We study microwave background anisotropies induced by scaling seed perturbations in a universe dominated by cold dark matter. Using a gauge-invariant linear perturbation analysis, we solve the perturbation equations on super-horizon scales, for CMB anisotropies triggered by generic gravitational seeds. We find that perturbations induced by seeds—under very mild restrictions—are nearly isocurvature. Thus, compensation, which is mainly the consequence of physically sensible initial conditions, is very generic. We then restrict our study to the case of scaling sources, motivated by global scalar fields. We parametrize the energy-momentum tensor of the source by “seed functions” and calculate the Sachs-Wolfe and acoustic contributions to the CMB anisotropies. We discuss the dependence of the anisotropy spectrum on the parameters of the model considered. Even within the restricted class of models investigated in this work, we find a surprising variety of results for the position and height of the first acoustic peak as well as for the overall amplitude. In particular, for certain choices of parameters, the spectrum resembles very much the well known adiabatic inflationary spectrum, whereas for others, the position of the first acoustic peak is significantly shifted towards smaller angular scales.