Apple has reportedly acquired a music analytics company called Asaii. And Apple plans to integrate Asaii into Apple Music to improve its recommendations feature and provide better insights for artists. And Apple may use Asaii’s technology to compete against Spotify’s RISE emerging artist initiative, according to AppleInsider.
The acquisition price was undisclosed, but Axios is reporting that it was for under $100 million. Even though Apple did not confirm the deal, the LinkedIn profiles of the three co-founders — which Sony Theakanath, Austin Chen, and Chris Zhang — of Asaii have been updated to executive roles at Apple Music.
Before launching Asaii, Theakanath was a software engineer at Apple who worked on a Special Projects Team between May 2015 to August 2016 specifically related to Core OS and iAd. And Chen also worked at Apple as a global operations manager in 2016 for a few months.
Asaii developed a proprietary algorithm that assigned an “Assai Score” to artists. And Asaii’s website said that the company can find artists ten weeks before the break on the charts.
The Asaii platform also provided real-time data where music industry insiders can find the newest tracks as they are uploaded online and can filter through a catalog of tracks to find “the needle in the haystack using dozens of detailed filters.”
Asaii was founded in 2016 and the company uses machine learning for analyzing streaming music. For example, Asaii used the play count and other data from Apple Music, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud, and Twitter to find up and coming tracks and provided analytics to music industry insiders.
And Asaii also provided an API for streaming services called Asaii Recommend. The Asaii Recommend API enabled third-party companies to power user recommendations and generate playlists based on certain algorithms.
