Backstage Blog

• Announcements
• Security

We’re excited to announce the launch of our public bug bounty program with Bugcrowd — the #1 crowdsourced security platform. This public program is open to Bugcrowd’s full crowd of top, trusted whitehat hackers, and we will award up to $1,500 per vulnerability identified on our website, API, and mobile apps.

• Announcements

Today we are launching a new API application process.

Starting today, developers will need to fill out an application form to request access to our API.

Here is why.

As SoundCloud has grown, we’ve seen our API used in countless innovative ways that support and enhance the SoundCloud experience for our creators and listeners around the globe. At the same time, we’ve also seen a number of apps or services that act on behalf of our users without their explicit permission or attempt to use creator…

• Announcements
• API

As well as adding new features and updates, we review existing features to see if they’re still beneficial to the community.

As we dug into the best ways for curators to connect with artists and fans, we found that Groups aren’t working as well as reposts and curated playlists.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to phase out Groups on Monday, August 22nd to make room for future updates.

From this date, all Groups-related GET requests will no longer return results, and PUT requests will not persist…

• Announcements
• Open Source
• Monitoring
• Go

On Monday this week, the Prometheus authors have released version 1.0.0 of the central component of the Prometheus monitoring and alerting system, the Prometheus server. (Other components will follow suit over the next months.) This is a major milestone for the project. Read more about it on the Prometheus blog, and check out the announcement of the CNCF, which has recently accepted Prometheus as a hosted project.

• Announcements
• Recommendation System
• Machine Learning

Over the last 100 years we have dialed into radio stations at home, on the road, or in the office to access a curated mix of top hits delivered to us by our favorite DJ. With more and more of our daily activities taking place online, we find our source of music now comes from a mix of our mobile phones, our desktop computers and the radio - and is available to us whenever we need it. The amount of music available today is endless. The music scene has never been so vibrant. A proliferation of production tools at low cost and the ease at which an artist can share their sounds, gives everyone the opportunity to share their work at any time, with only a few clicks.

Keeping this in mind, we set out to determine: How can we bring a radio like experience to SoundCloud that would enable you to tune-in and lean back?

• Announcements
• Recommendation System
• Machine Learning
• Data Science

With more than 125 million tracks from over 12 million creators heard each month on our platform, SoundCloud is uniquely positioned to offer listeners a full spectrum of music discovery.

Classic hits, the latest releases, gems from underground talent and the best of what’s up-and-coming – all in one place.

How can you make great content discoverable and available at ease? How can you create a unique experience for every single user?

• Announcements
• API

We previously introduced new playlist representations. The compact representation returns only the playlist itself without any of the tracks. For most users, this is preferable – the compact representation significantly reduces the size of the JSON payload for large playlists and provides faster API response times.

Beginning July 15, 2016, all queries using the q parameter will only return this compact representation for playlists. Other playlist representations will no longer be available when using the q…

• Announcements
• API
• JavaScript
• SDKs

We are happy to announce version 3.0.0 of our SoundCloud JavaScript SDK.

The new SDK improves stream security and content uploading functionality, and modernizes the technology stack.

Version 3 of the SoundCloud JavaScript SDK is a major update and is not backwards compatible. That said, the changes that you need to make your web app work with the new SDK are easy to implement. Please refer to Migrating to JavaScript SDK 3.0.0 to upgrade.

ECMAScript 2015 and CommonJS

The original version of the…

• Announcements
• API

At SoundCloud, we’re building an ecosystem where creativity thrives. Developers are an important part of that ecosystem. We’re continually inspired by how you use the SoundCloud API to support creators and listeners in innovative ways.

But as the ecosystem has grown, we’re dealing with an increasing number of applications that abuse creator content by violating our developer Terms of Use. To help control this type of behaviour, we’re introducing a daily rate limit on API play requests.

Beginning…

• Announcements
• API

Requests for playlists have always included the full track objects contained within. This representation may be convenient for playlists with ten or twenty tracks but can cause problems for playlists that contain hundreds or thousands of tracks. Requesting such large playlists could result in requests that take a long time to respond and that eventually timeout.

Today, we introduce two new representations for the /playlists resource: compact and id.

If you add representation=compact to a playlist request, the request will return only…