Twitter is reportedly considering a deal to acquire Soundcloud, the Berlin-based audio and music-sharing firm.
With Soundcloud valued at $700m, the buyout would be Twitter's largestsince it acquired mobile ad company MoPub in September 2013. A Soundcloud spokeswoman told the Guardian that "we don't comment on rumour or speculation".
According to Recode's Peter Kafka, who first broke news of the possible purchase, "a SoundCloud deal would give Twitter a way to expand its reach independent of its core service". In doing so, it could offer a way out of the company's disappointing slump in growth.
Twitter has experimented with music services before. In April 2013, it launched a music-focused app which it claimed would "change the way people find music". The app floundered and was unceremoniously killed in March 2014, after it fell as low as 1,486th in the music charts on iTunes.
SoundCloud is popular with bands and podcasters as a cheap and easy way of hosting short audio clips. But it's had trouble of its own: like any service which lets users upload media, there's no small amount of unlicensed material hosted on their service.
Source: Guardian
