EXCLUSIVE: Music tech veteran Hazel Savage co-founds Musiio to bring AI to music

12-year music technology veteran Hazel Savage, previously of Shazam in London, Pandora and Universal Music in Sydney, and BandLab in Singapore, is looking to tackle the issue of content volume in the music industry with her new startup.

TIO can exclusively reveal the launch of Musiio, a platform which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to sort through the thousands and thousands of tracks created and published worldwide every day.

Hazel Savage launched Musiio in Singapore with Sweden-born Aron Pettersson, a software engineer with over 17 years experience in AI and data science.

“Conservative estimates put the number of newly released tracks at around 30k a day […] This would take one person 70 days non-stop listening (24 hours a day) to hear,” the founders said. “Musiio can ‘listen’ to the same 30K+ tracks in 8.4 hours. By ‘listening’ to more tracks than a human ever could our AI allows the music industry to keep growing.”

How does it work?

Musiio aims to act as ears for the music industry, whether it be the music editor at Spotify, the head of A&R at a record label, or the music publisher looking to narrow the field when looking for indicators of quality.

Using a combination of deep learning and feature extraction, Musiio can comprehend and identify the characteristics and patterns of a track.

Savage and Pettersson believe Musiio’s wider effects could take the form of better streaming playlists, better recommendations or better content for web or mobile apps. They believe record labels and publishers will work more quickly and efficiently as they search for quality, without relying on third party data such as Facebook likes or Spotify plays.

“For artists this means you have a greater chance of being ‘discovered’ based on your talent instead of your online growth hacking skills,” the pair said. “And perhaps most excitingly for industry folk, now you never have to worry about being asked to ‘listen to my band’ again – Musiio can be your ears.”

Musiio was born out of London/Singapore startup incubator Entrepreneur First. Its portfolio of 100 startups is now worth over $1 billion SGD (AU$95bn) since its inception in 2011.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.