Apple growing on Big Data – acquiring company to find new talents
Apple is on the talks to acquire Asaii: a tech company that uses a machine learning software to identify trends and what will be the next big hits in the music industry. They claim to find artists 10 weeks before they break on charts.
Asaii’s main feature is a dashboard that pulls together data from social networks and streaming music services, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Apple Tunes, YouTube, Spotify and SoundCloud, to discover hidden talents and new songs.
Users are able to compare the daily, weekly and total play counts from different artists, but it also has more advanced features like marketing evaluations, benchmarks, a music management dashboard for A&R, an API for music services to integrate recommendations and helps record labels with promoting new campaigns.
Although the deal has not been confirmed by Apple, the LinkedIn profiles of the three founders of Asaii indicate that they have been working for the firm since October. The acquisition, rumoured to cost Apple less than $100 million.
Apple Music is about to beat Spotify in the United States, with 27 million paying subscribers for the US platform, against 24 million for Spotify according to the Financial Times. However, Steve Job’s empire still has a long way to go to compete on a global scale. Until today, Spotify claims 83 million paid subscribers worldwide, against 50 million for Apple Music.
Last month Apple announced the acquisition of Shazam too. Looks like the more data, the better the outcome on the streaming of music.
