SoundCloud Adds Friend Likes To Boost Social Discovery

SoundCloud is doubling down on its community roots with a new way to see the tracks that your friends and favorite artists like, shifting listening from passive to a more social, real-time discovery loop. The update weaves friend activity directly into the home experience and launches new recommendation surfaces that showcase what your crew is actually playing, not simply what algorithms think you might like.

How Friend Likes Work to Power Social Discovery

At the center is Liked By Your Crew, a daily refreshed list that collects the songs liked by people you follow — including tracks posted by your favorite artists — so you can thumb through the same feed your circle is vibing to. It appears right on the home screen and is made for easy sampling and easy queuing.

Next to that is Liked By Playlists, a scrollable carousel featuring playlists made by gathering together liked songs from your friends. Think of it as a living mixtape, curated by your network and left with a different vibe each time your circle taps the heart on a track.

And to broaden the lens, a Trending Trackwall highlights what’s popping all over the platform. Filters help you drill down to genres and moods without wading through endless user playlists — a recognition of the rapidity of today’s discovery cycles.

On mobile, what’s trending today is surfaced just for you with Hot For You. One daily track trends on SoundCloud based on who you are and what you’ve been listening to, giving your ears a taste of what’s happening. A new follow suggestions carousel suggests fans with similar taste, people you may know, and artists to follow, allowing for easy expansion of a quality feed.

All features will be added to the web and both iOS and Android apps, with Hot For You (and its follow-up questions) limited only to mobile apps.

Why Social Discovery Matters for Music Streaming

Discovery has become inherently social. Industry reports, put out by entities like Luminate and IFPI, repeatedly emphasize that friend and creator recommendations are the strongest among drivers of new music discovery — on par with editorial playlists and algorithmic suggestions. And when your trusted peer taps like, the signal is far weightier than faceless recommendations.

Platforms that emphasize social context generally have higher engagement and longer sessions, because listeners spend less time hunting around and more judging cues they trust. Spotify has doubled down here with friend activity and direct messaging, while YouTube Music and Apple Music have put efforts behind social-adjacent feeds and mixes based on what your network likes. SoundCloud’s move is of the moment — but with an unusual twist that brings to mind its historical culture of movements, remixes, and early-stage discovery.

The company also has an asset that others don’t: depth. SoundCloud has more than 300 million tracks from artists who number in the tens of millions, both aspiring talents and stars themselves, offering demos, edits and DJ sets as well as niche subgenres that hardly show up on mainstream services. Social signals can help tame those long tails by enabling communities to pull out gems faster than a recommendation model alone.

Implications for Artists, Curators, and Local Scenes

But for working artists, likes are more than vanity metrics — they’re distribution. That loose cabal of fans liking a track can now ripple through friend feeds and Liked By playlists, creating micro-virality within scenes before a song breaks wider. That kind of focused momentum is often what transforms a bedroom upload into a club staple or a festival gig.

It also dovetails nicely with SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties model, in which a listener’s subscription or ad dollars get distributed to the artists they actually play. If friend-driven discovery means repeat listens in close-knit communities, the payout loop becomes more straightforward and transparent for new acts.

Expect curators to benefit too. Listeners who consistently favorite high-signal tracks will sort of be de facto tastemakers inside their circles, and that social proof can translate into follows, playlist traction and even off-platform opportunities.

Competition and Differentiation Among Music Platforms

All of the big music services are racing to combine social graphs with recommendations. Spotify’s recent social expansion has seen the company add private sharing features and collaborative playlists, while Apple Music now offers similar capabilities with Friends Mix, along with an artist-driven profiles feature — albeit not one overly focused on music videos like the YouTube Music update today. In SoundCloud’s case, the differentiating factor is the grassroots pipeline: genres can take shape here very early, and those friend likes can bubble up tracks that don’t exist elsewhere or haven’t cleared into mainstream catalogs.

And if the execution is clean — snappy load times, useful filtering, and relevant suggestions — SoundCloud could turn casual wandering into habit-forming, friend-conducted listening that keeps fans in-app longer.

But What About Privacy and Control Over Your Likes

Rendering likes more prominent naturally raises concerns about privacy and control. SoundCloud profiles’ likes have to date been public by default, but making them highly prominent in feeds alters scale and context. Power users will seek out different granular settings — for private listening sessions, hide-from-feed toggles, or selective sharing — to control how their taste is blaring across the network.

Even in the absence of new controls, our social contract has been fairly obvious: When you follow someone, you desire a window into their taste. The new features take that premise and wrap it into more of a daily habit than the casual profile perusal.

The Bottom Line: Social Listening as SoundCloud’s Bet

By promoting what friends are loving to a first-class feed — and layering in trending views, personal picks, and smarter follow suggestions — SoundCloud’s betting that taste is a team sport. For listeners, that means less hunting and more serendipity. For creators, it’s a more direct route from one like to a thousand plays — and beyond — powered by the fanbases that already exist on SoundCloud.