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
Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#32Please 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.)
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…
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.
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#33According 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...
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.
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#34Berlin 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.
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#35Please 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.)
> [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.
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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?
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#38Berlin 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.
Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#39Re: Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud
#40According 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...
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.