Streaming music services seem like a dime a dozen in this day and age, but that set of options may be about to get just a little bit smaller in the near future as a new report claims that Spotify, the leading service in the market, is in discussion with SoundCloud to purchase the company. SoundCloud, which is known mainly for their offering of a platform that allows unknown artists to upload their own music for consumption, is quite a bit different from a lot of other services out there, like Play Music, Tidal, and even Spotify, who all tend to offer vast choices of music for streaming and download, but mostly from larger music labels, indie labels, and other artists who already have record deals.
With SoundCloud under its umbrella, Spotify would essentially have another tool in its arsenal to compete against the handful of other popular services, as it would be incorporating the ability for unknown artists to upload music to the platform. Then again it could simply choose to acquire SoundCloud and leave it operating as an independent service separate from Spotify, but with it under Spotify’s leadership they would be able to carve out a new stream of revenue.
Although an official announcement on the acquisition has not yet been made, it’s possible that those details could be made public in the near future, however no exact time frames have been mentioned nor has the acquisition or the talks about an acquisition been confirmed yet, and when/if it is confirmed it’s unclear whether or not Spotify would share the details of what the acqusition had cost them. With SoundCloud having just announced and launched their own paid streaming service earlier this year, Spotify could be coming in at a good time, as the company purchase would essentially be gaining them any subscribers that they didn’t already have from SoundCloud, even if those subscribers continued to stick with a free service. The deal would also be good news for SoundCloud, who has likely had a challenge competing with much larger rivals in the paid streaming music space. SoundCloud reportedly was estimated to have around 175 million monthly active users as of December 2014, so there’s every chance that those numbers could have grown in that nearly two-year time frame, which would be ripe for the picking for Spotify.