A new rumor suggests that Google is considering a buyout of SoundCloud, the streaming music service where you can typically find a collection of content from many indie artists as well as individuals who are looking to share their audio creations with the global network of SoundCloud’s community. The entirety of that community and the service that ties it all together is now supposedly being valued at around $500 Million, with Google said to be the potential buyer. This is following a reported rumor from earlier this year that Spotify was interested in purchasing SoundCloud themselves, although that deal later fell through when Spotify walked away from the table, which at the time was an acquisition that would have been around double the amount that it’s rumored to be now, which was about $1 Billion.
These are the just the beginning rumblings of Google’s rumored interest, and at the moment there is no actual detail about what Google sees in SoundCloud’s platform, so there’s no way to know whether they have plans to implement some of SoundCloud’s features into their own existing streaming music services or simply use SoundCloud employee’s to their own end. If Google were to acquire SoundCloud, though, it wouldn’t be the first streaming music acquisition for the search company.
Back in 2014 Google acquired Songza and later shuttered that service as of January 31st of 2016, while also rolling a good number of Songza’s features into Google Play Music. Taking this into consideration, it wouldn’t be too shocking to see Google do the same thing with SoundCloud. Of course, there is always the chance that they could acquire SoundCloud and leave it operating as an independent service, while weaving in some sort of integration between it and its other music service offerings. For now this is just a rumor, and there’s no telling if there might be other interested parties now that the potential price acceptance has been lowered to around $500 Million to sell. Google could be a good fit either way, and for the moment SoundCloud’s plethora of users, which totals more than 175 million globally, will be continuing to enjoy the features of the service as they are without change.