Spotify Looks to Amp up Music Discovery by Purchasing SoundCloud
The music streaming stalwart is apparently in “advanced talks” to buy the audio platform.
In the burgeoning realm of music streaming, a slew of major media outlets are claiming that Spotify may acquire SoundCloud. According to The Financial Times, the digital music service is in “advanced talks” to purchase the audio platform that is widely-recognized for helping budding musicians and bands gain clout in the rather oversaturated industry. Spotify will probably need to shell out a hefty $8.9 billion USD if it wants to take the platform over—what it was last valued as per The Wall Street Journal. The goal here is to amp up music discovery and by acquiring SoundCloud, the digital service helmed by Daniel Ek may knock its rivals out of the water, including Apple and TIDAL. Not to mention iHeartMedia, Pandora and Amazon who are all slated to release their exclusive on-demand services.
This past March, SoundCloud launched its latest music-streaming service called SoundCloud Go that charges users a reasonable $9.99 USD a month. It has offline playback, it’s ad-free and users can peruse an extensive archive of popular music. However, according to Business Insider, its interface “is difficult to navigate” due to its aggregation of “premium” songs with “free” ones—they aren’t separated. Still with Spotify’s 40 million paid users and over 100 million actives (September 2016) coupled with SoundCloud’s 175 million unique monthly listeners (December 2014), this acquisition shebang is undoubtedly making Spotify’s opponents quake in their boots.
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