Why You Can't Just "Transfer" Your Official Catalog from Spotify to SoundCloud

A real, common point of confusion — and the two real paths forward.

A question that comes up constantly, and the honest answer surprises most people: no, you cannot "transfer" your official artist catalog from Spotify to SoundCloud the way a playlist tool moves your liked songs. It's a completely different job, and conflating the two leads a lot of artists down the wrong path before they realize what needs to happen.

Two totally different things, wearing similar names

This is the actual source of the confusion, and it's worth being precise about it:

Your personal listening library

Liked songs, playlists you've built as a listener — genuinely portable. Tools like TuneMyMusic and Soundiiz move this kind of data between services all the time, reliably, because it's just references to existing tracks, not the tracks themselves.

Your official distributed artist releases

Your actual releases — the ones with real streaming stats, real master rights, real ISRCs tied to a distributor — are not something any playlist tool touches at all. There's no "transfer" button anywhere for this, on any platform, because that's not what these tools are built to do.

So what do you do if you want your music on SoundCloud too?

Two real paths, depending on what you're trying to accomplish:

Path 1 — Manual upload

Download your highest-quality audio files (WAV or FLAC, not the compressed version)
Upload them directly to your SoundCloud creator dashboard
Re-enter track titles, album art, descriptions, and social links yourself — per track, since none of this carries over automatically

This works, but it's genuinely manual — every field, every track, by hand.

Path 2 — SoundCloud for Artists (their own distribution tier)

If you're releasing new music going forward and want it on SoundCloud alongside Spotify and Apple Music from the start, SoundCloud's own artist distribution service can handle that — new releases go out through their pipeline directly. Worth knowing plainly: this covers new distributions, not a retroactive import of your existing catalog's history. Matching your existing Spotify-side stats and stream counts on SoundCloud isn't something this — or any — path does; each platform's numbers stay separate.

The bottom line

If the goal is backing up or moving your personal listening library, the existing tools (TuneMyMusic, Soundiiz) already do that well. If the goal is getting your actual releases live on SoundCloud, that's manual work or a fresh distribution — not a transfer, and not automatic, no matter how the request gets phrased. Worth knowing that going in, so the actual work doesn't come as a surprise partway through.