SoundCloud Amplify: The Most Affordable Way to Test Your Music’s Potential

SoundCloud’s Amplify feature is one of the most powerful and overlooked promotional tools in streaming. It’s built directly into the upload process and delivers your music to real SoundCloud users, 100 to 1,000 listeners per song, depending on engagement. That might not sound like much at first, but it changes everything for artists trying to figure out which song to release, how to spend limited ad dollars, and whether a track has real commercial potential.

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Why Amplify Matters

Right now, artists pay for music distribution to get their songs on Spotify, Apple, and other DSPs, but that doesn’t get their music heard. At best, distributors offer social media marketing tips that assume you already have an audience. They tell you what you “should” post and how often you “should” post, when the problem for most artists is that there’s no one seeing the things they post.

The alternative is paying for ads, but ads don’t live inside a streaming ecosystem. You might spend $500 on Facebook or Instagram ads to earn 100 U.S. listeners.

Taking a tour across Reddit and the various music business “academies,” the common advice is for artists to spend anywhere from $1 - $10 per day on Facebook ads. That means artists are spending at least $360 a year on Facebook ads to earn less than 100 US listeners.

SoundCloud’s Pro plan costs $100 a year. You can Amplify up to 30 tracks per day. That’s 30 daily opportunities to get music in front of 100 SoundCloud listeners.

If I release one song a week, it would be like being gifted a $2,000 monthly ad budget.

The Single Dilemma

In consultations with artists, there’s often friction around choosing the right song to release. Most have large catalogs of unreleased music and limited budgets. Without data, the decision usually comes down to opinions — friends, collaborators, or personal taste.

With social media ads, you pay to be seen, not necessarily to be heard. Visibility doesn’t guarantee engagement. Amplify changes that. You can upload every song under consideration, enable Amplify, and let SoundCloud’s listeners decide. If a song only reaches 100 listeners because nobody replays it or interacts, you didn’t waste $500 finding that out. If another track gets pushed to 1,000 listeners with high engagement, that’s the one worth putting real marketing behind.

My Amplify Campaign Results

I tested Amplify using four previously released songs: The Sorrow, Lost With Dreams, The Day, and Good Job.

The Sorrow

Day 1: 1,352 streams | 18 Likes

Day 2: 1,604 streams | 14 Likes

Lost With Dreams

Day 1: 153 streams | 1 Like

Day 2: 2,527 streams | 29 Likes

The Sorrow and Lost With Dreams had been my strongest tracks before. The Sorrow gained organic traction; Lost With Dreams was playlisted by SoundCloud’s head of marketing and reposted by a co-founder. The engagement from SoundCloud extended beyond the platform and lifted my streaming activity across Spotify and Apple Music. 

The other two songs had minimal engagement when first uploaded:

Good Job

194 streams | 2 Likes

The results made it clear — Amplify performance depends on the song itself. SoundCloud doesn’t force-feed low-performing music to users. If people don’t like what they hear, the campaign naturally stops reaching new listeners.

How the Algorithm Works

Amplify distributes each track to a limited number of listeners, then expands based on engagement. Likes, completions, and replays extend your reach. High skip rates or low interaction cut it short.

SoundCloud won’t risk alienating users by flooding their feeds with songs they don’t enjoy. The result is a merit-based ecosystem — your reach reflects listener response, not just budget size.

Long-Term Impact

You get one month of Amplify free with unlimited tracks. A lot of artists use that to promote everything, then cancel before the renewal hits. That’s short-sighted.

SoundCloud’s Fan-Powered Royalties make Amplify worth keeping. You can earn more from a few loyal SoundCloud listeners than from thousands of casual Spotify streams.

My Amplify campaigns created a steady stream of plays from a small but consistent listener base — and that small audience has earned me more in a single month than I made in years on Spotify.

Only SoundCloud Pro users can participate in Fan-Powered Royalties, and Amplify is one of the fastest ways to start building the kind of audience that system rewards.

Conclusion

Amplify isn’t just a discovery tool; it’s a feedback engine. It tells you which songs connect with listeners before you spend serious money. For independent artists, that insight is worth far more than its $100 price tag.

Next in the SoundCloud Pro Guide: [Fan-Powered Royalties Explained →]