Spotify Aims For Improved Music Recommendation Backend With Acquisition Of Niland

By acquiring Niland, a French music artificial intelligence startup, music streaming giant Spotify hopes it would be able to improve its music search and recommendations to its millions of subscribers. With the buy-in, the Niland team will join the Spotify offices in New York to refine the company’s search and recommendation tools.

If Spotify would have better recommendation and personalization technologies, the result would be more music discoveries that would benefit artists and music fans. The innovative approach of Niland to AI and recommendation systems based on machine learning is considered a perfect fit for Spotify, 9TO5Mac reports.

Spotify is currently using collaborative filtering that analyzes public sources of information such as blogs to discover the time the artist, album, or song are referenced in the same context. Niland pulls meaningful information from raw music content and forms the connection with other artists. Although Niland is not that known yet, the forte of Damien Tardieu, the CEO, is to research on the best connection between different types of music.

Forbes notes that Spotify is number one because it has features such as Discover Weekly and Release Radar, personalized playlists that are popular with subscribers of the music streaming giant. Spotify has been on a buying spree since the start of 2017. It bought Sonalytic, MightyTV, and Mediachain. Niland is its fourth purchase for the year which matches the firm’s four acquisitions in 2016.

Its acquisition of Niland would help Spotify retain its top spot in the music streaming industry where Apple Music is a poor second with 20.9 percent market share compared to Spotify’s 43 percent. In third place are other music streaming companies which hold 24.1 percent share, followed by Deezer with 6.9 percent, Napster 4.5 percent, and Tidal 1 percent. The total number of music streaming subscribers in 2017 reached 100.4 million globally, according to data from MiDiA’s Music Streamer Tracker.