Twitter Is Considering a Deal to Buy SoundCloud | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Is Considering a Deal to Buy SoundCloud

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81 pointscoloneltcb44 comments

As an avid SoundCloud user I hope this doesn't happen. Twitter's past attempts at music have been terrible and I don't see why SoundCloud needs someone to acquire it. They're pretty much the default place for musicians (pro and amateur) to host their music and they have a decent way to monetise users.

I agree. Being acquired by Twitter just makes it more likely that SoundCloud will fail, to me - have Twitter actually come up with a decent monetisation strategy yet?

Has SoundCloud come up with a decent monetisation strategy yet?

It's freemium, but the premium accounts are actually worth buying. You get more upload time, better stats, more customisable embedded players, etc. Lots of people buy them, I assume it's already quite profitable. The "prosumer" market for music production is expanding enormously at the moment with the american EDM boom.

If twitter shuts it down or ruins it, there will be blood. A lot of people depend on it and there would be instant demand for a replacement if the userbase turns its nose up at any changes.

OTOH anyone promoting their music on SC is almost certainly already doing so on twitter as well, so some simple, well executed integration could go a long way.

bandcamp could integrate a social community aspect? they already host music?

Bandcamp already let's you follow other users and musicians and view the albums they've bought/want to buy.

Well Twitter made about $665 million last year, with much larger projections for this year. I would say that qualifies as "decent".

Twitter lost $645 million in 2013. I'm not sure "spend $2 to make $1" necessarily qualifies as "decent".

It's decent to all the other companies out there that are now valued in the billions of dollars for reasons unbeknownst to me.

They didn't lose $645 million in spending, it was a one time recognition of the stock they already allocated.

They've still yet to make a profit.

I strongly agree with you. WeAreHunted was one of my favorite sites to find new music. Once Twitter bought it the site and it's service because useless.

Strange. Twitter bought We Are Hunted and turned it into twitter #music and killed that off a couple of months ago.

Now they're thinking about soundcloud? I can't see how it ends well for anyone.

They also got rid of the person leading that deal and the Twitter Music app that they shut down. They appear to be taking a new approach that goes beyond what is trending.

I like this acquisition compared to alternatives. Google would Google-plus-ify it which would be bad. Facebook would absorb it into the newsfeed and fan pages. Apple would make it even more of a walled garden and part of iTunes.

Twitter's ideal tweeter (in my mind) is someone who publishes things regularly (authors, journalists, artists) and so I think SoundCloud will fit right in. I think it's a lot smarter entry into music for Twitter than say Last.fm or Pandora, because Twitter is gaining access directly to musicians as users.

Also, many of the artists I follow on Soundcloud are also active on Twitter. There's a big user overlap, which could be good for an integrated Soundtweet service.

>> "I like this acquisition compared to alternatives. Google would Google-plus-ify it which would be bad. Facebook would absorb it into the newsfeed and fan pages. Apple would make it even more of a walled garden and part of iTunes."

How about they other alternative - not getting acquired? They're one of the few big websites with a decent monetisation strategy other than 'collect personal data and put ads on it'.

I'm on my second year with a paid pro unlimited account and would probably reconsider renewing it if they were bought by Twitter. SoundCloud is already moving into a direction that I don't particularly like and this might be the last straw.

"SoundCloud is already moving into a direction that I don't particularly like"

What direction is that that you are referring to?

The direction where more people start using it.

>> "SoundCloud is already moving into a direction that I don't particularly like"

Apart from the big redesign in 2012 they've changed little over the years. What have they done you don't like??

Twitter, Soundcloud and Instagram are about the only networks I actually enjoy using. (YouTube is used out of necessity and FB is well...FB).

I'd like to see twitter pick them up just so Google / FB doesn't do it.

Some interesting possibilities - but my first reaction was to vomit. (I use sc to push out my tracks.)

Carefully following and unfollowing sc users makes sense; and music and the sc stream to me is much more fun than the twitter one. I don't like getting all the sc reposts (I'd like that filtered out, whilst providing artists with a way to push out messages (which can be filtered out too))... anyway, the best thing for sc to do is have some sort of bitcoin integration.. tracking plays and allowing tip distributions from a listener's wallet to a producer's (and sc can take a commission and provide stats, and also give artists insight into their most valuable fans.) That'd actually be good for music (but twitter won't have any such vision.) After that, sc should do something with video or tickets. If anyone should buy sc, it should be yt - the other big music discovery platform.

If I were sc, I'd tell twitter to go shove it -- unless there are financial imperatives that make that unfeasible.

As long as it's not Yahoo buying them, I'm ok with this. Getting bought by Yahoo seems to be the kiss of death, and by death I mean a long slide into irrelevance.

Tumblr seems to be doing well. Their recent mobile app update brings some interestingness to the mobile blogging experience.

Thanks :)

For what? :)

User irace is an engineer at tumblr, apparently.

As opposed to being bought by say... Google?

A successful deep integration between these two services would be block buster. If they pull it off, it would be an absolutely amazing pairing.

SoundCloud is way too big and embedded across the net for Twitter to shut them down (as some people seem to fear in the comments). This would not go down the way of Posterous or We Are Hunted, the former of which was already not going to continue because they had essentially lost to tumblr and the latter of which was more of an experiment.

imeem was pretty big and embedded when it was shut down unceremoniously by myspace. So that is no protection. I don't think Twitter is likely to do that though.

I think at this point, in the age of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Tumblr acquisitions, it would be disastrous if Twitter's strategy is anything but let soundcloud continue as a separate entity. The more you leave big and established platforms well enough alone, the better.

Heh, it seems like $1B is the required valuation to get to stay independent. Definitely agree though, you don't acquihire at that price so don't screw up a working formula. Interesting that 2/3 of your examples are Facebook acquisitions too, they seem to be handling big acquisitions really well.

True, let's add Nest and Waze to the mix!

I haven't seen the Google/YouTube comparison on here yet. SoundCloud seems like the default place for audio uploads, similar (but not perfectly analogous) to YouTube for video circa 2006. Youtube has maintained a huge amount of independence from Google, to the point where the Twitch rumors from last week were all titled as, "YouTube to buy Twitch," or something close to that[1]. A similar partnership between Twitter/SoundCloud could work well.

[1] http://www.gamespot.com/articles/youtube-to-buy-twitch-for-1...

This will be interesting if it happens. The big issue with SoundCloud is that, so long as they have been a gutsy startup acting as a promotional platform for music, rights-holders have stood back and let them exist. I would imagine that an acquisition by a company like Twitter would bring down all sorts of legal complexity - as with YouTube's acquisition by Google. If rights holders pushed for a backdated payment against copyright music on SoundCloud it could be hugely expensive, unless they've quietly managed to put something in place to get around this.

So they can shut it down like Posterous? F*ck that...

Seriously - posterous was awesome.

Twitter itself was a a spin-off from Odeo (http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/) which was a podcasting/audio sharing service.

Oh no. Poor SoundCloud.

I wonder if this leak is aimed at putting pressure on Twitter to buy.

No! Please don't.

I hope they buy it and write a better UI for it. I love the idea but the UI is a big drawback of using it.

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