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Smule acquires Khush, two music-making app companies join forces
Here's an interesting acquisition that completely makes sense in hindsight. Smule, the company behind popular iOS apps like Magic Piano and the original Ocarina for iPhone app, has acquired Khush, an iOS developer that also makes musical apps, including LaDiDa and Songify. These two companies were basically meant for each other -- both use music and new interfaces in iOS to make one-of-a-kind experiences for the App Store. Songify, for example, has over 5 million downloads, and Ocarina boasts over 6 million downloads. Together, these two companies know how to make these things work. As you can read in the press release below, Smule will use Khush's assets, and vice versa, to keep producing these types of musical apps and expand the company's "Sonic Network" of social connections and creative sharing. Should be interesting to see what these two come up with working together. Their first work is a video, which uses both companies' apps to make some crazy music. The most interesting part of this merger, however, might be the one thing we don't know: the numbers. Smule has been extremely popular on the App Store, but the fact that it would acquire another company like this shows it's been earning some money to go along with that popularity. This is obviously not just about money -- watching the video above, you can see that these two groups have very similar backgrounds and goals, and having met Smule's Ge Wang myself a few times, I know that Smule's work really is about making these musical experiences come true in a way that almost anyone can experience. That said, these are both for-profit companies, and it'd be interesting to see just how much Khush went for. The iOS developer acquisition game is serious business, and if Smule can acquire another company like this, it shows they have at least a little profit to throw around.
