AI is the next big thing to happen to music (and everything else, it seems). The latest news is that Musiio, a Singapore-based startup that provides AI solutions to digital music companies for creating discovery and suggestion algorithms, has raised $1 million in seed round funding.
The funding was provided by Singapore’s Wavemaker Partners, U.S. investor Exponential Creativity Ventures, and other angel investors. This is the first external funding round for the Singaporean startup. Musiio was founded at Entrepreneur First location in Singapore.
Entrepreneur First is a London-based accelerator that helps tech entrepreneurs kickstart their own startups.
Musiio was started by CEO Hazel Savage, a former executive at BandLab and marketing manager at Pandora. Her co-founder is AI expert Aron Pettersson who is a former data scientists with a Master’s in Molecular Biology.
Musiio raised SG$75,000 ($57,000) last April when it was part of Entrepreneur First, but has now managed to increase its value more than tenfold, taking on a staff of seven full-time employees.
The company wants to cut down on the tedious task of labeling, categorizing, or finding relevant music, which often requires human input. This would allow smaller music-focused companies to dedicate fewer resources to these tasks.
Musiio has taken on Free Music Archive as its first client. The website is an online resource of 120,000 pieces of music that helps users search for non-copyrighted samples to use in their projects. Musiio will help FMA curate this content make their archives more accessible and efficient to use.
Savage told TechCrunch last year that, “Musiio won’t replace the need to have people listening to music. But we can delete the inefficiencies.” Musiio’s work with FMA was a good way to inform investors about the work it was capable of doing. It helped the startup gain recognition, expand its portfolio, and potentially help land more clients.
Savage said, “Over the next month or two, there will be two or three commercial announcements. We’re working with streaming companies and sync companies.”
AI has been a part of the music industry for quite some time now. Musicians and other creative artists have experimented in the past by using AI to create experimental harmonies, time signatures, beats, and even lyrics. The use of AI in this regard was more of a creative, experimental process.
But now due to the popularity of streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, AI is being used in a much more practical way. AI is being used to deliver music that is much more likely to resemble a listener’s personal taste and even give suggestions on new music that is much more likely to appeal to them.