Business News Deals Digital

Spotify buys audio ID maker Sonalytic

By | Published on Wednesday 8 March 2017

Spotify

Spotify has bought itself a Sonalytic, because why wouldn’t you?

Sonalytic, in case you wondered, is a company that makes some of that audio detection technology type stuff that can spot tracks and songs, and bits of tracks and songs, and all that gubbins, which can – of course – help enhance both music discovery services and rights management or royalty processing.

Spotify is keen to enhance both of those elements of its platform, the latter in the US especially where the lack of a proper mechanical rights collecting society shifts the responsibility for working out what songs are streaming within what tracks onto the digital services. And a failure to identify what songs are streaming can lead to litigation, as Spotify itself knows.

While there are plenty of audio ID solutions out there now, London-based Sonalytic has been employing ever more sophisticated technologies to spot tiny elements of recordings. The company’s Martin Gould told CMU last year: “Sonalytic analyses music at the microscopic level of its constituent parts, to extract detailed fingerprints of the individual sounds. This means that we can identify not only whole songs, but also stems, loops and samples within them”.

It remains to be seen quite how Spotify utilises Sonalytic, but it confirmed the acquisition yesterday, saying: “We’re happy to announce that Sonalytic is joining the Spotify family. The Sonalytic team is passionate about creating technology to improve the music ecosystem for artists and fans. Their advancements in audio feature detection will be used in several ways to advance Spotify’s mission: from improving Spotify’s personalised playlists to matching songs with compositions to improve our publishing data system. Stay tuned for new products we’ll bring to market with Sonalytic’s help”.



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