Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud | Hacker News Reader

Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud

reuters.com

103 pointsadventured58 comments

I don't think Twitter would buy SoundCloud for audio Tweets or podcasts.

Rather, I'd argue that SoundCloud is the #1 source of up-and-coming music on the Web today. Between play and upload information from SoundCloud and mention and trend information from Twitter, Twitter could easily become a content-discovery powerhouse. Information about the "next big thing" will always hold value for marketers, and access to the trendsetters who are consuming the "next big thing" is worth even more.

Between their folded #music attempt based on We Are Hunted and their recent acquisition of Gnip, it's obvious that Twitter are trying to expand and sell their role as a destination for information about the up-and-coming.

That's why they'd buy SoundCloud - Twitter could let marketers learn what's hot next, who's consuming it, and then allow them turn around and sell ads directly to those influencers.

Reminds me of MySpace.

The funny thing is before twitter was twitter it was birthed within Odeo, which could be compared as the soundcloud of the time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo

I thought that the most recent news was that the deal was off http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/06/04/addition-soundcloud...

thought I heard that too... interesting

Please buy Soundcloud. They have a great product that hasn't made many improvements in the last couple years. Hopefully an acquisition by Twitter would give them the resources they need to thrive, without too much negative oversight. (Vine is an example of a very successful Twitter acquisition.)

don't get ahead of yourself. remember twitter #music product?

was vine an acquisition or an internal dev project?

Vine was an acquisition. Dorsey found it and convinced the Twitter team to acquire.

Not sure I agree. I've enjoyed how intentional SoundCloud's updates have been over the last few years without trying to do too much (like every music service ever). The changes have been subtle but useful for both power-users and casual listeners.

I think their approach to discovery needs some attention, but definitely wouldn't expect Twitter to be instrumental in helping with that.

I'm biased, as I'd hate to see anything ruin what I think is one of the best music services right now.

This is exactly how I feel - SoundCloud is one of the best music services out there and I use it to discover the majority of the new artists and music that I enjoy these days. People are also posting awesome mixes and more lengthy content for free. Their mobile app is well thought out, too.

It would be sad to see an acquisition from Twitter, because I think they're going to make it whatever they think they need to compete, which will ruin what SoundCloud is now.

I hope that will be the case but I'm not holding my breath, they have received over $120M in funding up to this point. They had so much potential when they launched and in the last year or so they have just fell behind. When they moved over to this new look there was so much functionality lost and so many critical bugs introduced that they still haven't fixed.

Infinite scroll on their site is completely unusable, on the desktop and on the iPhone. Try to scroll past page 5 on either device and it will begin to slow to crawl, and then it will just start repeating pages of songs over and over. As you scroll, they load more and more elements until the page is using a ridiculous amount of ram. There is no playlist shuffle capability on the iPhone. The shuffle functionality on the desktop is a joke, it shuffles the current page of songs that have been pulled in via infinite scroll.

The whole site in general is very buggy. Many times I can't scroll through my list of playlists when I try to add a song to a playlist. Sometimes I'll like a song and it won't register. All these things have made it become almost unbearable to use.

So between the non-working scroll and lack of real shuffle, it is impossible for me to access any songs I have liked when I started my account. Which are the main songs I want to access. I was thinking of creating my own client on top of their API but I'm worried it will get pulled off the app store like they did with Soundflake.

Although I agree with most of your assessment I have to disagree with this:

>> They had so much potential when they launched and in the last year or so they have just fell behind.

Fallen behind who or what? They are pretty much the YouTube for audio now. If you browse any of the major music sites of even small blogs they embed SoundCloud. When an artist releases an album stream a week before the release and publishes is on Rolling Stone etc. - it's nearly always with a SoundCloud embed.

I agree they really get to fix the product because it's very buggy and missing features that would make the playback experience better (as someone with music on it the artist side of things is quite good) but I don't see anyone coming and overtaking them anytime soon. There aren't really any viable competitors.

I meant they have fallen behind features/bug fixes. Poor wording on my part.

But yes, I agree. They don't have any real competitors at the moment, so that may be part of the reason they aren't improving their product. Don't get me wrong, I think they have an awesome product, I just thought these UX issues were temporary until they worked out all the bugs in the new site, but it has been a while now.

I'm really interested to find out why they pulled Soundflake off the app store though. Anyone know?

> [SoundCloud hasn't] made many improvements in the last couple years.

What, do you think, needs improvement?

I use the application for recording and storing occasional riffs I come up with as private tracks, and to listen to new music from people I follow occasionally. As far as I've experienced, they need not make a big improvement over the site as it is now, but given that I'm not a power user, I might have missed lots of stuff.

The one that annoys me the most is playback. Songs will often stop playing randomly. It only seems to happen with the web client, not the iOS app, but it happens on a lot of different computers and people I have talked to.

Yeah I've experienced that too, I always assumed it was their equivalent of Pandora's "are you still there?" only without politely asking before shutting it off

Well the sound quality of the streaming service is pretty bad, especially for tracks that aren't professionally produced. I don't think people realize how much effect this has on the listeners.

Unfortunately Twitter haven't seemed to realise the "Facebook" way of making acquisitions — if it's a good product in it's own silo, let it stay the course and then have two silos. Twitter seems to acquire and suck products into it, often destroying it in the process (see: The Echo Nest). Vine was unique because it was dead-simple and was already integrated into the Twitter ecosystem, and required barely any modification.

I love SoundCloud, although it has deteriorated slightly in the past year (even little things, like the site going from truly fluid to having several fixed breakpoints, seem to indicators of them become more risk-adverse or "normal" — IMO). I think a change internally would cause some excitement and innovation within the company, and Twitter coming into it would not bring the right kind of change.

Super interesting -- but Soundcloud won't come cheap (they raised at a $700mm valuation in January [1] and are doing really well).

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/25/soundcloud-raises-60-millio...

Berlin startup exit, it is dearly needed! We almost have no first generation entrepreneurs here, all we got is basically Samwer brothers.

IMO it's cooler that Berlin has a company like SoundCloud that makes money! I don't know the numbers but base don what they're charging and the number of people I see with pro accounts they've got to be making decent revenues. Much cooler than a company that makes no money and gets bought by one of the big tech companies.

I don't think they actually make a lot of money as they have to pay a lot for infrastructure, though they have a LOT of traffic and imho that's not a bad thing. Products with a lot of traffic like Snapchat or Secret are amazing. They could all make money if they wanted, but they choose to build up the community instead.

Berlin has a number of great smallish tech-oriented companies that have been around for a while, like Native Instruments and Ableton AG.

It's interesting, and good for SoundCloud, but I don't think Berlin has any particular need for that kind of "startup" culture, where you create some internet service and sell it.

Uh-oh. Are there any other companies than Whisper System that had an actual end-user product that Twitter has acquired -- and then not killed off?

I don't recognize that many from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Except for Dabble DB (Smallthought Systems) and Posterous:

http://blog.dabbledb.com/2010/06/140character-dabbling.html

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/4281780/posterous-is-shutt...

I hadn't realize how extra-cruel the dabbledb thing was until I read this:

https://blog.twitter.com/2010/more-dabbling

"Up until about a year ago, we[twitter] used an online database called Dabble DB to track and share information about our projects internally. While we’ve since moved that project management tool in-house (...)" [In other words: we realize this was a great product, and we still killed it, because, meh profits for twitter?"]

For those that didn't know what DabbleDB was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY

So, while an acquisition might be great for the owners of soundcloud, I'm rather terrified as a user...

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I know off the top of my head:

* Summize -> search.twitter.com

* Tweetie -> Twitter for iPhone

* TweetDeck

* Vine

* Crashlytics

* MoPub

* Gnip

Thanks, I suppose I should have been a little more specific -- I'm not surprised Summize, Tweetie, Gnip and TweetDeck lives on. That said, Crashlytics, MoPub and Vine does seem to indicate that not every Twitter acquisition of an "independent" product leads to product death.

According to Swedish media, refering to Financial Times, Twitter is in talks to acquire Spotify as well. Link that I can't visit: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7ad44fd2-ec08-11e3-ab1b-00144feabd...

Twitter raised $2.1 billion in its IPO -- Spotify is valued north of $4 billion.

Twitter's market cap is $20 billion, which is more relevant.

It wouldn't have to be an all cash deal, though.

Noooooooooo.

I can't see how that would be good at all for Twitter. Spotify makes no money. All their revenues go to paying for the content and that's unlikely to change soon. Twitter would just be purchasing a really cool, really heavy anchor.

Assuming Twitter and Spotify have equally poor formulas for monetizing music, my guess is Twitter views Soundcloud less as a profit generator and more as a lead generator. Since Twitter's revenue model hinges on ad impressions, the hope is Soundcloud could directly or indirectly bring more traffic into the Twitter ecosystem and boost overall ad impressions. Music is just a way to get users "into the store." Whether this is wise is a separate matter. Without knowing specifics about Soundcloud, the other attractive element could be that music is a natural activity on mobile devices. If Soundcloud sees great mobile usage, an acquisition strengthens Twitter's story that it is a leading media network for the mobile generation, which will play well with Wall Street.

It's going to be funny when we reach the end of this social road and we're all back on myspace essentially. Customizable personalized spaces where we share music, videos, and pictures of food.

Tom Anderson is my hero. The guy lives on a new beach every week while Zuckerberg is working 24/7 to rebuild myspace.

As an individual who enjoys listening to music on SoundCloud, this acquisition would be great!

SoundCloud is an amazing platform for music discovery and streaming. I tried Spotify for a while but I returned to SoundCloud. SoundCloud seems to get “out of the way”. I always find better music you would never hear in regulated mainstream music. There are a lot of talented artists who truly enjoy making good music on the platform that probably deserve to be in the Charts but they cannot afford to get record label deals.

With Twitter behind them, this could mean artists have a chance to get their work discovered faster. I hope this acquisition becomes a reality.

As it so happens I've just launched a service built on top of SoundCloud. voliyo.com (non-mobile for now) aims to help musicians and photographers expose their content to a larger audience, and on the flip side, allows you to find new music whilst sitting back and enjoying a photo slide show!

If any photographers/musicians are interested in trying out the private beta, PM me and I'll happily dish out the invite links :)

Interesting that both are/were part of Fred Wilson's portfolio . I wonder if there's other in talks with Soundcloud.

Can any company survive on their own anymore? Need every one of them be absorbed by already oversized entities?

Vine is nothing without a distribution method, so that kind of acquisition makes sense.

If Facebook turns to Shitbook, I really don't want SoundCloud impacted, because they're unassociated and can thrive independently.

Strategically beneficial for both in my opinion. Soundcloud could really use some help in terms of product design in my opinion. UI/UX could be a lot better. Maybe twitter team could help move that along

Interesting. I'd be assuming it's for making audio tweets, but even then it's kind of restricting. Putting voice in front of other people is something people might not still be ready for.

With text/tweets, you can process the text and what it is about at a glance. With video, you have thumbnails and they usually give you a good idea what to expect from that video. With audio, there's nothing. I think people are not ready for that, because audio only is so hard to filter and "consume" without having to listen to it.

Yeah, audio is kind of... obscure, enclosed, linear, hard to scan, browse or preview. It will be very interesting to see what kind of paradigm change is needed to "open" the contents of audio. I wonder if as of today, it is too hard to recognize words in audio and tag accordingly, for example.

There's speech to text. Even if inaccurate, it gives somewhat of a preview that the user can edit.

What if the audio-tweet contained no words?

This is super smart – Soundcloud needs to integrate more deeply with the hype / discovery abilities of Twitter.

Soundcloud songs overlaid on Vine vids, etc. could prove amazing as well.

I think this could be an interesting move for Twitter. Especially for podcasting, since Twitter started out as Odeo, and pivoted due to lackluster interest in the medium.

What is Soundcloud's relation to podcasting? I'm not familiar.

Soundcloud is a platform for sharing audio, people upload audio podcasts to it among other things.

It is used by many people, I listen the Andreessen & Horowitz's podcast there... https://soundcloud.com/a16z

Besides that, it is also the perfect app to upload and share fart sounds...

https://soundcloud.com/royalty-free-musicfactory/fart-sound-...

I hope this doesn't happen.

Why? (Not snarky, genuinely curious)

I'm not the poster you're responding to, but I fear it would make SoundCloud more like Twitter, which would be a bad thing from my point of view. I like SoundCloud. Twitter annoys me.

Incidentally, what are your soundclouds?

i don't think it's podcasting anymore, but making the tweets really small like 1 minute or 50 seconds might be making people more interested in speaking infront of an audience, but if it's online music streaming they could choose rdio instead of soundcloud.

I don't think you can compare SoundCloud with Rdio. Two completely different services.

NOOO

Audio tweets?

An annotated soundcloud track is part of Jeff Tweedy of Wilco's promotion for his new solo album.

http://www.stereogum.com/1684887/tweedy-ill-sing-it/mp3s/

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