Apple will reportedly buy the music analytics startup, which uses data to predict up-and-coming artists and songs, for less than $100 million to bolster Apple Music in its war with Spotify.
Apple Music is gaining another weapon in its ongoing music streaming subscription battle against Spotify: music analytics engine Asaii, which it acquired for less than $100 million, according to Axios.
Apple declined to comment, as it usually does concerning unofficial acquisition rumors. However, Asaii’s co-founders updated their LinkedIn profiles with new positions at Apple Music, seemingly confirming Apple’s latest acqui-hire. Two of Asaii’s three co-founders, Austin Chen and Sony Theakanath, previously worked at Apple.
There is some dispute over whether Apple is actually acquiring Asaii’s technology or simply hiring its founders to work on a similar technology for Apple Music. The San Francisco-based startup announced in September that its service would shut down as of Oct. 14.
Asaii is a music analytics engine for artist managers and labels that analyzes music data with machine learning algorithms to predict which artists and songs are about to blow up the charts. The Asaii dashboard aggregates music data into discover charts, leaderboards, and auto-generated artist recommendations.
“Our algorithms are able to find the next Justin Bieber, before anyone else,” the startup’s website boasts.
Asaii also doubles as an artist management platform showing popularity metrics and portfolios for every artist you’re tracking, and pulls in social listening data to break down artists’ social media followings and analyze spikes in online popularity.
This marks Apple’s second music-focused acquisition, as the company completed its deal to buy Shazam in September. The Shazam deal also gives Apple a trove of data to help predict when songs are breaking out in popularity thanks to how often Shazam users are searching for them.
In totality, these deals begin to color in Apple’s broader strategy for competing with Spotify and closing its subscriber gap. Both platforms are investing heavily in personalization to curate predictive playlists for users, and Spotify recently announced a beta program to let unsigned artists go around labels by uploading music directly to Spotify.
The Asaii deal ups the ante not only by giving Apple Music better algorithms to personalize users’ music experiences, but ultimately as a means to give Apple’s service a data-driven edge in identifying the next big artists before Spotify does.
