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Twitter might be looking to buy SoundCloud

• Egon Kilin
• May 20th, 2014

According to a Redcode report, Twitter seems to be interested in purchasing SoundCloud, the popular online audio distribution platform. The deal is not yet confirmed and details are still scarce at this time, but “people familiar with both companies” claim that it’s bound to happen.

This wouldn’t be the first time Twitter has shown an interest in music, but if the deal closes it will certainly be more profitable than their previous attempts. The microblogging service featured a music app for almost a year, but unfortunately it was forced to shut it down because users weren’t showing any interest in it. More recently, the company partnered with Billboard in an effort to create a tool capable of tracking discussions about artists and their albums.

While this partnership proved to be useful for both companies, it was not enough to solve Twitter’s growing problem. Twitter hasn’t been doing very well recently and is quickly losing ground to other platforms such as Facebook. Acquiring SoundCloud would definitely put them in a better position to compete with the social networking giant, which already has more than one billion active users.

SoundCloud is becoming more and more popular lately and is currently valued at $700 million based on its most recent founding round. The service was founded back in 2007 and had more than 250 million listeners as of October 2013. A deal with Twitter would be profitable for them as well, and it would give the audio company a chance to sell ads alongside its music streams.

Unexpected partnerships and acquisitions seem to be more and more common these days. Just yesterday we’ve heard that Youtube might be looking to buy Twitch for more than $1 billion while earlier this month an Apple – Beats by Dre deal was rumored to be in the works. SoundCloud being purchased by Twitter doesn’t seem all that strange in light of these recent events.

In any case, both companies have declined to comment so please take this rumor with a grain of salt until something official is announced. We’ll let you know the moment we learn something new so stay tuned.