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SoundCloud Download Gate Data: 13 Weeks of Real Numbers

Most of what gets written about SoundCloud download gates is either a vendor's pitch or a guess. This is neither. It's what actually happened across StillHype's first 13 weeks of beta: 255 accounts, 262 gates, and 5,501 gate views, tracked end to end from the moment a fan lands on a gate to the moment a download unlocks.

Three things worth knowing before the numbers. First, these are global figures, not a single-country cut. The beta doesn't have enough volume in any one country yet to support a country-specific stat honestly, so this isn't split by geography. Second, everything below clears a minimum sample size before it's presented as a rate rather than a raw count. Where a number doesn't clear that bar, it's shown as a count and labelled as such, not smoothed into a percentage that would look more finished than it is. Third, the 13-week window spans two distinct phases: private beta from June 12 to August 16, and public production from August 17 onward. That split matters for the growth numbers below.

The funnel: what happens between a view and a download

The overall completion rate, a fan seeing a gate and actually finishing it, is 5.84%. That's a useful number to sit with if you're an artist trying to judge whether your own gate's numbers are normal: most people who land on a gate page don't finish it, and that's true regardless of which tool built the gate. The value isn't in every fan converting, it's in the ones who do being a real follow, a real repost, or a real email address instead of nothing at all.

The gap between email submissions (13.05%) and completed SoundCloud actions (5.98%) is the more interesting number. Roughly half the fans willing to hand over an email drop off before finishing the SoundCloud step. That's the step that requires leaving the gate page and doing something on SoundCloud itself, and it's where most of the friction in a gate actually lives.

How artists are stacking gate actions

The average gate on StillHype requires 3.26 distinct actions out of a possible four (follow, like, repost, comment). That's a heavier ask than a lot of gate advice online suggests is reasonable, and it's the most common configuration by a wide margin:

• All four actions required: 163 gates (62%)
• Three actions: 47 gates
• One action: 45 gates
• Two actions: 6 gates

Follow is gated on almost every single gate (99%), which tracks, it's the lowest-friction ask and the one artists care about most. Repost (79%) and comment (78%) aren't far behind. Like is the least commonly required action at 68%, which suggests artists see it as the least valuable of the four, or the one most likely to get skipped if it's the only thing standing between a fan and a free download.

File formats: who's actually using this

Of the 208 gates where format could be reliably determined (54 gates link out to external file hosts and can't be classified), 64% are WAV, 34% MP3, and 2% AIFF. That's a meaningfully DJ- and producer-skewed split. An artist gating a track purely for casual listener reach tends to default to MP3; a WAV-majority split points to an audience that includes people who actually plan to play the file out, not just stream it.

What genres are gating tracks

Techno (42 gates), House (37), and Dubstep (37) lead, followed by Dance/EDM (28) and Electronic (20). R&B (13) and Afro House (13) are the largest genres outside the dance-adjacent cluster. Nineteen gates have no genre set at all.

What public launch did to the growth curve

Going public on August 17 shows up directly in the numbers, not as a vague upward trend but as a clean before-and-after.

• Gate creation: averaged 13.8 per week across the nine weeks of private beta, versus 34.5 per week across the four weeks since public launch, roughly 2.5x.
• New signups: averaged 11.7 per week in private beta versus 34.5 per week post-launch, roughly 3x.
• More than half of everything to date happened in that last quarter of the timeline: 138 of 262 total gates (53%) and 138 of 255 total signups (54%) were created in the four weeks since going public.

Email capture

13.05% of fans who view a gate submit an email, measured at the same funnel stage as above. Across the full 13 weeks, that's added up to 9,212 email submissions and 763 unique addresses collected by artists who chose to include the email step.

What we're not publishing yet, and why

Three things came up in this data that aren't included above because the sample doesn't support saying anything meaningful about them yet:

• Country-specific numbers. Only 120 of 255 accounts have any location data at all, and no single country outside the largest few clears a usable sample size. Any country-specific completion rate or gate count right now would be reporting noise as if it were a finding.
• Label-tier usage. Exactly one account is subscribed to the Indie Label pricing tier. Any average or rate built from a single account isn't a statistic, it's that one account's specific numbers.
• HypeChart "biggest movers." Checking the current top 10 against their ranks two weeks earlier, only 2 of the 10 were ranked at all, and both had dropped rather than climbed. At this beta size, the leaderboard turns over faster than any artist reliably climbs it, so a climb-velocity narrative isn't honest yet.

Each of these is worth revisiting once the beta has more volume behind it.

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