist vs Pro is three hours vs unlimited uploaded music.
So if you had over three hours uploaded, it seems reasonable for them to restrict the service. If you had <= three, then it would a problem.
that just sounds like customer not paying for service not getting the service
The service is freemium, so they had a limited account. Decided to pay for a premium account. And apparently can’t downgrade and get back what they once had.
I'm just guessing, but this:
> and have posted my rough mixes [...] on my SoundCloud for more then ten years
...easily implies >3h of uploads, which is over the free plan limit. If you're over that limit and stop paying, yes, it makes perfect sense that they'd threaten with deletion of some of your existing uploads.
They first hide your songs and as time goes on they start threaten to delete your songs if you dont pay
What should they do instead? spend money continuously holding your music on disk forever even though you aren't paying them for the service? Sounds like they are being cool about it by keeping it around for a while and warning you before deleting it.
The marketing move of offering an unlimited plan reveals that storage and traffic are not that expensive and someone made a choice that light users will subsidize heavy users. With that, hiding your data from you and subsequently deleting it, at least without first encouraging you to download it within some post-downgrade grace period, would be a choice, not necessity, and is user-hostile.
If it is an actual necessity—a service chose to market an unlimited plan to attract more users, and then realized they are losing money on storage and traffic so much that they would unapologetically burn bridges with existing users who showed themselves as willing to pay (who maybe needed to downgrade temporarily for whatever reason) with the above move—and yet their strategy is apparently to keep offering that plan (in hopes to turn things around with more light users joining?), I would question whether that service has serious issues with even medium term planning.
No matter their actual costs to provide the service, I'm struggling to see why they should not immediately delete all of your stored files upon cancellation of the storage service.
They are a European company, so you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies. They use less manipulation and dark patterns than an equivalent American company.
You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service. If they can't bill you, they should try to communicate with you for a few months before treating it as a cancellation. If you cancel, then your choice is clear and you should expect your service to be immediately terminated at the end of the current billing period. If their service is storing files for you, termination of the service means deletion of the files.
There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.
Overall what Im saying is they treat their non-paying customers better then their paying ones. Once I was a paying customer after having and using my free account for over 7 years then converting to a paying customer and having to cancel Soundcloud became hostile.
Did you have more stored data than the limit for stored data for unpaid accounts?
As a listener I'd pay (a reasonable amount like <$5 per month) to only listen to mixes, especially if it can be filtered by bitrate.
Their best feature is social feed - I only see reposts from people I follow. But for branching out / discovery might be cool to see what their feed looks like, so something like "show followees feed".
I'd pay for Soundcloud, but not sure what I'd get for over free version. It costs more than Apple Music and offering offline nowadays is lol feature.
You can export your entire profile using yt-dlp. Of course you have to do it, when you are still a paying customer.
Do this regularly, like youtube soundclownd ‘silent’ deletes favorites and also blocks songs based on your vpn/geo location. I lost so much music… so i need to resort to scraping. Simple solution: make the song unavailable but please just keep the entry (name-title) in your fav. list.
Why would someone that writes their own songs, mixes in GarageBand, uploads to a 3rd party website need to use yt-dlp to get back the files that they themselves made?
Yes, I'm intentionally victim blaming here. The victim is complaining about a 3rd party site deleting files. Who cares? Why would you have as your only source of your files the copies stored by the 3rd party?
Date of publication (copyright) is important to a songwriter. Soundcloud im sure knows this! Probably should have said this from the top!
You get a point there, but export is mostly about metadata, eg images and description.
Data loss happens too. Soundcloud may be your only source of your own tracks.
Not only that, the victim is complaining about a paid file storage company deleting the files when the victim stops paying
You mean you never kept your originals but just uploaded and deleted the masters?
Date of publication (copyright) is important to a songwriter even if there are a hobbyist.
Are there any alternatives?
A lot of people use apps like this lately: https://untitled.stream/, https://gatefolded.com/, https://samply.app/
Isn't everyone on YouTube or Bandcamp now for this use case?
YouTube is the domain of Satan, also the name is hilarious - you tube? really? I don't tube thaanks
So I guess I should watch out for scams being sent to "soundcloud@" on a personal domain. Oh no, how will I distinguish them from my legitimate banking email???
Clever spammers (there are some!) see the presence of company@<domain> and assume the user will have similar emails for other accounts, so it might be worth trying ebays scams to ebay@<domain> or banking scams to chase@<domain> or boa@<domain>. Sending is cheap so why not, you're not trying to fool everyone, only a few.
I use a unique string per company but it's not guessable in advance, but it's obvious when looking at it and squinting a bit, for example (and these are not the exact ones I use): sundclod@<domain> or ebuy@<domain> or amzoon@<domain>
Sure I have to remember them but it's easy for me to check and my password manager is filling them in for me 99.99% of the time.
I can filter on those emails instead, and I also know that anything coming to soundcloud@<domain> or ebay@<domain> or amazon@<domain> is definitely spam as I've never used those addresses myself.
If sundclod@<domain> appears in a leak I can (hopefully) change my account email at Soundcloud to sondclud@<domain> and then confine sundclod@<domain> to /dev/null
For the more shady sites, I use first names or fake usernames.
We are the minority of users that had enough foresight to do this. I'd bet that _most_ people on this breach don't even know about the plus/dot trick with gmail (and I am sure other providers, too).
Glad that I removed my SoundCloud account right on time.
I think it’s only a matter of time before a service gets breached.
It's best to use unique random username, email, and password for every online account. Also, providing only the bare minimum of data and faking as much as possible is helpful in cases of data breaches.
Kinda sad to see a "Recommended Actions", with only sponsors, with ad copy that would be understood by HN readers but not our non-technical friends. (i.e. a simple "Nothing. No passwords have been leaked yet, only metadata" in this case)
all this leaked data pretty much used for one objective now: stealing crypto
By aggregating breach data by email, this tool inadvertently exposes users's full web history, including sensitive sites like crypto/adult/dating platforms, to anyone who knows their address
Fun
From the FAQ [1]:
What is a "sensitive breach"?
HIBP enables you to discover if your account was exposed in most of the data breaches by directly searching the system. However, certain breaches are particularly sensitive in that someone's presence in the breach may adversely impact them if others are able to find that they were a member of the site. These breaches are classed as "sensitive" and may not be publicly searched.
A sensitive data breach can only be searched by the verified owner of the email address being searched for. This is done by signing in to the dashboard which involves verifying you can receive an email to the entered address. Once signed in, all breaches (including sensitive ones) are visible in the "Breaches" section under "Personal".
There are presently 82 sensitive breaches in the system including Adult FriendFinder (2015), Adult FriendFinder (2016), Adult-FanFiction.Org, Ashley Madison, Beautiful People, Bestialitysextaboo, Brazzers, BudTrader, Carding Mafia (December 2021), Carding Mafia (March 2021), Catwatchful, CityJerks, Cocospy, Color Dating, CrimeAgency vBulletin Hacks, CTARS, CyberServe, Date Hot Brunettes, DC Health Link, Doxbin and 62 more.
> Bestialitysextaboo
I laughed pretty hard