There have been changes announced for people who have their podcasts with Spotify for Creators and also those who have music and audio on SoundCloud. The latter changes to terms and conditions more than a year ago has caused significant backlash from users.
Starting with Spotify their still free to use podcast platform Spotify for Creators has introduced plays, a new metric that allows users to see, directly within the app, how audio and video episodes are tracking with the number of times people have actively listened to it or watched.
Plays will sit on the home dashboard, showing even consumption hour metrics even if the podcast is not hosted on the platform.
Monetisation for those with enough of an audience to ulitise that feature, will continue to be determined by streams and the podcast advertising industry standard of at least 60 seconds of engagement.
For the many of you who have a SoundCloud account for music, interviews and other audio, a tech ethicist called Ed Newton-Rex share the below post to X over the weekend after he noticed a change to the company’s terms and conditions, a change that appears to have happened more than a year ago.
The terms say:
“You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services.”
Industry technology and startup publication TechCrunch then reached out to SoundCloud receiving a spokesperson statement which said:
“SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud content from our platform for AI training purposes. In fact, we implemented technical safeguards, including a ‘no AI’ tag on our site to explicitly prohibit unauthorized use.
The February 2024 update to our terms of service was intended to clarify how content may interact with AI technologies within SoundCloud’s own platform. Use cases include personalized recommendations, content organization, fraud detection, and improvements to content identification with the help of AI technologies.
Any future application of AI at SoundCloud will be designed to support human artists, enhancing the tools, capabilities, reach, and opportunities available to them on our platform. Examples include improving music recommendations, generating playlists, organizing content, and detecting fraudulent activity. These efforts are aligned with existing licensing agreements and ethical standards. Tools like [those from our partner] Musiio are strictly used to power artist discovery and content organization, not to train generative AI models.
We understand the concerns raised and remain committed to open dialogue. Artists will continue to have control over their work, and we’ll keep our community informed every step of the way as we explore innovation and apply AI technologies responsibly, especially as legal and commercial frameworks continue to evolve.”
TechCrunch couldn’t find any ‘no AI’ tag. Users on Reddit were very upset at not being informed when the terms were changed with some, including myself, unable to find them. AI created music on the platform is unable to be monetised.
It should be additionally noted that YouTube too now allows third-party companies that are building AI models to use videos for training. In this instance the third-party training setting is turned off by default. YouTube users manually have to turn on a third-party training setting and then select which companies to allow.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo.
SoundCloud seems to claim the right to train on people's uploaded music in their terms. I think they have major questions to answer over this.
— Ed Newton-Rex (@ednewtonrex) May 9, 2025
I checked the wayback machine – it seems to have been added to their terms on 12th Feb 2024. I'm a SoundCloud user and I can't see any… pic.twitter.com/NIk7TP7K3C