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Scraping SoundCloud: Extract Tracks, Artists & Play Counts (2026)

April 24, 2026 · 5 min read

SoundCloud hosts over 300 million tracks from 30 million creators. For music industry professionals, researchers, and product teams, it’s a rich source of data on emerging artists, trending genres, audience engagement, and content velocity. But programmatic access to that data at scale is not straightforward.

SoundCloud’s public API has been progressively restricted. The endpoints that remain available are rate-limited, and bulk extraction of artist catalogs, search results, or trending charts requires infrastructure that most teams don’t want to build and maintain.

Why people extract SoundCloud data

A&R and talent discovery — Labels and managers monitor play count velocity and engagement rates to identify artists gaining traction before they cross over to mainstream platforms.
Music trend research — Track which genres, sub-genres, and sounds are growing fastest across specific geographies or listener segments.
Artist profile monitoring — Watch follower growth, track upload frequency, and engagement metrics for specific artists or rosters over time.
Content licensing research — Find tracks with high play counts but limited commercial exposure, relevant for sync licensing and playlist curation.
Competitor analysis — Distribution platforms, podcast networks, and audio-first startups track how competing creators grow their audiences on SoundCloud.

What makes SoundCloud data hard to get at scale

SoundCloud’s frontend is a single-page application. Track data, follower counts, and engagement metrics are loaded asynchronously from API endpoints that are not publicly documented and change without notice. Rate limits are enforced aggressively on unauthenticated sessions.

The pagination problem: Artists with large catalogs (500+ tracks) require handling cursor-based pagination across multiple API calls, with backoff logic and session rotation to avoid throttling. Without this, extraction stalls after the first page of results.

Search results are also non-trivial to extract in bulk. Filtering by genre, upload date, and play count involves navigating SoundCloud’s internal search parameters, which differ from the public-facing URL structure.

The practical solution: a ready-made SoundCloud scraper

We built and maintain a SoundCloud Scraper on Apify that handles pagination, session management, and normalization. You supply search queries or artist URLs; it returns structured track and profile data.

Input

Search by keyword:

{
  "searchQuery": "lo-fi beats 2026",
  "maxTracks": 100,
  "type": "tracks"
}

Or scrape a specific artist’s catalog:

{
  "artistUrl": "https://soundcloud.com/example-artist",
  "maxTracks": 200
}

Output

Each track returns:

{
  "title": "Late Night Study Session Vol. 3",
  "artist": "lofi.collective",
  "artistUrl": "https://soundcloud.com/lofi.collective",
  "trackUrl": "https://soundcloud.com/lofi.collective/late-night-vol-3",
  "playCount": 2184920,
  "likes": 31402,
  "commentCount": 287,
  "repostCount": 4821,
  "genre": "Lo-fi Hip Hop",
  "uploadedAt": "2025-09-14T11:30:00Z",
  "durationSeconds": 224
}

Fields returned per track

Field	Type	Description
`title`	string	Track title
`artist`	string	Artist username
`trackUrl`	string	Direct URL to the track
`playCount`	integer	Total plays at time of scrape
`likes`	integer	Like count
`commentCount`	integer	Number of comments
`repostCount`	integer	Number of reposts
`genre`	string	Genre tag set by the artist
`uploadedAt`	string	ISO 8601 upload timestamp
`durationSeconds`	integer	Track length in seconds

Output is available as JSON, CSV, or XLSX. Runs can be scheduled to monitor artists or search queries on a recurring basis.

Pricing

The actor uses Pay Per Event pricing at $0.005 per track.

Volume	Cost
100 tracks	$0.50
500 tracks	$2.50
Artist catalog (200 tracks)	$1.00
Weekly monitoring (10 searches) × 4 weeks	~$2.00/month

Try it

SoundCloud Scraper on Apify →

Apify has a free tier for testing. Sign up here if you do not have an account. Results connect directly to Apify’s storage and webhook APIs, so you can feed data into dashboards or data pipelines automatically.