Neither company disclosed why they had chosen to collaborate at this time, nor what their collaboration would mean for the tech giant or the upstart music service.
But Twitter has been seeking a way to add music to its offerings to boost its value and actually tried to buy SoundCloud in 2014 before pulling out of the deal, according to the Recode tech news website.
This time, sources told Recode, Twitter invested $70 million in the Berlin, Germany-based music service after valuing SoundCloud at $700 million.
“Earlier this year we made an investment in SoundCloud through Twitter Ventures to help support some of our efforts with creators,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said this week in a written statement.
“They’ve been great partners of ours over the years and their community-supported approach mirrors ours in many ways,” he said.
A SoundCloud spokesperson said in a written statement that Twitter and SoundCloud were a good combination that should help both companies achieve more-robust growth, which has escaped them for the past few years and forced their stock prices to stagnate.
“We can confirm that Twitter has made an investment in SoundCloud,” the statement said.
“This investment will enable SoundCloud to remain focused on building value for creators and listeners alike, and to continue the global rollout of many company initiatives such as our recently launched subscription service, SouncCloud Go,” the statement continued.
SoundCloud, which claims to have 175 million users, launched its SoundCloud Go subscription service in March.
SoundCloud Go is considered innovative because it features user-generated music and sounds in addition to commercial recorded music.
