Why Tape Lab Loves SoundCloud in 2025
We have always loved SoundCloud. It’s still where we upload our music first in 2025, before Spotify, Apple Music, or any of the “serious” digital distribution platforms. As an underground music collective, that direct connection with listeners, other producers, and the occasional confused fan is exactly why SoundCloud is the best music platform for independent artists.
Comment sections on waveforms, reposts from other underground producers, random DMs from people making weird beats in their bedrooms—that’s the real value of SoundCloud for DIY musicians.
SoundCloud History, Car Tests, and Unreleased Beats
Tape Lab has been on SoundCloud long enough to even remember the “Here Is the Drop” feature. RIP to a real one. If you know, you know.
In 2025, having a SoundCloud CarPlay app is huge for producers and beatmakers. Being able to quickly toggle to my Uploads, throw on private mode, and run a fast car test mix of unreleased beats is clutch. Sorry, passengers—this ride we’re listening to slightly updated WIPs, A/B-ing masters, and checking low end on that new tape.
This is where SoundCloud stands out from other music streaming platforms: it respects the way producers actually work. Upload, test, tweak, upload again. No distributor, no waiting for a release date, no fake hype cycle—just real-time iteration.
SoundCloud as a Tool for Underground Producers
That highlights a broader relationship between Tape Lab’s artistic methodology (aka how we mess around until it sounds good) and SoundCloud. This veers a little into “the medium is the message” territory, but it’s true: SoundCloud shapes how underground artists create and release music.
Being able to quickly make new tracks re-listenable is amazing, especially for experimental or electronic music. We didn’t want to spend hours making duplicate copies of tapes just to test sequences. Instead, we uploaded one long file to SoundCloud that contained the whole EP, so we could live with it, listen in different contexts, and refine from there.
For underground music collectives, beatmakers, and DIY labels, SoundCloud in 2025 is basically a sketchbook, playlist, archive, and soft-launch platform in one.
Why SoundCloud Pro Still Makes Sense in 2025
This isn’t an ad for SoundCloud Pro (which has gone by about a million names since we signed up around 2018), but you 100% should get it if you’re a serious independent artist or producer.
UNLIMITED UPLOADS means you’re no longer limited by space or time. You can flood your account with demos, live sets, alternate masters, private links for collaborators—whatever. Just start releasing music.
Track replacements are huge. Being able to update songs as we improve them (we call it “George Lucas-ing”) perfectly matches our incremental approach to music production: make it, release it, tweak it, re-upload it. More expressive, more evocative, less precious.
In 2024 we went back and released our longform albums as individual tracks on SoundCloud (see: RELUX REWIND), which is another example of how flexible the platform is for experimental releases and underground electronic music.
SoundCloud Mastering, For What It’s Worth
The built-in SoundCloud Mastering feature definitely does something. Is it better than us doing our own mastering chain? Hard to say. It’s probably not replacing a real mastering session anytime soon, but it’s still a cool feature to have baked in—especially for new producers learning how to release tracks online.
If you’re just starting out with music production, those mastering credits might be a decent way to test your mix translation across different systems without immediately paying a human.
SoundCloud as a Music Archive and File Browser
One underrated thing: SoundCloud doubles as a giant, searchable file browser for your tracks. For a collective like Tape Lab, with tons of WIPs and side projects, having all our music in one place—tagged, dated, and organized—is incredibly useful.
In 2025, SoundCloud is still the best place for:
Underground producers dropping weird, genre-blurry stuff
Independent artists testing mixes before a “real” release
Music collectives building a community around niche sounds
Anyone who wants to upload music fast and connect directly with listeners
It’s imperfect, clunky, and occasionally confusing, but that’s kind of the point. For Tape Lab, SoundCloud isn’t just another streaming platform—it’s part of the creative process.
