It looks like Twitter could be taking another crack at breaking into the music world, if reports that the micro-blogging service is in talks to acquire SoundCloud are to be believed.
Music tech journalist Peter Kafka reports that Twitter is currently in talks to purchase the music-sharing service, which has become the de facto place for musicians to post new tunes and remixes since its 2007 inception.
Soundcloud has a reported 250 million listeners, while Twitter has 255 million monthly active users.
This isn’t Twitter’s first foray into music. The social media service launched Twitter Music — which was shuttered in March 2014 — last year. That service allowed users to see what tunes were trending on Twitter, as well as get musical suggestions based on their tastes.
If this deal were to go through, it would be a big buy for Twitter, as SoundCloud is currently valued at $700 million.
The sale wouldn’t be as pricey a deal as Apple’s alleged $3.2 billion plan to buy Beats Electronics, but it could be relatively impactful, adding a deeper social layer to SoundCloud and making Twitter more dynamic.
SoundCloud has made efforts to make its homepage more social in the past, with its “The Next Soundcloud” redesign (complete with profile pages), but the site never really seemed to become a destination for casual music fans; the name of the game has always been sharing.
Twitter users share more SoundCloud links than any other music service — a practice made easier now that those links can be played without leaving Twitter.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment on this alleged deal.
Brenna Ehrlich
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