Rumors began to circulate last month about Swedish firm Spotify's possible interest in doing with the mainly independent German music distribution platform SoundCloud. SoundCloud is the ideal platform for all those independent artists who need a way to distribute their content either in the form of songs or through podcasts. After several months of negotiations, and according to Techcrunch, the Swedish firm appears to have abandoned the negotiations so ultimately all the content from SoundCloud will not be integrated into Spotify.
Apparently the Swedish firm has been forced to rule out a possible purchase from SoundCloud because it would negatively affect an imminent public offering for sale. As we can read in Techcrunch:
Spotify has not officially said that it will go public next year, but there has been a lot of speculation about it, including a round of financing. According to our sources, the negotiations between Spotify and SoundCloud have been frozen because the Swedish firm does not need an additional headache in the very likely case that they decide to go public next year.
SoundCloud allowing users to upload, promote and share audio recordings would have allowed Spotify to add user-created content to its own music catalog, but Spotify would have to deal with licensing issues something you wouldn't want to do with a public offering for sale in between.
The number of Spotify subscribers is currently 40 million, while Apple Music just hit 20 million. Regarding the number of paid SoundCloud users, the only thing we know is that the music service is used by 175 million listeners every month.
