In a move that could signify a boosted effort to challenge Apple's music streaming stranglehold, Spotify is reportedly in talks to take over rival service SoundCloud.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that the streaming services have entered "discussions" but that these "could still collapse."
SoundCloud raised $100 million in funding in June from investors including Twitter.
Spotify initially expressed interest in purchasing the Berlin-based company in 2015 but talks fell through because Spotify "balked at its asking price," according to the FT.
Despite strong competition from Apple Music, launched in June 2015, Spotify continues to be the most popular music streaming platform with 40 million paying subscribers. Apple, meanwhile, has pulled in 17 million paying customers in just over a year.
However, Apple has not been shy about leveraging its sizeable budget to buy exclusive rights to stream albums from some of music's biggest artists. It held a period of exclusivity over Drake's latest record, Views, which, in July, was the second-biggest selling album of the year in the U.S.
Apple—and Tidal's—practice of exclusive content for its customers has raised the level of competition in an already crowded market. For Apple and Amazon, which operates Amazon Prime Music, its music streaming platforms are additional products that supplement the core of their businesses.
Meanwhile, Spotify and SoundCloud are both independent firms that operate solely as streaming platforms, making a merger more practical when faced with competition from larger players.
Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype and defunct streaming service Rdio, told the FT: "The big question for the streaming market is whether you can be a standalone company in a category when you have companies like Amazon and Apple looking at music as a loss leader, just to sell more iPhones or Echo speakers."
SoundCloud has traditionally been a platform for users to upload their own audio files, but in March launched its own music streaming service akin to Spotify and Apple Music, SoundCloud Go.
Apple has also been in talks for an acquisition of its own: the Jay Z-owned Tidal, which has boasted exclusive streaming content from major pop stars like Beyoncé and Rihanna.
Representatives for both Spotify and SoundCloud declined to comment when contacted by Newsweek.
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