Berlin based online music streaming company SoundCloud made some important executive announcements today. Eric Wahlforss, who co-founded SoundCloud in 2007 along with Alexander Ljung, is leaving his CTO position to take over the charge of chief product officer. Artem Fishman, who most recently had been a vice president of engineering at Yahoo, has been hired as the new CTO for SoundCloud.
The audio streaming startup has been having a difficult time generating revenue, and was taken to be an acquisition interest of Google. It has also been facing tough competition from giants like Spotify, Apple and Google in the audio streaming market. Therefore, this move could be taken as its intent to bring technical leadership in its firm and add more variety iinits products for the sake of financial gains.
Alex Ljung, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, SoundCloud, in a statement, said:
SoundCloud is a truly unique platform in the music streaming space. We have ambitious goals to further innovate the user experience for our connected community of creators, curators and listeners, and as we enter into this next stage of growth, Eric and I felt it was important to bring in a senior leader to oversee Engineering, to allow Eric to have laser focus on leading and aligning the exciting product initiatives we have slated to launch later this year.
In its recent financial fillings in UK (as per MusicBusinessWorldwide) the company mentioned a loss of $52 million on revenues of $22 million in 2015. Obviously, they are in dire needs of raising revenues. But with the launch of Go, the revenue has surged a bit in 2016.
The company has been an acquisition interest, but the attempts of Twitter and Spotify both proved a fiasco. Twitter is now only an investor in the company. And very recently, the reports from MBW alleged that Google is willing to gain control over SoundCloud. However, no official comments have been released by both these companies.
Meanwhile, Wahlforss will lead both engineering and design teams of SoundCloud in addition to supervising its data and analytic business.
In a statement, he said,
Artem is a seasoned engineering executive who brings with him a wealth of experience and a positive, collaborative mindset.We’re delighted he will be joining SoundCloud as our new Chief Technology Officer, which is a key role as we continue to innovate and grow. Fishman has a keen interest in deep technical details and data-driven approaches which, alongside his leadership skills and passion for our product, will be of real benefit to the engineering organization.
