I still miss the Apple Music festival.

Apple has acquired hot music analytics start-up Asaii, in a deal that that should see Apple Music recommendations improve dramatically while also enabling the company to identify emerging music trends faster.

Apple intelligence

Asaii’s website states the company’s mission: “Asaii aggregates and analyzes all music data on the internet,providing solutions to make sense of all the noise.”

It's been a ride! 👋 pic.twitter.com/Atw6AZlhp6

— Asaii (@asaii_inc) September 14, 2018

Music Ally confirmed the news in conversation with company investors this morning. It also exposed some of the sexy details in the move – one of the company’s products Asaii Recommend “could create algorithmic, personalised playlists as well as recommend songs and playlists to people based on their listening habits,” the report explains.

Apple Music

The company has also developed an automated A&R platform that helped A&R people identify acts before they get known. “We find 10 artists a week before they break on the charts,” the company states.

(You can listen to some acts it thought were pretty cool thi time last year over at Soundcloud).

Fourth to pitch in #midemlab marketing and data/analytics category is @asaii_inc – presenting its ‘Asaii Brain’ for music recommendations and analytics pic.twitter.com/bfVSVNBudg

— MIDƐM+ (@midem) June 6, 2018

It will be interesting to see how that kind of analysis gets boosted with data Apple has now acquired from Shazam. Who else can recall the Apple music label rumors that leak out from time to time?

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Axios writes:

“Along with bolstering content recommendations to users, Apple is also interested in Asaii as it can help it compete with Spotify’s efforts to work directly with smaller artist —like a music label..”

The acquisition supplements technologies Apple acquired when it took UK data firm, Semetric in 2015. It could also be used to improve the artist analytics Apple provides to artists and music publishers.