High-Tier Content in the SoundCloud API

You can now retrieve metadata for our full SoundCloud catalog through our API by providing the new access filter in your request.

Until recently, high-tier content (Go+ content) wasn’t served from our API. This removed the ability for clients to decide how to present restricted or blocked content, i.e. high-tier content. With this change, clients are now able to fully control the user experience:

https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/833426378/tracks?access=playable,preview,blocked&linked_partitioning=true

In the above example, the access parameter indicates which level of playback accessibility for a track is available to the requesting user. There are three possible values supported:

• playable — The user can listen to a full track.
• preview — The user gets a snippet of a track (Go+ content for free users).
• blocked — The user isn’t allowed to play the track but can see the metadata.

You can specify any number of allowed values depending on your use case.

For instance:

• access=playable will return only tracks the user can listen to.
• access=playable,preview will return all tracks that the user can either play fully or preview the snippets of.
• access=playable,preview,blocked will return metadata for all tracks — even the blocked ones the user cannot listen to due to various restrictions.

If no filter is provided, the endpoint falls back to the default behavior and provides the content with the access=playable,preview value.

All track entities are now also annotated with this new field to indicate the level of playback accessibility available to the user:

{
  "artwork_url": "https://i1.sndcdn.com/artwork.jpg",
  "id": 123456,
  "isrc": null,
  "kind": "track",
  "permalink_url": "https://soundcloud.com/userPermalink/trackPermalink",
  "stream_url": "https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/123456/stream",
  ...
  ...
  "access": "playable"
}

For an overview of full use and all the supported endpoints, please refer to our API specification.

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