Spotify has purchased audio recognition firm Sonalytic and plans to incorporate their technology into the service and application, though not necessarily in the way that many people might think based on what Sonalytic’s technology sounds like. When you hear “audio recognition” you might think that Spotify will be using this technology in the same way that apps such as Shazam can be used to identify songs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case as Spotify states that they’ll be using the technology from Sonalytic to do various things including matching songs with compositions to improve their publishing data and improving the personalized playlists that users can create.
That being said, Spotify also mentions that with help from the Sonalytic team they’ll be launching some new products in the future and they have told users to “stay tuned,” so while they haven’t been very specific about what those new products will be they definitely have something in the works and are planning to unveil it to users down the road. This could be anything from an entirely new service to just new features within their existing one, and without any indication as to their plans it could really be anything at this point.
Spotify has kept quiet on any details regarding the financial terms of the acquisition and they also haven’t mentioned whether or not all of Sonalytic’s employees will be coming over as part of the deal. Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming services available and it can be accessed via a wide spread of formats, including an Android app, web player, and Windows app. Recently Spotify hit 50 million paid subscribers which is a fairly hefty list of users, though this also doesn’t include the numbers for their users who simply access the free service. That same day it was also discovered that Spotify was testing a new subscription option that would offer users lossless Hi-Fi audio for tracks, which would essentially give users the ability to download and stream music with a higher audio quality than what’s available in their standard service all for an additional $5 a month.