As more and more people choose to stream their music, Twitter is reportedly looking to buy Berlin-based company SoundCloud.
When it comes to music, times have certainly changed. Like the transmission of photos (via Instagram and Facebook) and letters (via email and social media posts) before it, more and more of the music that we listen to is being listened to by way of the Internet, with digital downloads increasingly becoming the preferred medium over CDs and the even more aging media of vinyl records. A key place that people go to listen to music for free is YouTube, as people choose to watch music videos via the video streaming service, but for the times when you don’t have the bandwidth for videos and don’t want to continuously select your playlist, people go to SoundCloud and now, Twitter are rumoured to be buying the Berlin-based company.
While a figure wasn’t disclosed by sources with insider information on the deal, the leak suggests that Twitter would like SoundCloud to become the ‘YouTube of audio’. SoundCloud is already a popular way to discover new music from lesser known artists, as well as allowing users to access the hottest tracks from the most popular artists around and so those are two key reasons as to why the company was recently valued at $700 million, which certainly isn’t a figure to sniff at. Twitter too is a rather nifty way of discovering new artists, with their social media profiles garnering interest, but by merging the two together Twitter would be able to leverage it and even make more money with promoted tweets and sponsored accounts.
That would definitely be a lucrative deal should Twitter follow through with it as despite plenty of people using Twitter, the free nature of the site means that it struggles to make money. However, on the other hand, money is also a key reason as to why the deal has yet to go through. According to additional sources “the numbers just didn’t add up” suggesting that Twitter would perhaps like to haggle that $700 million figure down before both companies sign the papers.
We’ll keep you posted once we know more.
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