Spotify acquires music AI startup Niland

Spotify has acquired an artificial intelligence-based music startup called Niland to help improve its personalization and recommendation features for users.

“Niland has changed the game for how AI technology can optimise music search and recommendation capabilities and shares Spotify’s passion for surfacing the right content to the right user at the right time,” Spotify said in a statement.

Though at this point there is little information about the terms of the deal, but Spotify's latest acquisition further heats up its battle with rivals like Apple Music, Google Play etc. As part of the deal, the France-based company will join Spotify’s R&D (Research & Development) team, which is based in New York.

Niland was founded in 2013 and raised undisclosed funding from French investor IT Translation. It also graduated from the Paris-based accelerator program Agoranov. Most of the other Music services currently use something called collaborative filtering, which consists of analysing public sources of information, such as blogs, to find when multiple artists, albums, or songs are referenced in the same context. Niland, on the other hand, has been researching on ways to extract meaningful information from raw music content in order to form connections with other music.

"We will keep working on new ways to better understand music to craft better innovative listening and discovery experiences," Niland’s founding team wrote on its website.

To up its game in the music industry, Spotify has bought a series of companies this year that includes blockchain startup Mediachain, content recommendation startup MightyTV and audio detection startup Sonalytics.