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Spotify in Talks To Acquire SoundCloud (variety.com)
Janko Roettgers, writing for Variety: Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire rival music service SoundCloud, according to a report by the Financial Times. An announcement of the acquisition could be made soon, according to the Times. The acquisition would come just months after SoundCloud launched its own paid streaming service. A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment on the report when contacted by Variety; SoundCloud didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Spotify is the market leader in the growing paid streaming business, disclosing earlier this month that it now has more than 40 million paying subscribers. Its biggest competitor is Apple Music with 17 million paying subscribers.
looking forward to the tens of thousands of spotify users being automatically led to unfunny "meme" mixes and songs byy teenage edgelords with waifu or furry avatars.
I follow the 80's synth music community closely and they heavily rely on soundcloud.
My understanding is that despite 100's of millions of monthly users they have not been able to monetize their service without pissing off their users and in fact run at a loss.
They essentially provide an invaluable service to the world for free. If this goes through I expect things to change.
This is not good.
Spotify works on Linux, doesn't have ads in the paid version (because the $10 a month for "any music I can think of" is a better value than the "some movies" I get from Netflix), and the worst thing they are guilty is paying record labels who go on to stiff the artists.
..and I love podcasts and right now, Soundcloud is one of the best ways to get them. Unfortunately, they're not terribly profitable. And that means, there's a chance of that work disappearing forever.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Where are the trolls to tell us you should use Pandora because Spotify is for hackers and SoundCloud is for terrorists.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it's Soundcloud. It was over when they were bought out the first time. It was really cool to begin with and then money interests got their hands on it. Once again creativity squashed by Copyright.
AFAICT Soundcloud is the only music site that supports CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing).
They let artists mark each track individually whether or not that feature is allowed for their track. I've used it as source music for things on vertexshaderart.com. It will kind of suck of because of the acquisition they remove CORS support.
In the last few months a major change has already happened. They've removed the ability to self promote your music to groups. The only way to be heard now is if your music is reposted by someone else who has a lot of followers. It was obviously part of some kind of monetization attempt. it remains to be seen what will happen to the service now.
As an independent musician it has become impossible to get people to find your music unless you are big enough that followers start reposting your tracks. Listens on my tracks have fallen to 25% of what it used to be.