Looking to further its recent subscriber milestone, Spotify has today announced the acquisition of London-based audio detection and discovery startup Sonalytic. The financial details of the transaction haven’t been disclosed in the short announcement blog post. Even details of what the streaming service plans to do with their technology are scarce. But, these two audio companies seem to be a perfect match for each other.
Sonalytic was founded by Martin Gould just last year with the aim to develop a patent-protected song identification technology. It also enabled creators and rights-holders to court monetization opportunities for their content. But, the startup hasn’t launched consumer-facing products until date and now it isn’t sure if Spotify will allow it to.
It has instead focused on offering its technology and services directly to businesses (simply adopting a B2B approach). It provides the same to low-volume customers through their web portal and an API for creators with large amounts of data.
The company further adds that it brings “lightning fast” music identification and discovery features to the users. Sonalytic can identify individual songs — mixed content and short audio clips, monitor usage of copyright-protected material and provide analytics data, and help discover soundtracks through their proprietary technology.
This technology, as mentioned on Sonalytic’s website, provides a robust and next-gen approach to audio identification. Their platform is said to capable identifying clips as short as 1 second in length and is also capable of recognizing musical stems and derivatives within tracks (even in real-time). In the official announcement, Spotify describes its future plans for the said technology as under:
Their advancements in audio feature detection will be used in several ways to advance Spotify’s mission: from improving Spotify’s personalized playlists to matching songs with compositions to improve our publishing data system.
However, Sonalytic isn’t the streaming platform’s first acquisition in the music discovery space. In early January last year, Spotify had acquired Dublin-based Soundwave, a social networking app that helps users to discover new music, share songs and connect with like-minded music fans. It was also aimed at enhancing song identification, as well as overall customer experience of the platform.
Thus, it seems pretty obvious that Spotify is looking to better its playlists – which is an important feature of the streaming service – with the addition of another discovery-focused platform. It could also use Sonalytic’s machine learning algos to provide smart, personalized playlists to its growing user base — which has now amassed 50 million paying subscribers. Also, it could be looking to take competitors such as Shazam or Genius working on audio recognition technology head-on by building new tools.
