I built SoundCloud's brand voice from zero.
First dedicated writer. Launch campaign. Subscription rollout.
SoundCloud Go · November 2016 – February 2017almost none paying
no business model — until Go
a dedicated writer. I was it.
became the company's voice system
The bet.
SoundCloud was the free internet's favorite music platform — 175 million users, fiercely loyal, and almost none of them paying. The business needed a subscription model. The audience needed a reason not to revolt. The voice that convinced them had to sound like SoundCloud — self-aware, enthusiastic, a little breathless — without apologizing for the ask. When I arrived, it didn't yet exist.
What I built.
The voice.
SoundCloud had no brand voice when I arrived. No guidelines, no legacy tone, just a platform with a fiercely specific culture and an audience that could smell corporate from a mile away. I built the voice system from scratch — enthusiast without being breathless, self-aware enough to acknowledge we were living through a genuinely weird moment in music history. By launch, the voice was ready. And the brief was about to get very hard.
The launch.
Video, web, email, social, in-product. The films were designed to feel native to the platform: energetic, a little chaotic, unapologetically music-obsessed. Not polished brand film — something that could live on SoundCloud itself without feeling out of place.
The hard email.
Email was the part that could've blown up. I had to ask a free user base with 175 million people to start paying — and not make them feel like the thing they loved had been replaced by something worse. The campaign had to be additive, not subtractive. Open rates told us the voice was working.
What changed.
SoundCloud Go didn't save the company on its own — almost every streaming service loses money — but it gave them a runway and proved the voice could carry a commercial ask without betraying the audience. The voice I built for the launch became the voice of the company. It still is.
The free internet didn't need to be sold to. It needed to be respected. That's what we wrote.