Apple is focusing on enhancing Apple Music with its recent collaborations and purchases. It purchased Shazam, a song-identification service, collaborated with Genius, expanding its lyrics database and now bought over Asaii, an analytics startup.
Asaii is a music analytics company that can discover new artists with its technology, using an analytics engine to score song data through social media and streaming services such as Facebook, Spotify, Twitter and so on to identify breaking artists before they become mainstream. The acquisition of the company will help Apple Music in finding artists 10 weeks before they appear on charts, and the technology was said to have a 70% success rate in doing so.
Asaii also have a recommendation algorithm that can suggest music to users based on the songs they listened to, which allows Apple to match with Spotify’s recommendation services. Spotify also started allowing unsigned artists to upload music to its platform, which is why the acquisition of Asaii will be able to bring Apple Music on par with Spotify. A report by Axios said that the startup was bought for less than $100 million.