The What, How, and Why of SoundCloud Rap

Historically, new musical movements usually have a place of origin or “birthplace”. A specific place that is intrinsically tied to the history of that music. For example, New Orleans has Jazz, Las Angeles has gangster rap, Seattle has grunge, and Nashville Tennessee has country music. However, as a proud member of generation Z, I question the importance of physical spaces. The internet has changed the way that almost everything is done, and making music is no exception. In fact, the music that defines my high school and college experiences didn’t originate from a physical place, but from a website.

SoundCloud is a unique website because it is part music streaming service and part social media platform. When the site first launched in 2007, its primary purpose was helping musicians collaborate by helping them to share unfinished songs, but it quickly turned into a space where artists could share their finished work with a growing digital audience (Dunham 2022). By 2009, the website was challenging MySpace as the dominant online music sharing platform, and by 2011 it had ten million registered users (Hubbles et al. 2017). That number quickly grew to forty million users by 2013, and 175 million monthly listeners by 2014, the last time user data was made publicly available (Hubbles et al. 2017).

Unlike other music streaming services, SoundCloud has no barrier to entry which allows basically anyone to post whatever they like. More popular music streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify, require independent artists to work with a distributor in order to get their music on the platform (Rindner 2021). However, on SoundCloud anyone can register for a free account which allows them to upload up to three hours of audio, as well as comment on other people’s content (Hubbles et al. 2017). Paid accounts increase the audio upload limit and give the user increased customization options. The low barrier to entry combined with a large potential audience made SoundCloud a fertile breeding ground for a new generation of artists. Many of these rappers had a similar story to PnB Rock, a Philadelphia musical artist who came out of the SoundCloud music scene and was able to break out into the mainstream, who once said “I uploaded all my music onto SoundCloud,” because “I ain’t have no other option.” SoundCloud fits into the DIY lineage of hip-hop that started with independent artists selling their homemade CDs out of the trunks of their cars as well as burning their own mixtapes (Rindner 2021). However, unlike aspiring artists in the past, SoundCloud rappers are not constrained to a geographic location in which they can effectively self promote. Platforms like SoundCloud give these artists immediate access to a national audience even if it still often takes time for the artists to build a large following. Another thing that makes SoundCloud unique are its features that allow it to function as a social media platform.

SoundCloud’s almost non-existent barriers to entry created a unique space where the music of complete unknowns and mainstream international superstars coexisted side by side. This factor facilitated the discovery of new artists because major label-backed artists and small independent artists would often find themselves on the same user created playlists. This feature helped users to find new artists with similar sounds to the ones that they already enjoyed, and helped small independent artists to get more listens and ultimately new fans. In addition to user created playlists, SoundCloud also has a “Picks for you” playlist that “suggests related tracks based on what you’re currently listening to (Rindner 2021).” However, playlists are just one feature of SoundCloud designed with independent artists in mind.

SoundCloud fosters an online community through its inclusion of features more commonly seen on social media platforms than on music streaming services. For example, SoundCloud’s homepage feed is similar to a Twitter timeline, “except instead of tweets it shows tracks by artists you follow, while users have the ability to comment on them and easily share them to their own feeds (Rindner 2021).” Users can also view artists’ feeds which means “ fans can see what artists like, songs they repost, who they follow, and which other acts their listeners tend to check out (Rindner 2021).” These social and discovery features led to collaborations between artists on the website. PnB Rock, who has collaborated with a large number of SoundCloud artists, once said “I found Yachty [on SoundCloud] when he was a nobody. I found Trippie Redd when he was a nobody. I found X when he was a nobody.” This was a fairly common phenomenon and collaborations between SoundCloud artists helped the community to grow because the most popular artists and producers essentially became tastemakers by introducing up and coming artists to their already established fan bases. In addition to homepage feeds, another one of the features unique to SoundCloud is how its comment sharing functions.

On SoundCloud, uploaded songs display as a two dimensional graph of the audio file’s waveform, and a small line moves across the waveform graph as the audio is played. Users are then able to stop the song at any point and leave a time-stamped comment, which will be publicly displayed for other users to see when they watch the track. Instead of having a block of comments beneath the post, like YouTube does for example, comments are only displayed for a few fleeting moments at the time stamp at which they were left. This functionality encourages users to leave more thoughtful comments because they are able to be extremely specific about which part of the song they are referring to in their comment. This facilitates both peer to peer collaboration on music as well as fan to artists communication. Any SoundCloud user can reply to anyone’s comment, but a quantitative study of commenting and reply behavior on SoundCloud found that approximately 44.7% of replies on SoundCloud are left by the user who uploaded the song as opposed to listeners (Hubbles et al. 2017). Obviously, every artist can’t respond to every comment they receive, but this research does suggest that this is much more than an anecdotal phenomenon. Especially for smaller independent artists, the reply function is a great tool for them to build an audience by directly interacting with them. These direct interactions between artists and fans also helps to build a sense of shared community despite the lack of a shared physical space. All of these features helped SoundCloud to become the “birthplace” of rap's newest genre, the eponymously named SoundCloud rap.

Youth is largely a period of self discovery, and part of that process is rebellion against the accepted norms of society. Every generation has its own “subversive youth culture on the fringes of the mainstream,” that “exists to provide access to a rebellious ethos (Roy 2019).” Adolescents in the 70s and 80s had punk music, grunge music emerged during the 90s, and youth in the early 2000s had emo, pop-punk, and hardcore. For my generation, people who were teenagers in the 2010s, that subversive music and culture is SoundCloud rap.

By the 2010s, rap had fully entered the mainstream of American music, but in doing so it had to sand down some of its rough edges. Major-label rap turned away from gangsta rap and towards artists with less controversial public personas such as Drake. Profits in the music industry were down as a whole because during this time sales of physical media were falling, but streaming had not yet emerged as a viable alternative revenue stream. Major labels were unwilling to take risks on unproven up and coming artists, so these artists started congregating and posting music in the only place they could, SoundCloud. Without the input of label executives a new sound was able to emerge.

Roger Gengo, who has covered this emerging scene since its infancy on his podcast the Masked Gorilla, said that “at its best, it has an almost punklike purity, emphasizing abandon over structure, rawness over dexterity. It sounds so unpolished, so youthful.” Similar to the punk music that came before it, SoundCloud rap focuses on “emotions and raw feelings rather than telling a life story,” and the two genres garner similar critiques “such as not having a clear message in the work or not showcasing the adequate skill (Phillips 2021).” The unpolished and DIY aesthetic of the music caused Gengo to call the new genre “grunge rap”, but this label never caught on.

Even the live performances by these artists were more similar to rock concerts than rap shows. Tariq Cherif, one of the founders of Miami’s Rolling Loud Festival, noticed that the crowds at SoundCloud artists’ shows were predominantly young, male, and white and often featured mosh pits because “they wanna rage, they wanna sweat, they wanna scream,” or more simply put, “you go to a show, and it’s a punk rock show.” Unlike punk rock, this sound belonged to a new generation. SoundCloud rap is an internet phenomenon, born from a music streaming service, therefore it should come as no surprise that this movement belongs to the internet natives, Generation Z.

Despite the highly decentralized nature of this movement, a common SoundCloud rap aesthetic emerged. Visually, that style is “high-end streetwear meets high fashion, with face tattoos, [and] hair dyed in wild colors (Caramanica 2017).” These meme-worthy looks are necessary to stand out in a competitive online environment where people and especially children’s attention spans are short. Face tattoos are easily the visual aesthetic most associated with SoundCloud rap, or as one source put it, “face tattoos are to SoundCloud rappers what flannels were to the grunge movement (Battan 2019).” They paradoxically gave rappers more credibility in this space because “they telegraph to the world that someone has willingly disqualified himself from the prospect of a conventional career forever (Battan 2019).” It signals to the world that this artist is committed to making a career out of music and has metaphorically burned the boats giving them no other alternative but to succeed in music. Interestingly, the musical aesthetic of SoundCloud is more difficult to describe because the website encourages experimentation with its lack of traditional music industry gatekeepers.

SoundCloud rap is an evolution of hip-hop, but with influences from pop punk, emo, and hardcore music. The music is “unmistakably hip-hop, but more moody and nihilistic, rowdier and more unpolished (Rindner 2021).” Common themes in the lyrics include innocuous things such as relationships, mental health, and a yearning for the next steps of their lives, but also more concerning topics such as “overmedication and drug abuse, depression, toxic thoughts and behaviors towards loved ones (Roy 2019).” Unlike their gangsta rap counterparts in the past, SoundCloud rappers are more likely to rap about taking drugs to numb their emotional pain than selling drugs to survive.

However, as a whole SoundCloud rap has “a proclivity towards somewhat nonsensical repetition over substantial lyrical content (Scheinberg 2017).” An example of this is the extensive use of ad-libs such as Lil Pump’s famous catchphrase and ad-lib esketit. These artists may not exactly be Shakespear with their use of made-up words but “they still manage to relay this hyped-up, party-starting, not-giving-a-fuck emotions (Scheinberg 2017).” Oftentimes, the feelings a song produces in its listener is more important than its actual lyrical content.

As for unpolished, production that is low-fidelity, low budget and distorted defines the SoundCloud sound. Some of the most seminal tracks that gained popularity off of SoundCloud “sound like they were probably recorded straight off of an iPhone or laptop mic (Scheinberg 2017).” Much of the music on SoundCloud was actually recorded that way because for young independent artists those were likely the only recording equipment that they had access to. The DIY production aesthetic started out of necessity, but many artists choose to keep that production style in their music after signing deals with major record labels.

Other markers of the SoundCloud style are trap inspired beats, booming bass lines, extensive use of the Roland’s TR-808 drum machine, short song lengths, and heavily auto-tuned singing. The extensive use of singing is somewhat unique in hip-hop and demonstrates how SoundCloud rap places an emphasis on melody over rhythm.

All SoundCloud rap has shared visual and musical aesthetics, but despite these commonalities there are two commonly recognized subgenres. These two subgenres can be classified as aggressive and emotional which can be equated to “hip-hop’s versions of hardcore punk and emo (Scheinberg 2017).”

Aggressive SoundCloud rap is best represented by artists such as XXXTentacion and Ski Mask The Slump God who utilize “speaker-blowing production, shockingly savage lyrics and explosively abrupt screams (Scheinberg 2017).”

On the other side of the coin is emo or emotional SoundCloud rap which is stereotypically “the Hot Topic-clad, septum-pierced artists whose melodic, sing-raps sit atop guitar-laden production and early-2000s emo samples (Scheinberg 2017).” Artist in this subgenre, such as Lil Peep, blend emo and hip-hop sensibilities by rapping “about drugs, suicide, and ex-girlfriends atop 808s and trap production (Scheinberg 2017).”

Despite these two distinct subgenres emerging, “the most commercially successful of the scene—XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD, even Lil Uzi Vert depending on who you ask—could move assuredly through both the worlds of raging hardcore and wounded emo (Rindner 2021).” This ability helped these artists to move more easily into the mainstream and achieve multi-platinum success. Below are two Juice WRLD songs to demonstrate this point. Lucid Dreams shows off his emo side, meanwhile Syphilis demonstrates his aggressive style.

Despite the massive success of artists who originated on SoundCloud, such as Post Malone, Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, Trippie Redd, 6ix9ine, and many more, the era of SoundCloud rap appears to be nearing its end. Young and tragic deaths have unfortunately become a pattern in the SoundCloud rap community. Some of the most prominent and promising artists that were leading this new musical movement experienced untimely early deaths including but not limited to Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice WRLD.

In addition to this, most of the surviving members of the SoundCloud rap scene have signed deals with major record labels which has had a profound impact on artists quality and quantity of musical output. It also changes how these artists are perceived by the public. As one music journalist was quick to point out, “Post Malone is the most successful SoundCloud rapper ever, tenfold, but when you soften those edges and you do your own thing, you leave the underground and you’re not a SoundCloud rapper anymore” because “no one will ever look at [Post], even with his face tattoos, and be like, ‘He’s a SoundCloud rapper’ (Rindner 2021).”

Even if the SoundCloud goldrush is over, new musical movements will continue to “originate and thrive on SoundCloud because of the unique ways artists can directly connect with a community around their sound and expression (Rindner 2021).” It is an ideal website for up and coming artists because it is “the streaming service most oriented toward music discovery, and the one with the lowest barrier to entry (Caramanica 2017).” Only on SoundCloud can artists go from sharing their first-ever track to “millions of listens, booking nationwide tours, [and] selling merchandise (Caramanica 2017)” all without the scrutiny of traditional gatekeepers. The unique features of SoundCloud provided a space for artists to experiment with new sounds and build a community around this new genre of music. Physical spaces will always be important in the music industry, but the case of SoundCloud rap proves that a new music community and genre can emerge from digital spaces as well as physical.