The growing academic, governmental and social interest in marine soundscapes is an encouraging development for soundscape ecology and marine conservation initiatives. Recent technological advances in both software and hardware have increased the accessibility for conducting acoustic survey, which have created new opportunities to progress soundscape monitoring techniques. It is evident that adoption, development and integration of these technologies is becoming more widespread in terrestrial soundscape research practices. However, these are not always directly transferable to monitoring coastal marine systems. It is crucial that researchers are aware of the limitations and challenges when studying coastal marine systems in order to minimise the risk of compromising data quality. This paper will review the main challenges facing coastal marine soundscape research and evaluate key research progress and opportunities.