SoundCloud acquires Nina Protocol after decentralized music platform shuts down

SoundCloud acquired Nina Protocol on July 22, bringing the decentralized music platform’s artist relationships, editorial archive and discovery tools into its own service as Nina shut down after five years in operation. The companies announced the deal in a joint statement, and the financial terms were not disclosed.

The move gives SoundCloud access to the parts of Nina that had value beyond the startup’s own short life span. SoundCloud said it will provide artist migration services and host Nina’s editorial archive, while continuing to expand a platform built around independent musicians and fan-powered royalties. That combination makes the acquisition less about preserving a failed standalone company than about absorbing the tools and communities that had formed around it.

Nina Protocol launched in 2021 as a free independent music platform and blockchain-based marketplace and streaming site. It let artists create and operate their own digital storefronts, a model that reflected the early web3 promise of direct-to-fan commerce. But on May 28, Nina said it would wind down in phases over six weeks, telling users to withdraw earnings and export releases, purchases and connections before the service disappeared. Nina later said the site and app would be fully offline by July 22, and it said it was looking into options to archive Nina Editorial online.

The acquisition closes a brief and highly visible run for one of the better-known decentralized music experiments. Music Business Worldwide described Nina as winding down after five years, and the shutdown followed months of public uncertainty about how the service could support itself. For SoundCloud, the value appears to lie in what survived that experiment: artist ties, discovery infrastructure and an editorial voice built inside a blockchain-era platform that could not make its own economics work.