Solve these with your ears. They are invisible on the page.
A soundalike clue points at a word that sounds like the answer without being spelled like it. The clue "lots of" gives LOTTA. The clue "Joe leans" gives JOLENE. These are the clues that make people talk to themselves.
They exist because popular music has never respected spelling. Song titles contract, slur and abbreviate to match how the line is actually sung, and artists have named themselves with deliberate misspellings for as long as there have been artists. A game that only allowed proper dictionary words would have to leave out a substantial slice of music.
What makes them satisfying is that they defeat a specific kind of cleverness. You can be excellent at synonyms, quick with anagrams and completely stuck on a soundalike, because reading is a visual habit and these clues are not visual. The information is in the sound, and the sound only arrives when you stop looking and start listening.
They are also where the wit tends to live. A clue that gets from a Scottish phrase to a rapper's first name, or from a golf call to the word FOR, is doing something that has no equivalent in the other clue types. There are relatively few of these in the game, and they are disproportionately the ones people mention.
Cryptune contains 75 soundalike clues, which is 4% of every clue in the game, spread across 67 puzzles. They break down as 55 on artist puzzles, 19 on song puzzles, 1 on album puzzles.
Joe leans→JOLENE
From Jolene. Two words collapsing into one name. Completely opaque on the page and completely obvious the moment it is spoken, which is the defining property of the type.
Scottish for 'can you'→KANYE
From Kanye West. The clue tells you it is about pronunciation by pointing at a dialect. That signposting is what keeps a clue like this fair.
misspelled Saturday & Sunday→WEEKND
From The Weeknd. Here the clue is explicit about the trick, because a stage name with a missing vowel cannot be clued any other way without being unfair.
heaven→SEVEN
From Seven Nation Army. A single word, one letter of difference, and no signposting at all. Among the harder soundalikes in the game precisely because it looks like it should be a synonym.
Say it out loud. This is not a general tip, it is the specific method for this clue type, and it works far more often than it has any right to.
Suspect a soundalike whenever a synonym almost works but the spelling feels wrong. If you are confident the word means "a lot of" and the letters will not fit the title, you have probably solved it already and are looking at the sound rather than the spelling.
Watch for clues that reference another language, a regional accent or a specialist call. These are usually signposts that the answer is phonetic, because there is no other reason for the clue to be pointing at how something is pronounced.
A wider sample, clue on the left and the word it hides on the right.
Back to the clue school, or see how clue types vary across the eras on the decade pages.