The network has historically had a diverse mix of music, including underground and independent artists, unreleased music, such as demos and mixtapes, bootlegs, live tracks, and live DJ sets, but releases from major and independent labels can also be found.

For example, typing in experimental will return all the files that are contained in folders having that name, providing quick access to bands and albums in a determined musical genre.

The list of search results shows details, such as the full name and path of the file, its size, the user who is hosting the file, together with that users' average transfer rate, and brief details about the encoded track itself, such as bit rate, length, etc.

The resulting search list may then be sorted in a variety of ways and individual files (or folders) chosen for download.

Soulseek does not support multi-source downloading or "swarming" like other post-Napster clients, and must fetch a requested file from a single source.

Users may complete a profile which contains basic free-form text information (e.g. basic information about themselves or their 'file transfer rules') together with a list of things they like, a list of things they dislike, and optionally an image file.

The Soulseek 156, 157 and Qt clients provide a "wishlist" feature which functions like a stored search.

While the Soulseek software is free, a donation scheme exists to support the programming effort and cost of maintaining the servers.

Nir Arbel writes, as of July 1, 2008: I would also like to take this opportunity to address some of the lies that have been spread about our lifestyle and the money we make off Soulseek.

A few months ago we had to let go of sierracat, our system admin, despite his excellent work, because we could no longer afford his services.

I don't like discussing money issues, but I feel it necessary to defend ourselves from accusations that are, and have always been, patently untrue.

Soulseek claims to be against copyright violation and that the purpose of their service is to promote unsigned artists.

The groups alleged that Soulseek is designed to permit unauthorized access to copyrighted works.

Nir Arbel stated in an interview published December 26, 2003 that there were, at that time, over a million registered usernames and that 80,000–100,000 users log on during peak hours.

[12] The increase in Soulseek users after the shutdown of Audiogalaxy was plainly evident from a before-and-after comparison of chat room populations.

Every year since then, that meeting still takes place at a digital arts festival called Lab30 (30 being the street number of the Abraxas Theater) in Augsburg, Germany, organized by longtime Soulseek user Manfred Genther and other Augsburg locals.

Lab30 has steadily grown in size since the first event and continues to be a meeting place for the musicians and users of Soulseek.

Whilst the main interface has largely remained unchanged since its inception, additional features such as the chat room 'ticker' were introduced into the 156 version.

All recent versions have several bugs which can hang or cause the system to stop searching or downloading.

Nicotine+'s defunct predecessor Nicotine also ran on all Unix-based systems, such as Mac OS X, and on Microsoft Windows.

[22] PySoulSeek was a Soulseek client written in Python that runs under Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris and other Unix-based operating systems.