Apple Music recommendations could get superpowers thanks to latest acquisition

By Kris Wouk Published October 15, 2018

For some time now, Apple Music has been beating its chief rival Spotify in the United States, but that doesn’t mean Apple is resting on its laurels. In September the company finalized its acquisition of Shazam, and now it has acquired Asaii, a music analytics company with tech and talent that could help give Apple Music an even bigger lead over its competition.

While the deal was initially just a rumor attributed to unnamed sources by Axios, the information was quickly confirmed by LinkedIn listings showing the founders of Asaii now listed as working on the Apple Music team. Following this, The House, an investor in Asaii, confirmed the deal in a statement to Music Ally. The deal was reported to cost Apple less than $100 million.

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So what does this mean for Apple Music? While the company hasn’t yet made a statement on the acquisition, Asaii offered a few interesting services. One was Discover Charts, a service that claimed to show music industry executives which artists were poised to have major hits “within 10 weeks to a year,” letting them find up and coming artists before anyone else. Another was an API that let music services add recommendations to their products. Both of these seem like they would be of interest to Apple.

Music recommendations are one of the key things people look for in a streaming service, but they can be hard to pull off, especially for picky listeners. Its recommendations are one of the main reasons users love Spotify, but if Apple Music can make its own recommendations demonstrably better than its rivals’, it could pull in plenty of new subscribers. Apple Music has also already made deals with big names to put their music out exclusively on Apple Music, so if it could use Asaii’s tech to find out which artists are about to blow up and sign deals with them before anyone else has a chance to, this could also be a major advantage.

With the ink still fresh on the page, it’s not clear when or even if we’ll see any new features making their way to Apple Music as a result of the deal. That doesn’t mean the service isn’t constantly adding new features though: Just last week, the company added lyrics integration powered by Genius.

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Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…

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