You’re creating on SoundCloud, which means…

“you hereby grant”

This is the direction that matters — you giving, not SoundCloud giving. The licence SoundCloud grants you sits in a different section and is the mirror image: “limited, personal, non-exclusive, revocable, non-assignable and non-transferable”.

Scoped by necessity

The grant is bounded by the sentence it lives in: what is necessary to host, transcode and serve your track, and to run the tasks in these Terms. It is not a free-standing right to use your music for anything they like.

Royalty-free includes the ads

Advertising sits inside the necessity clause, so SoundCloud can sell ads against your track without paying you anything under this licence. Whether you get paid at all is decided by the separate Artist Terms, not here.

The words that are absent

“Sub-licensable” appears zero times in this document. “Transferable” appears twice, both times as “non-transferable”, in the licence SoundCloud grants you. Nothing in this grant is perpetual or irrevocable.

Read the recipient, not the adjectives

The adjectives here are the same mild ones SoundCloud took for itself. What is different is who receives them: every other user, and the operators of any website or app where your track has been embedded. SoundCloud never needed the word “sub-licensable” because this sentence hands the rights out directly.

Derivative works

“adapt, prepare derivative works of, compile” is the language that reaches remixes, edits and compilations. It runs to users and to Linked Service operators on a royalty-free licence.

The one brake

“within the parameters set by you using the Services” is the limit on the whole grant, and it is the permissions tab on each track — downloads, offline listening, embedding. Those settings are the contract term you actually control, and they are set per upload.

Your likeness is narrower

The likeness grant is a separate sentence and is confined to “social features on the Platform”. It covers your username, profile picture and activity data. It does not mention advertising or sponsored content.

A cancel button that exists

This is the sentence most platforms do not have. Take the track down and the licence ends by itself — no request, no notice period. It is granted per item, so removing one track ends that track's licence and leaves the rest running.

The split inside the same clause

“Perpetual” and “irrevocable” appear in this document attached to comments and other contributions, not to your audio. It is the same paragraph, one sentence later, on the opposite terms.

“subject to the following paragraph”

The automatic termination is qualified before it finishes. The paragraph it points to is the one below — what leaves the platform does not come back.

Embeds outlive the upload

A Linked Service is any site, app or platform your track was shared or embedded to using SoundCloud's player or widget. SoundCloud deletes its own copy and takes on no duty to chase those, or to make any user delete theirs.

30 days, stated

If you enabled offline listening, downloaded copies stay playable on other people's devices for up to 30 days after you delete. That number is in the text, and it applies only to the offline feature you switched on yourself.

A third exception, and it is theirs

Two of the exceptions are permissions you set at upload — embedding and offline listening. The third is not. On account termination SoundCloud keeps whatever it is “obliged or permitted to retain … and/or to protect our legitimate business interests”, and it is SoundCloud that decides what its legitimate business interests are. The window is “for a certain period of time”, which the document never fills in, and no other clause fills it in either: “retention”, “backup” and “archive” appear zero times.

“Grant of License” is on the survival list

The Termination section names Grant of License among the sections that survive. The list self-limits — it reaches only provisions “intended by their nature to survive” — and the provision in Grant of License that survives by its nature is the comment licence, which says so itself: it continues “notwithstanding any termination of your account”. Read that way, deleting a track still ends that track’s licence. The document does not settle it either way: it names the section, not the sentence, and anyone relying on the off switch should know the section is on the list.

Opt-in, not opt-out

Consent has to be “affirmatively provided”. Silence is not consent under this sentence, and neither is a default setting you never touched.

The promise carries its own scope

It covers generative models “that aim to replicate or synthesize your voice, music, or likeness”. That is the boundary the sentence draws itself; training with a different aim is not what this sentence addresses, and no other sentence in the document does.

Two kinds of music, two paragraphs

The second paragraph is about catalogue “delivered to the Platform under separate agreements” by rights holders — distributor and label deliveries — not the track you uploaded yourself. The document keeps the upload and the delivered catalogue apart, and gives each its own sentence.

100 euro

That is the stated ceiling on everything SoundCloud could owe you under this agreement, unless you have paid them more than that in the previous twelve months.

No order to stop

The waiver names your Content specifically. If SoundCloud used your track in a way this agreement does not allow, the remedy written here is damages, not an order making them stop. The same section keeps SoundCloud's own right to seek equitable relief intact.

It may not stay SoundCloud

Under Assignment to third parties, “SoundCloud may assign its rights and (where permissible by law) its obligations under this Agreement, in whole or in part, to any third party at any time without notice, including without limitation, to any person or entity acquiring all or substantially all of the assets or business of SoundCloud.” You cannot assign it back the other way without their written consent.