Online audio sharing and streaming platform SoundCloud has acquired AI music curation company Musiio. With this acquisition, SoundCloud hopes to strengthen its music discovery features and allow the company to leverage Musiio’s vast data to identify the next music trends and talents.

Singapore-headquartered Musiio was founded by Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson in June 2018. Musiio’s technology focuses on B2B audio reference search, automated tagging, and playlisting tools for the music industry. It ‘listens’ to tracks (much more than a human could comprehend) to identify characteristics and patterns. The underlying AI allows the user to better predict their success and increase their hit rate and revenue, identifying talent and trends ahead of anybody else. Even after the acquisition, Savage and Pettersson will assume the roles of VP, Music Intelligence and VP, AI and Machine Learning, respectively, and continue to be an integral part of operations. SoundCloud would also fully integrate Musiio’s employees and allow them to retain their positions.

Recently, Musiio had secured USD 1 million in the seed funding round and had also collaborated with its first public client – Free Music Archive, a free music site developed by US radio station WFMU. Among Musiio’s achievements, some of the most important ones are the rediscovery of a number of ‘lost’ songs, including an eight-year-old track, and helping it double its plays within two days.

“SoundCloud hosts more music from more creators than any platform on the planet. Acquiring Musiio accelerates our strategy to better understand how that music is moving in a proprietary way, which is critical to our success,” says Eliah Seton, President of SoundCloud.

Echoing similar sentiment, Savage of Musiio said, “SoundCloud is not only a legendary household name but also an artist forward business that I believe is the future of the new, holistic music industry.”