Soundcloud acquires Musiio to improve music discovery and artist data

SoundCloud has acquired artificial intelligence startup Musiio, whose AI can “listen” to and tag, search and listen to large catalogs of music.

SoundCloud will use Musiio to extend its existing music intelligence capabilities and “enable the company to further leverage its vast data to identify the next trends and musical talents”.

This means better music discovery for Soundcloud users and more data available to artists and their teams.

Based in Singapore and founded by UK CEO wild hazelnut and Swedish CTO ARon PettersonMusiio was founded in June 2018 and named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies for 2022. Savage and Pettersson will join Soundcloud as VP, Music Intelligence and VP, AI and Machine Learning, respectively.

“SoundCloud is not only a legendary household name, but also an artist-focused company that I believe is the future of the new holistic music industry,” said Hazel Savage, CEO of Musiio. “I am incredibly proud that after 4 years of building Musiio, we are now part of SoundCloud.”

“SoundCloud hosts more music from more creators than any platform on the planet. The acquisition of Musiio accelerates our strategy to better understand how this music uniquely evolves, which is critical to our success,” said Eliah Seton, President of SoundCloud.

Bruce Houghton is founder and publisher of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and is senior adviser to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the founder and president of Skyline Artists Agency and a professor at Berklee College Of Music.