Backstage Blog

• engineering
• update
• oauth
• authentication

tl;dr: If your app doesn’t store SoundCloud access tokens outside of the context of a user’s client (i.e. a database) the following should not affect you.

There will be upcoming changes to Access Tokens important for third parties integrated with SoundCloud. Access tokens were previously dispensed as opaque strings and going forward will be transitioning to a JWT format.

Ideally, clients should not rely on the shape/format of these tokens as this is transitive PII user data, but for example…

• engineering
• update
• oauth
• authentication

Earlier this year, we updated our API Guide to let developers know that SoundCloud authentication is now operating on the OAuth 2.1 protocol, a popular open standard used by many API providers. This change needed to be made to ensure that we are staying up-to-date in maintaining the highest level of security possible to protect our platform from potential bad actors.

As a result, we must ask that our developer community adhere to this new standard as well. We are giving developers who already implemented SoundCloud authorization using OAuth 2.0 a grace period to transition their integrations to OAuth 2.1 and ask that these updates be made by October 1, 2024, at the latest…