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Twitter Invests $70 Million In Music Streaming Service SoundCloud (recode.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Recode reports that Twitter has decided to purchase a piece of the music streaming service SoundCloud. Roughly two years ago, Twitter thought about buying SoundCloud, but ultimately ended up walking away from the music service. Now, Twitter has invested around $70 million "as part of a round that should end up in the $100 million-range." Recode reports: "The round is expected to value SoundCloud at about $700 million -- the same value that investors placed on the company in 2014, when it raised $60 million; since then it has also raised a debt round." Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wouldn't comment on the specifics, but did confirm Twitter's stake in the company. "Earlier this year we made an investment in SoundCloud through Twitter Ventures to help support some of our efforts with creators," said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. "They've been great partners of ours over the years and their community-supported approach mirrors ours in many ways." Twitter may try and integrate SoundCloud into its service to increase growth and engagement, while SoundCloud may try and use Twitter to promote its newly launched subscription service.
Many of my favorite podcasts are now on sound cloud, so they do seem to be offering some good deals to get them to migrate to their service.
Facebook and YT have been removing peoples live streaming due to copyright strikes for fair use complains. Lucky sound cloud must deal with them differently, because I can normally find them on there.
I thought Twitter was losing a hundred mil per year...why do people keep giving them money? They can't monitize people's garbage thoughts.
seems jack dorsey is in denial. his profitless, billions of dollar destroying, anti free speech, sjw ridden, company is a dead man walking.
this investment, being embraced by a smelly rotting corpse, is bad for soundcloud.
it's a great place to host independent music as it offers exposure to a network of fans and other artists. it's easily embedded to any webpage. i like bandcamp more, but it does not offer the ability of artists to become fans of other artists. a lot of people stumble onto my music because of the other bands i know in my following list.
I used to use soundcloud, until they kicked me off. First the thing just stopped working, then I got a "fuck you" page with not even so much as an email address or any other contact info. So soundcloud thinks nothing of shutting users out on technicalities (like "browser too old" even though it used to work fine).
I don't think I would like to invest in outfits like that, no. But then, this is twitter, desperately seeking more enduring relevance than their own unicorn status grants them. We'll see how that works out for them.
If SoundCloud has been around for 2 years and still hasn't gotten a foothold or become profitable, it isn't going to.
There are only a million other successful music streaming services. SoundCloud is an also-ran.
I have never clicked on a soundcloud link and found a band that I like. Sure, there are probably some great bands on there but they are lost in a sea of mediocrity and bedroom demo quality productions. I expect to be disappointed and am rarely surprised. I barely even click at this point, having given up on discovering bands I may like.
I really liked sound cloud.
What sites can we move to after twitter destroys it?