Apple Music reportedly buys music analytics firm Asaii

Apple seems to have bought Asaii, a San Francisco based music analytics platform, which claims to be “able to find the next Justin Bieber”.

Although Apple has not officially confirmed the buy, it reportedly paid less than US$100 million.

 Sony Theakanath, Austin Chen, and Chris Zhang, who co-founded the start-up in August 2016, are now filed in LinkedIn as having become Apple executives this month.

Asaii’s best-known products are Assaii Score, a music management dashboard for A&R reps to quickly scout and manage talent, and an API for music services to integrate a recommendation engine into their platforms.

Its website claims: “Our machine learning powered algorithms finds artists 10 weeks before they chart.

“Our algorithms are able to find the next Justin Bieber, before anyone else.”

Asaii closed as a stand-alone operation on October 14.

The benefit for Apple is two-fold.

It can sharpen content recommendations to users. This comes weeks after the completion of its acquisition of song identification platform Shazam.

Secondly, it offers a greater support system for rising artists.

Its major rival Spotify has RISE which promotes emerging musicians and also investing heavily in developing in-house analytics and marketing tools for artists.