Twitter: Bird on the Wire

As speculation runs rife that Apple is about buy Beats for $3bn and Google develops a twitch, rumours surfaced that Twitter was about to make a move on SoundCloud– though the deal is apparently now off. ‘Tech monopoly’ is fast becoming The Gen’s favourite new game, combining the stakes of Wall Street with the suspense of a Hitchcock box set.

Twitter closed its unremarkable music chart service ‘#Music’ one year after opening earlier this year. This was set-up following an acquisition of new music discovery service We Are Hunted.

Souncloud allows users to upload and share tracks but remains an unlicensed service despite reportedly being in talks with various major labels. SoundCloud had 250 million users in October last year and is valued at a cool $700m.

Recode reported that a deal was on the cards earlier this week, with Twitter’s 5m users possibly about to get a re-skinned version of a service they clearly didn’t want in the first place. Or simply a greater level of integration with existing Soundcloud services. Alas, we’ll probably never know though The Gen doubts this will be Twitter’s final cuckoo clock coo to the world of music services.