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SoundCloud is getting saved by its investors (at least for now)

The board members of SoundCloud, the ailing music streaming service popular with independent artists and musicians, have officially agreed on a rescue plan.

The Berlin-based company announced Friday that it was swapping out founding CEO Alex Ljung for ex-Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor, and making Ljung chairman of the SoundCloud board. The move follows months of reporting that indicated SoundCloud was in dire financial straits, which required it to lay off 40 percent of its staff — 173 people — in early July.

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Soundcloud is getting a roughly $170 million life-saving investment that is mostly funded by the Singaporean government-owned firm Temasek and the Raine Group (which is also an investor in VICE Media). The funding sets SoundCloud’s value at $150 million, according to Recode. In 2014, the company reportedly tried to sell for more than $1 billion to Twitter, which is a SoundCloud investor.

Since its founding in Sweden in 2007, SoundCloud acquired a reputation as something of a YouTube for young and independent musicians and podcasters. It raised successive rounds of funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs like Kleiner Perkins and Twitter, attracted hardcore fans in music celebrities like Chance the Rapper, and went from 1 million registered users in 2010 to around 40 million in 2014.

But over the past few years, things went terribly wrong for SoundCloud. In the face of mounting copyright claims from record labels, the company implemented a series content takedown tools that were unpopular with users. More recently, it introduced a paid, on-demand streaming service meant to compete with Apple Music and Spotify — SoundCloud Go — that has apparently flopped.

But SoundCloud, in spite of these struggles, still has its champions. Chance the Rapper, for instance, tweeted that he was “working on” the company’s struggles shortly after the layoffs.

Whether the $170 million in funding, the change in leadership, and the company’s diehard fans will be enough to turn SoundCloud is no sure thing — its losses have also widened each of the last few years, reaching about $52 million in 2015.