Songtradr Buys AI Metadata and Music Search Company Musicube

To speed up its customer experience, Los Angeles-based Australian B2B music licensing company Songtradr has acquired next generation AI metadata and music search company Musicube.

The Hamburg, Germany-based Musicube has a database with over 50 million song titles and has 500 keywords that let users find music based on audiences, moods, genres, instruments, vocal features, tempo and content from song lyrics.

This increases Songtradr’s ability to match music to content and a brand’s target audience.

Musicube’s proprietary software is delivered via web widgets and an Application Programming Interface (API) that provides what Songtradr calls “pristine metadata at scale” for a wide-ranging audience that includes music labels, publishers, and music supervisors.

“Musicube has approached audio analysis from an entirely unique perspective and this acquisition accelerates our mission to increase the value and effectiveness of music in content,” Paul Wiltshire, CEO of Songtradr, said.

“Their impressive team of passionate musicologists and data scientists understand the power of data and its relationship with music, which ultimately benefits our brand and agency customers as well as music rights holders.

“In order to have the world’s best B2B music search and recommendation technology, we need premier metadata enrichment technology, which is a key component of the B2B music supply chain.

“Adding the Musicube technologies, data and extraordinary team to Songtradr will help accelerate our enterprise customer user experience.”

Musicube was founded in 2019 by musicologists and data scientists David Hoga and Agnes Chung, with the idea of solving the closed “preferences” playlist loop that most users experience from existing streaming services.

At the time Hoga said, “Today’s music listeners are stuck in filter bubbles, and nearly 90% of music is almost never heard as a result.

“The Musicube mission is to enable music discovery and listening time for all music genres.

“We can help companies sort through complex data to make better decisions and create richer services and increase listening time.”

Early research showed that 40% of younger audiences would use the Musicube Playlist Generator, with one of its investors being metal festival Wacken Open Air co-founder Holger Hübner.

Talking about this week’s acquisition, Hoga said, “Songtradr is the most exciting music company we have seen in a very long time.

“We are incredibly happy to join this exceptional team of music lovers and technologists as every single conversation we have had can be characterized by both cordiality and an ambitious agenda.

“We share a common vision of an artist-friendly music industry, using data to achieve it.”

Songtradr has been on a path of acquisition, including Massive Music in June 2021, Big Sync Music in February 2019 and Song Zu in March 2021 as well as US film, TV and gaming music data platform Tunefind, and Pretzel, the world’s first platform to provide stream-safe music for Twitch and YouTube livestreamers.

In September 2020, it injected $1 million in Australian-based global music credit resource Jaxsta.

Songtradr has a team of more than 350 people and offices in 12 countries worldwide.