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By AppleInsider Staff
Sunday, October 14, 2018, 22:11 (01:11 ET)
According to an unconfirmed report released Sunday, Apple recently bought the music analysis startup Asaii in order to further refine the recommendations of Apple Music and better integrate to emerging artists.
Citing sources familiar with the subject, Axios Apple reports paid less than $ 100 million for Asaii. Apple has not yet confirmed the transaction, although the LinkedIn profiles of the three co-founders of Asaii now list Apple Music executives.
Founded in 2016, Asaii has applied machine learning to aggregating and analyzing streaming music. Using music tracks and related data from Apple Music, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, Spotify and Twitter, the company's technology has swept the Internet to offer new popular leads to industry professionals. Like other analytical solutions, Asaii has distilled and presented the information found in a user-friendly dashboard.
According to the company's website, which is still active at the time of writing this article, the analytics engine exploited the real-time song data to assign an "Assai score," featuring new artists in vogue for A & R executives. Separate products provided a news feed for contextualizing the reach of social media and a tracking module for artist management.
Asaii also marketed Asaii Recommend, a Streaming Services API that powers user recommendations, generating algorithmically created playlists, and more.
Sony Theakanath, CEO of Asaii, and co-founders Austin Chen and Chris Zhang all took office at Apple in October.
Before creating the streaming streaming startup, Theakanath was a software engineer within the Apple Special Projects team from May 2015 to August 2016, focusing on Core OS and iAd . Chen also worked at Apple, serving as Director of Global Operations for four months in 2016.
The acquisition of Asaii is expected to strengthen Apple Music's recommendations and track end-user discovery. According to sources, Apple is also looking to compete with the Rise initiative for emerging artists Spotify RISE, which leverages the size of the streaming music platform to promote emerging musicians.
Apple's acquisition of Asaii follows the purchase of the Shazam song recognition platform in December.
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