SoundCloud Acquires AI—Said to Predict Hit Songs

Credit: teamuglywolves

SoundCloud recently acquired music AI solutions company Musioo, which claims that it could foretell songs that will become hits. According to a statement released by SoundCloud, Musioo “listens” to music tracks and identifies patterns and characteristics that are akin to today’s chart-toppers. As such, the platform’s AI enables music creators to predict the success of their songs and potentially increase their likelihood of churning out hits.

With the acquisition, SoundCloud also seeks to expand the capabilities of its AI, especially in identifying current and upcoming trends and potential hitmakers. In a statement, SoundCloud President Eliah Seton mentioned that “Acquiring Musioo accelerates our strategy to better understand how music is moving in a proprietary way, which is critical to our success.”

Musioo has the capacity to analyze the over 300 million tracks from 30 million creators in SoundCloud’s library. As it is, SoundCloud already attracts hordes of amateur artists looking to put their music out despite not being signed by record labels. The Musioo acquisition helps many of these aspirants connect with more people through their music, en route to potentially becoming the “next big thing” in the global music industry, should Musiio’s integration with SoundCloud prove to be a success.

Besides its predictive capabilities, Musioo allows users to create music-related workflows and automate the tasks surrounding each workflow stage. It carries solutions for tagging a vast number of songs, finding songs based on other tunes with similar melodies, and creating playlists. These functionalities aid SoundCloud in indexing songs and artists, on top of providing more comprehensive song searches to users.

Will This Make SoundCloud More Profitable?

While the Musioo acquisition is a tremendous leap forward, the question lies in whether this move helps alleviate SoundCloud’s profitability woes. Despite dwarfing the libraries of other music streaming platforms, the company has yet to break even, even though it was founded back in 2007. It struggled to make money for itself and its creators. Moreover, SoundCloud has lost acquisition deals from bigger players like Spotify and Twitter due to financial issues and ended up letting go of around 40% of its workforce in 2017.

However, it finally achieved its first profitable quarter in 2020. And this acquisition could jump-start its journey to financial success. After all, acquiring a powerful artificial intelligence system helps shape positive experiences for all types of SoundCloud users.

On the creator side, Musioo’s predictive analytics improves the hit rates of artists, which influences their profits. In turn, more success from its artists could drive an increase in returns from its revenue streams, including advertising and audio mastering. As a result, it can attract more artists to use the platform.

Over to the listener side, a larger volume of hit songs potentially draws more users to SoundCloud, possibly influencing returns for another revenue stream: ticket sales. Besides having more popular artists, the improved tagging and music search functionalities mold better experiences on the platform, which could pave the way for increased premium subscriptions.

Acquiring Musioo is a win for SoundCloud on many counts, particularly if it maximizes the former’s potential. Although everything is still within the realm of speculation at this point, SoundCloud is certainly moving in the right direction.