Songtradr CEO Paul Wiltshire. Photo Credit: Songtradr
Music licensing and distribution platform Songtradr has officially acquired Musicube, which bills itself as a provider of “B2B AI music metadata services like auto-tagging, metadata enrichment and semantic search.”
Santa Monica-headquartered Songtradr’s buyout of Hamburg-based Musicube just recently came to light via a formal release that was emailed to Digital Music News. According to the involved parties, three-year-old Musicube “helps match music to content and a brand’s target audience” with its AI-powered tagging and database of over 50 million analyzed tracks.
This AI-classification (and metadata-optimization) process requires three seconds per song, higher-ups relayed, and clients can then search the mentioned database (and auto-generate playlists) by mood, genre, vocal characteristics, and even descriptors like “pleasantness” and “arousal,” Musicube’s website shows.
For Songtradr – which closed a $50 million Series D in June of 2021 – the play has bolstered an existing “portfolio of tech-enabled music solutions designed to license the right music for any content, driving higher ROI and enabling brands to measurably engage their target audience,” execs stated.
Songtradr in 2021 acquired creative music agency MassiveMusic, visual-media music database Tunefind, livestream music licensing platform Pretzel, and sound-design company Song Zu, following several noteworthy purchases in 2020.
Neither the one-stop sync company nor Musicube has revealed the financial specifics of today’s agreement, but Songtradr CEO Paul Wiltshire in a statement emphasized the important role that high-quality data plays in the contemporary music industry.
“musicube has approached audio analysis from an entirely unique perspective and this acquisition accelerates our mission to increase the value and effectiveness of music in content,” Wiltshire said in part.
“Their impressive team of passionate musicologists and data scientists understand the power of data and its relationship with music, which ultimately benefits our brand and agency customers as well as music rights holders. In order to have the world’s best B2B music search and recommendation technology, we need premier metadata enrichment technology, which is a key component of the B2B music supply chain,” continued Wiltshire, whose company now employs over 350 team members in 12 countries.
And in a statement of his own, Musicube founder and CEO David Hoga, who also owns H4 X Software, communicated in part: “We are incredibly happy to join this exceptional team of music lovers and technologists as every single conversation we have had can be characterized by both cordiality and an ambitious agenda. We share a common vision of an artist-friendly music industry, using data to achieve it.”
Regarding artificial intelligence’s increasingly significant part in music, 2022’s initial five or so months have brought SoundCloud’s acquisition of AI-centered music-analysis platform Musiio, a $3.8 million raise for music-creation startup Soundful, a roughly $14.5 million round for AI music-tech service LifeScore, and Apple’s buyout of London-based AI Music.