The iPhone giant has reportedly acquired music analytics startup Asaii, says Axios. The small company offers an AI-based product that allows music labels to discover and track artists that post their songs to social media and sites such as YouTube. On their website, Asaii boasts: “No more manual grunt work. Our machine learning-powered algorithms find artists 10 weeks before they chart. Be ahead of the game.”
Axios says the deal is worth nearly $100 million. So what will Apple do with Asaii’s tech? It will almost certainly use it to improve content recommendations to users of Apple Music. But if Apple wanted to, they could also use it to digitally scout up-and-coming musicians and sign them to Apple Music exclusives before the other music labels snap them up.
Apple has not yet issued their boilerplate acquisition confirmation at the time of this writing, but we’ve reached out to them for verification.
Update: TechCrunch is contradicting Axios‘ report. The site says Apple did not acquire Asaii, but instead hired its three founders:
What it has done is hire a few employees of the company — specifically the three founders, Sony Theakanath, Austin Chen and Chris Zhang — who are all now working at Apple at Apple Music.
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