With the purchase of Soundtrap, could Spotify provide powerful collaborative music creation tools for artists in the near future?
Ahead of their IPO next year, Spotify has spent a lot of money to acquire new companies.
To roll out a possible Shazam-style service, the company bought British startup Sonalytic back in March. Then, to avoid further litigation over attribution problems on their platform, Spotify acquired blockchain startup Mediachain Labs. Finally, to improve content recommendations, Spotify acquired MightyTV and machine learning startup, Niland. Now, the Swedish streaming platform has acquired yet another company.
Earlier this morning, Spotify announced that it had purchased online music recording studio, Soundtrap.
Founded just three years ago, the Swedish start-up provides a browser-based music production and recording studio. Creators could collaborate with other users on the platform in real-time.
Last year, the music startup received $6 million in funding from top-name backers, including former Spotify CFO Peter Sterky. Swedish producer and songwriter Andreas Carlson also invested in the company. Carlson has written hits for Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and the Backstreet Boys, among others.
Speaking about the acquisition in a blog post, Soundtrap wrote,
“Just three years after launching our online collaborative music and podcast recording studio, we are proud to announce that Soundtrap has been acquired by Spotify. Our two teams are culturally, creatively and strategically a great fit, so Soundtrap — including all our staff — will continue to revolutionize the music-making process for consumers, educators, and students from within the Spotify family.”
Spotify added,
“Soundtrap’s rapidly growing business is highly aligned with Spotify’s vision of democratizing the music ecosystem.”
Spotify didn’t explain why it purchased the company. However, the acquisition could “signal interest in a completely different direction for the company,” according to Engadget. The streaming platform could provide tools to allow artists to create their own music on the platform. This would fall in line with Soundtrap’s original vision. In an interview two years ago with The Next Web, co-founder Per Emanuelson explained,
“When Steve Jobs introduced GarageBand, he said half of US households had an active musician in them. Most tools out there today focus on the pro-musician though. Some people can’t deal with all those options but are still very musically talented. We thought: How do we make this as useable as something like Instagram, but still have quality?”
Spotify’s main competition is Apple Music. The acquisition would make sense to compete with Apple’s popular GarageBand software and apps.
Spotify and Soundtrap didn’t provide the financial terms of the acquisition. According to Reuters, Spotify aims to launch their IPO on Wall Street in the first or second quarter of 2018.
Featured image by Spotify
What a bunch of BS. Anyone stupid enough to record with Spotify and hand over their copyrights deserves to be ripped off. Throw this in the bin with that other clown from Google starting that ‘pro-artist’ new streaming service. Decent modern recording is not that hard to come by, not that music production is something any newbie bozo can pull off. Still, lots of up and coming engineers out there.
Avoid anyone associated with the previous industry like the plague. There are co-ops being formed out of musicians. Stick with them. I won’t say you don’t need the promotion some of these clowns might give .1% of the people who submit their music, but the rest will all have their rights compromised.
Spotify saw Recordgram won TechCrunch and decided to buy an inferior company. ?