Apple would have acquired Asaii, a platform for musical analysis "able to find the next Justin Bieber"

Apple has acquired San Francisco-based music analyst startup Asaii, according to unnamed sources cited by Axios. The deal, which has not been confirmed by Apple, would have cost less than $ 100 million.

Asaii has developed tools for music labels to discover, track and manage artists through machine learning. The platform has extracted data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and streaming music services such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud, to find hidden talents.

Asaii specifically offered two products: a music management dashboard that allows A & R representatives to quickly search for and manage talent, and an API for music services to integrate a recommendation engine with their own. platforms.

"Our machine-learning algorithms find artists 10 weeks before they think of themselves," says the startup's website. "Our algorithms are able to find the next Justin Bieber, before everyone else," said another page.

The acquisition will help Apple reinforce its content recommendations for users and help it cope with Spotify's efforts to work directly with smaller artists and music labels, according to the report. . Apple Music and iTunes will likely benefit from Asaii's machine learning algorithms.

Asaii was founded in August 2016 by Sony Theakanath, Austin Chen and Chris Zhang, who previously worked together for Apple, Facebook, Uber, Salesforce and Yelp. The three people are now working in the Apple Music team at Apple, as of October 2018, according to their LinkedIn profile.

In an email to customers shared by Ally music Last month, Asaii announced the closure of its operations on October 14, 2018.

Last month, Apple announced the finalization of the acquisition of Shazam, a popular music recognition service to identify names and lyrics of music songs and videos. Shazam could be more closely integrated with Apple products and services, from Apple Music to Siri.