SoundCloud
Go.
SoundCloud · November 2015 – February 2017
The Challenge
SoundCloud had a problem that was also a point of pride: its audience was the free internet. Producers, DJs, bedroom musicians, obsessive fans — people who built their entire musical identity on a platform where everything was free, open, and gloriously unpolished. The kind of people who considered paying for music a moral failing.
Then the business reality arrived. SoundCloud needed a subscription model to survive. And someone had to figure out how to tell the free-internet faithful that the thing they loved was about to ask for their credit card.
That someone was me. As SoundCloud's first-ever dedicated writer, I had to build a brand voice from scratch — and immediately put it to its hardest possible test.
My Role
- First dedicated writer at SoundCloud
- Built brand voice from the ground up
- Concepted & wrote the Go launch campaign
Deliverables
- Brand voice (built as we went)
- Launch video campaign
- Product microsites
- Email campaigns
- Social content
- Website & in-app copy
The Voice Problem
When I arrived, SoundCloud didn't have a formalized brand voice. Which meant they also didn't have a wrong one. There was no document to consult, no legacy tone to preserve — just a platform with a fiercely specific culture and an audience that could smell corporate from a mile away.
So I made it up as I went — which is another way of saying I listened carefully and wrote accordingly. Direct without being cold. Enthusiastic without being breathless. Self-aware enough to acknowledge that we were living through a genuinely weird moment in music history. A voice that had to work for a DJ uploading their first mix and a major label dropping a comeback album on the same platform.
By the time SoundCloud Go launched, the voice was ready. Which was good, because the brief was about to get very hard.
Selling Paid to the Free Internet
The strategic insight that unlocked the campaign: don't apologize for the ask. SoundCloud's audience respected directness. What they didn't respect was being talked down to.
So the Go campaign led with what it actually was: everything they already knew and loved about SoundCloud — the uploads, the waveforms, the comments dropped mid-track — plus almost all of recorded musical history. The catalog the free version didn't have. Not instead of. In addition to.
That reframe — additive, not subtractive — became the spine of every piece of communication. The message was consistent across every touchpoint: SoundCloud isn't changing. It's just getting bigger.
Everything you love about SoundCloud—plus all of recorded musical history.The idea that drove the campaign.
The Work
The launch campaign ran across video, web, email, social, and in-product. The videos were designed to feel native to the platform: energetic, a little chaotic, unapologetically music-obsessed. Not a polished brand film — something that could live on SoundCloud itself without feeling out of place.
The microsites gave the product room to breathe, explaining the value proposition without over-explaining it. Which is a harder brief than it sounds when your audience has a finely calibrated BS detector.
The email campaigns had to do something genuinely difficult: re-engage a free user base and ask them to pay, without making them feel like the thing they loved had been replaced by something worse. Open rates told us the voice was working.
The Bigger Picture
Fun fact: every music streaming service in history loses money. SoundCloud Go didn't save the company on its own. But it gave them a runway. And the launch communication did its job, which was to make a skeptical, fiercely independent audience understand that the ask was fair. The only way to earn their attention was to actually deserve it.