Global Excellence 2020

88 Acquisition International - Global Excellence 2020 Acquisition International - Issue 11 2020 17 Sep20717 Music to our Ears Musiio is an artificial intelligence start-up company that builds tech for the music industry. We speak to one of the firm’s co-founders in more detail exactly what it does, how it works and the importance of finding the right people to recruit. The music industry has a problem,” begins Aron Pettersson, Co- Founder of Musiio. “With 40,000 tracks added to platforms every single day, it has become physically impossible to listen to every single track. Here at Musiio, we built an AI that can listen to music and can help with cataloguing, searching, and playlisting for millions of songs a day. We aim to help the industry to deal with this very new problem and continue to work with our customers to streamline laborious, outdated or impossible workflows with the power of AI. Our intention is not to replace people’s jobs, in fact, we tell our customers that the best use of our AI is when there is human involvement too. We just focus on the jobs that have been an age-old problem in the industry, that nobody wants to do, so they can focus on the important stuff.” Musiio has more than 30 paying customers with a combined catalogue of over 6.5 million tracks across four continents. Jamendo, Epidemic Sound and Audio Network are among a few. The company also works with music labels, studios production/sync sites, music marketplaces, streaming services, gaming companies, background music companies and more. “The beauty of our product is whether you have one track or one million tracks, we have a solution for you. You can access technology through our App or our API so no need for any interaction if you just want to get going, or we have a full team internally that can advise and guide you through a full custom AI product build. If you have a catalogue of music and you can’t keep on top of tags, your search experience is sluggish or you have users that would love personalised playlists, then we have the technology to help.” Musiio has built its proprietary tech internally. Aron is a Machine Learning and Neural Networks graduate from KTH in Stockholm. He’s been coding for 17 years and creating artificial intelligence-based products for 15 years. He is responsible for the revolutionary proprietary AI technology that all of Musiio’s products are built upon today. Co-Founder and CEO Hazel Savage used to be in an all-girl punk band in London and spent 15 years in the music industry working for some of the world’s largest music brands - from cataloguing music on the shelves at HMV, to running teams at the businesses at the forefront of music listening/recommendations, Hazel understands the needs of the industry from musician through to large multinational. “ Company: Musiio Contact: Aaron Pettersson Web Address: www.musiio.com “Musiio feels like a family and everyone who works here is a part of it,” Aron enthuses. “We all contribute ideas, give open feedback and collectively pounce on problems to fix them as and when they occur. “The team has been built slowly and in a considered way as and when the business needs it. Every team member and seat in the office, therefore, is extremely important. While we all have specialisms, many team members are spinning multiple plates, working on a wide variety of projects at the same time. We are a start-up and there is a gritty and determined start-up culture that everybody at Musiio leans into. “The sales and music team work together to create weekly blogs using our AI to analyse music releases from around the world. The AI team are constantly developing new ways to train and develop our AI. Our designer creates birthday cards for staff members. The effort the team put in never goes unnoticed, but if any team member were to leave, there would be a significant gap in what we are able to achieve.” The company culture at Musiio is transparent, inclusive, vibrant, happy, and hardworking, Aron tells us. “We have a ‘get stuff done’ attitude and a customer-centric mindset. We’re collaborative, innovative and we’re not afraid to strip out old processes if we feel they are getting in the way of getting the job done. At Musiio, we have people from India, Singapore, England, the U.S, Russia, Sweden, and China. In addition to this, we are inclusive and hire great, honest and trustworthy people who are extremely talented in their specialism. Ultimately, we do not hire people so we can tell them what to do, we hire people so they can tell us what to do.” Leading Innovators in AI-Based Solutions for Music - 2020