Hacked Sony emails reveal Snapchat planning a music feature

The Sony corporate hack, perhaps the biggest tech story of the year, just keeps on making headlines. 

This time, the subject is Snapchat and a list of emails between the company and Sony Entertainment's CEO Michael Lynton, first reported by TechCrunch.

In the emails, Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel reveals that the company has been working on a music service that will eventually help promote artists on the app. Snapchat even came close to a deal with Vevo in August which fell apart at the last minute. 

Introducing a music-specific feature to the service would make a lot of sense for Snapchat, given the ubiquity of streaming services and the company’s young demographic. 

As much as both companies would have preferred for these emails to stay private, they do show an interesting development process for the Snapchat music idea, with some initial back-and-forth between Snapchat’s CEO and Sony Music’s Global Digital Business President and, later on, emails with Epic’s CEO LA Reid and VEVO’s CEO Rio Caraeff. 

The emails with Caraeff in particular reveal that VEVO turned down a deal that would have seen Snapchat take home 40% gross of the advertising revenues.

The emails also reveal the price on the acquisitions of AddLive ($10m cash, $20m stock), Scan.me ($14m cash, $33m stock) and that the company turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Google. 

As the leaks from the hacks continue, they could expose more sensitive data of third party companies that have had communications with Sony over the past year.

Sony Music should be particularly worried. There have been many high-profile negotiations over the past year, with the likes of SoundCloud for example, and should all those threads come to light that could prove to be a real issue for both companies. 

 

(Andrea Leonelli)