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Twitter has been quietly pursuing the music industry for a while now. They have focused their attention on approaching music socially, with the birth of Twitter Music we saw this vision fly and fall. Twitter Music aimed to be the clever and creative radio station for Twitter users to engage with using their music streaming services socially. Their efforts focused a lot on trying to seek and find emerging artists that highlighted themselves as trends on the social media service (for example, highly mentioned artists), over time many people saw as another failed attempt of a service but having effective abilities in the discovery element but overall hasn’t impressed many people in the last year.
Meanwhile SoundCloud has dominated the Twittersphere with content over the last few years. Since 2007, SoundCloud has been looking at ways to grow and expand their products and with their easy to use and agile social embedding abilities they have naturally carved their way into the music streaming industry. SoundCloud works extremely well with Facebook and Twitter which attracts a lot of artists to using the service and gives them strong integration tools for their listeners to get straight into listening with no barriers to stopping them like link routes.
To the burning question, Why would Twitter want to buy something like SoundCloud.
SoundCloud is very similar to Twitter in my eyes, both designed to be social (easy sharing), both designed to be interactive (comments and replies) and both gamified (followers, plays, RTs). SoundCloud has over 250M monthly listeners and Twitter with over 300M active users, They both focus to reach a lot of users without an account necessary.
One core element that Twitter needs deep down is something deeper, with the purchase of Vine in 2012, they have received a lot of success however developments in social trends showcase that people are looking for more from a service. People are comparing Twitter to Facebook more than ever everyday with not the slightest idea that they are completely different. Twitter needs another core feature, whether this is music or video that is deeply and heavily embedded into the service this is the way they will have to go.
At the moment, SoundCloud does the best job of making their content look so deeply part of a tweet that little difference is raised at the connection between the audio content and the written content. Looking into the Vine acquisition further, Twitter actioned the service into a new social network but Twitter did this within the first few months of service.
Vine was much much smaller that SoundCloud is now which goes to show Twitter needs to focus on maintaining relationship with millions of avid listeners over at SoundCloud. There are many different ways in which this takeover could go, the two services could go its separate ways, letting Twitter have control but the business to continue doing what it is doing or they could merge SoundCloud into a Twitter feature/embedding it as new content.
Personally I don’t think I would ever go to Twitter to listen to music as a sole feature but for music discovery and for TV programme discovery and trends, I would be interested in this being a service within Twitter to see the visual trends of daily activities of the music and TV world and recommendations on what to watch, listen to and play.
This would be an effective tool in growing more users both on Twitter and SoundCloud as a content provider. If Twitter purchases SoundCloud this will be a great way to move forward and launch something more useful for users but if they don’t SoundCloud will continue growing as a resource until a scared Rdio come along and purchase it for $1Bn.
