Spotify have acquired a sound recording startup for $30 million

Spotify’s slow but sure take over of every sector of the music industry may just be that much closer. The streaming monolith has now recently acquired Swedish startup, Soundtrap, a ‘cloud-based digital audio workstation’.

The deal is said to have set back Spotify “at least 30 million” with members of Soundtrap saying that “Soundtrap’s rapidly growing business is highly aligned with Spotify’s vision of democratizing the music ecosystem.”

The software was launched in 2015 and allow users to collaborate on remixes and studio projects in much the same way as a Google Doc, with a completely real-time recording experience across devices. The company is currently based in Stockholm and was founded byBjörn Melinder, Fredrik Posse, Gabriel Sjöberg and Per Emanuelsson, as the world’s first ‘web-based, cross-platform collaborative music recording studio‘. The interface is reminiscent of Garageband, making perfect for the millions of Spotify’s millennial users to get acquainted with very easily.

The company has shared a blogpost saying,”This is a perfect fit because Spotify has also helped democratize music by helping millions of artists connect with millions of fans while helping listeners discover their favorite new artists.”

With tensions between record labels, artists and Spotify constantly coming to head – could the future of the platform work as a service in which artists directly upload their music after recording through inbuilt software? It didn’t seem to work for SoundCloud for too long –  it’ll be interesting to see how Spotify will alter this process to see it work in their favour.

This follows Spotify’s recent trend of acquiring start-up companies, having made nine deals similar to this since the beginning of 2016.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.