Twitter Looking to Buy Music-Sharing Service SoundCloud: Report

The move would be a new effort by Twitter to get back into music after a failed attempt last year to launch a music-finding service.

(Also see: Twitter Music officially shutting down on April 18)

The report suggested that such a deal, if consummated, would be expensive for Twitter, but would add a company with a customer base of 250 million, roughly the same size as that of the messaging platform.

SoundCloud recently raised some $60 million in venture capital, which would give the startup a value of some $700 million according to The Wall Street Journal.

Neither company has commented on the report.

Re/code said the deal could appeal to SoundCloud by giving the service easier ability to deliver revenue-generating ads along with its music streams.

Twitter in April announced its acquisition of social data provider Gnip for an undisclosed amount, signalling that it would take on a new role of packaging and selling data, a service in demand by business and government. The social media company said separately that it hired a Google executive to lead its consumer product development, filling a position that had been vacant since January.

Later in April, Twitter reported lacklustre user and usage growth for the second consecutive quarter, deepening investor concerns about its struggle to gain a mass following. Perhaps most worrying, the San Francisco-based company said its 255 million monthly users, on average, appeared to check the service less frequently than a year ago.

Written with agency inputs