SCENES TO WATCH
SCENES ON SOUNDCLOUD SHAPE THE FUTURE OF MUSIC. FORMED THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTIVITY ON THE PLATFORM, THEY REFLECT SHARED CULTURAL AND SONIC INSPIRATION AND ARE HOTBEDS OF CREATIVE COLLABORATION. THEY ARE BEACONS FOR FANS LOOKING FOR WHAT'S NEXT IN MUSIC.
2025’s Music Intelligence Report highlighted a growing indie wave, powered by a new generation of artists picking up guitars and reshaping alternative music. In 2026, expect names like bunii (SoundCloud’s October 2025 Ascending artist), crayon and overtonight to hit bigger stages. Artists in this scene are fluent in pop-punk and bedroom acoustic, but also draw heavily from newer hip-hop trends like “jerk,” to make music that freely crosses traditional genre lines. It’s an eclectic sound that speaks to the youth — eclectic new indie plays jumped more than 2.5x in 2025, with 89% of fans being Gen Z.
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One of the fastest growing hip-hop scenes on SoundCloud is Mexican reggaeton, with plays up 81% in the past year. Artists in this scene fuse reggaeton, trap, plugg, alternative and rising hip-hop sounds including jerk. The movement is anchored by La Obsession Factory, a Mexico City collective that released a debut mixtape in October 2025 and have been selling out local shows. The scene brings rebellious energy to a new youth movement, with 78% of listeners being Gen Z. It’s already spawning new styles: “#chugg” is a scene-specific evolution of plugg music, which itself developed on SoundCloud over the last decade. In 2026, the scene is poised to go international; in the US, plays have already doubled since July.
DMV rap — from DC, Maryland and Virginia — is growing and evolving. Today’s sound pulls from Southern trap and drill, but remains distinct due to the area’s go-go lineage (an energetic, DC-specific blend of post-funk and hip-hop) which drives quicker lyrical flows. A new wave of artists is expanding the sound, from the hectic beats of crank into ‘90s R&B and beyond. At the forefront is the collective Too Many Strikers, featuring SJR2800, JaeyChino, JodyBoof, Dragnutz, zuru and kuru. In 2026, they’re poised to stamp the DMV’s mark on underground hip-hop scenes. The scene grew 10% in 2025, as artists like Nino Paid and Skino released albums that increased their listenerships many times over, and brought the new DMV sound to the world.
Hard, driving techno scenes are speeding up — literally. The percentage of hardstyle, hardcore and hardtekk tracks that top 180 BPM has increased in each of the past three years as producers and DJs push the limits of hard-driving electronic music. These sounds are increasingly popular among producers, and uploads of flavors of hard techno including “#hardtekk,” “#schranz,” “#makina” and “#240” collectively increased 57% in 2025, with uploads in schranz, a dark and distortion-rich German variant, surging 83%. It’s finding US audiences, too — US plays on tracks hashtagged “hardtekk” increased 75% over the past two years.