The streaming music market leader Spotify just announced the acquisition of the Paris-based AI startup Niland. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. This is Spotify’s fourth acquisition this year. Niland’s technology will enable Spotify to deliver better song recommendations to users.
Founded in 2013, Niland develops machine learning algorithms to analyze digital music. Niland graduated the Paris-based accelerator program Agoranov and raised an undisclosed amount of funding from French investor IT Translation.
Prior to Spotify’s purchase, Niland offered music search and recommendation services to companies in the music business through custom APIs. The young company also offered content creators and publishers a specialized audio search engine. Customers were able to upload tracks for processing and receive a list of similar sounding songs. The technology could also be used to surface similar tracks within a particular catalog, making for a powerful recommendation engine. Niland’s technology is able to extract complex metadata pertaining to mood, type of voice, instrumentation, genre and tempo.
Niland’s team and technology will now become part of the Spotify R&D unit based in New York City, where it will help the streaming giant improve its recommendation and personalization technologies.
