There are rumours that Spotify is looking to acquire SoundCloud

Recent comments by Spotify founder Daniel Ek have raised questions over whether the Swedish company is weighing up a bid for SoundCloud or, at least, adopting a similar model.

Ek was talking to Swedish TV4 about Spotify's 10-year plan and expressed a desire for the company to provide its users with new artists.

He said: "Today Spotify has two million artists on its platform. To us, the next 10 years is all about enabling these artists to make a living out of their music, and connect them with a new audience. Today our users say ”introduce me to new music”. What the artists say is ”help me finding my audience”. Essentially, that’s two sides of the same coin.”

As DiDigital points out, though, Spotify does not have the same scope of lesser-known artists as SoundCloud does, thus alluding that Spotify may be working towards a similar model to SoundCloud or even looking to purchase it.

Touching upon the subject of hoping to form a more direct relationship between artists and users, he alluded to a function commonly used on SoundCloud, the comment section.

"Yes, trying to connect them and finding opportunities for artists to express themselves and for users to give feedback to the artists.”

Although we're not saying anything is concrete, a bid from Spotify wouldn't come as a total surprise as it was recently reported that SoundCloud was looking to sell for $1 billion. The Berlin streaming service also had $70 million of investment poured into it by Twitter.

SoundCloud's subscription service, SoundCloud Go, is also seen as a competitor to Spotify.

[Via: Business Insider Nordic]

Dave Turner is Mixmag's Digital News Editor, follow him on Twitter