The latest ‘acquihire’ in the music startups world has seen social music app Listn’s team absorbed into Beatport, with the app due to be shut down this month as a result. The dance-focused SFX subsidiary is paying an undisclosed amount for the startup, which launched its smartphone app in January 2013, then raised $500k of seed funding that November (Bulletin, 6-Nov-13). The app was pitched as a way for people to browse one another’s music collections, listening to them via iTunes, Rdio, Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud, and signed up 400,000 registered users. “The technical challenges of it were fun, and we were seeing nice growth, but in the back of our minds, we knew the music industry was incredibly challenging, not to mention expensive to compete in. Monetisation was something that was far down the line for us,” admits CEO Mike Schmidt, in an interview with PandoDaily. “We were always having fundraising and acquisition conversations in parallel. That’s how the Beatport relationship started, as a strategic investment discussion. But they were more interested in acquiring us.”
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…