SoundCloud has officially acquired AI-powered music-analysis platform Musiio, which higher-ups say “will amplify SoundCloud’s existing music intelligence capabilities.”
Berlin-headquartered SoundCloud today emailed DMN a release announcing its buyout of Singapore’s Musiio. The latter platform “focuses on B2B audio reference search (AI that can ‘listen’ to music), automated tagging, and playlisting tools for the music industry,” according to the involved parties.
Of course, a number of emerging artists have utilized SoundCloud to achieve mainstream commercial success, and the company in February inked an artist-discovery deal with Solid Foundation Management. Additionally, SoundCloud execs recently commemorated the one-year anniversary of “fan-powered” royalties by doubling musicians’ on-platform earnings for a day.
Bearing in mind these points, SoundCloud emphasized the perceived significance of the Musiio purchase, indicating that the acquired business’s “AI allows users to better predict success, which in turn, can increase their ‘hit-rate’ and ultimately their revenue.”
Consequently, the purchasing entity intends to make four-year-old Musiio “core to SoundCloud’s discovery experience” and use the appropriate technology “to identify talent and trends ahead of anybody else.”
Underscoring and elaborating upon these plans in a statement, SoundCloud president Eliah Seton said in part: “SoundCloud hosts more music from more creators than any platform on the planet. Acquiring Musiio accelerates our strategy to better understand how that music is moving in a proprietary way, which is critical to our success.”
And in a statement of her own, Musiio co-founder and CEO Hazel Savage – who will transition to VP of music intelligence – communicated: “SoundCloud is not only a legendary household name but also an artist forward business that I believe is the future of the new, holistic music industry.
“I am incredibly proud that after 4 years of building Musiio we are now part of SoundCloud,” concluded the Audioshake angel investor Savage, whose fellow Musiio co-founder (and former CTO) Aron Pettersson will become VP of AI and machine learning at the post-acquisition company.
SoundCloud’s Musiio buyout represents the latest example of the music industry’s growing focus on artificial intelligence and the potential advantages thereof.
2021 delivered multimillion-dollar investments in AI companies such as Supertone (which replicates singing voices), Snafu Records (which says that it uses AI to analyze as many as 1,000,000 projects from unsigned acts per week), Aimi (which uses AI to craft electronic music), and the aforementioned AI-driven music-separation platform Audioshake.
But 2022’s first third has already seen the likes of LifeScore (in which Warner Music invested), Soundful, and BandLab complete sizable rounds of their own. However, the U.S. Copyright Office in February doubled down on its refusal to issue a copyright for art that was created entirely by AI.
