Planning ahead for your SoundCloud accounts
SoundCloud Global Limited & Co. KG accounts cannot be transferred and have no beneficiary option — here is what you can do while the account is active
SoundCloud Global Limited & Co. KG does not guarantee transfer of accounts after death. Lifetime planning provides options for managing accounts and controlling who has access to them.
How to protect your SoundCloud accounts
5 lifetime planning steps for your SoundCloud accounts:
Family sharing
SoundCloud has no family sharing features. Each account is individual. SoundCloud Artist and Artist Pro subscriptions are tied to individual accounts. There is no mechanism to share a subscription or link accounts.
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Frequently asked questions
Keep local backups of every uploaded track -- SoundCloud is not a backup service, and all uploaded audio is permanently deleted when the account is closed. Note that account access is what lets the estate download tracks and manage the profile, and consider marking important tracks as "downloadable" so fans or family can preserve them without needing the account. If you earn through SoundCloud for Artists, document the income stream and your payout method so the estate can claim any balance, and note whether SoundCloud is your only distributor or whether you also distribute through a service like DistroKid or TuneCore.
Recording that a SoundCloud account exists, alongside other accounts, gives a fiduciary the information needed to reach the operator through its official process.
There is no beneficiary designation option for SoundCloud. This account type does not support naming a recipient the way bank or investment accounts do.
Sources
Data sourced from SoundCloud Global Limited & Co. KG primary sources (11 pages reviewed). How we research.
