Twitter is apparently again trying to engage our eardrums with a deal to buy audio sharing company SoundCloud, Recode reports. The deal would push forward Twitter’s music strategy, one that’s largely stagnated since the failure of Twitter #Music.
SoundCloud, considered “YouTube for audio,” has 250 million monthly active listeners, a number comparable to Twitter’s user base. There’s undoubtedly some overlap there, but a SoundCloud acquisition could give Twitter an opportunity to diverge from its core product and provide a new sort of standalone social service without having to build it from scratch.
SoundCloud is already the most popular music sharing service on Twitter, Recode notes. Twitter users share more links to SoundCloud than any other service, including Spotify. Both companies declined to comment.
Update 5/20 1:30PM: The Wall Street Journal reports that Twitter backed out of the SoundCloud deal because “the numbers didn’t add up,” citing a person familiar with the matter.
Image courtesy of Eric Wahlforss on Flickr
