According to Wall Street Journal, Internet giant Google had tried to buy Spotify, the streaming music service, last year but had to back off last minute due to its jaw dropping price tag.
As of May 2014, Spotify had around 40 million users in 56 countries which made it the number one service for streaming music on the internet.
According to the report in the Journal, Spotify was reportedly asking for a whopping $10 billion despite it being valued at $4 billion in its latest round of equity funding.
Majority of the Spotify users go for advertising support versions of the service while only 10 million choose the ad-free option.
The Internet giant had planned on spending around $20 billion to $30 billion on acquiring technology and companies abroad according to a letter it had filed with the regulators of US Securities and Exchange Commission last year. The company has also revealed that in the recent past it had tried to buy a foreign company for $4 to $5 billion but in the end the deal fell through.
Google has also recently purchased a startup called Songza in order to boost its own music service at its Play online shop. Songza is a free online streaming music service which recommends tunes based on people’s mood. The service recommends playlists based on where people are and what are they doing, such as exercising, working hard in the office or starting a day at home. The service has applications tailor-made for iOS and Android Smartphones.
The financial terms of the deal disclosed were not released officially but if some rumours doing the rounds of the internet are to be believed, the deal was locked in at around $15 million.
According to Google’s post on its social network Google+, the company will try to incorporate the Songza features like by the users into its Google Play Music and YouTube wherever possible.
Songza has been to likened to Spotify rival Pandora, which is considered of having the leading advertising supported streaming music model in the world. The top established companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have music services that have to compete in a market where Pandora and Spotify currently are the top players.
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