Spotify buys Beats’ and the UN’s former data provider

Spotify has acquired data provider Seed Scientific, in a bid to build itself up as the best music service in audience intelligence.

The acquisition, which was purchased for an undisclosed amount, makes Seed the second music intelligence force at Spotify. The streaming service acquired its first music intelligence company, The Echo Nest, last March.

The news comes less than a month after it was announced that streaming rival Pandora had acquired Next Big Sound, a third party data provider to Spotify. Earlier this year, Apple purchased Musicmetric to provide data insight to their artists, labels and advertisers.

Importantly, the purchase of Seed ensures that Spotify’s competitors will no longer have access to Seed’s services. This includes the now Apple-owned Beats Music, which was a former client of Seed prior to its acquisition, as well as Audi, Unilever and most interestingly, the United Nations.

It is expected that Seed will grow Spotify’s presence among its streaming rivals, strengthen the Advanced Analytics unit of the company and expand its knowledge of listeners’ music DNA. Combining “cutting edge math, science, design, and engineering to craft insights, models and tools with data,” Seed will determine what music suggestions to make to users for automatic streaming services.

The acquisition seems to be well timed, considering Spotify’s recent introduction of new mobile services including Spotify Running and the Now start page, both of which are heavily reliant on user analytics.

20 Seed staff will be joining the Spotify headquarters in New York, with Seed CEO Adam Bly heading this unit.

“Seed Scientific was founded to advance ‘Scientific Thinking’ in the world using data Today, our algorithms, insights, and applications are beneath the surface of major brands, NGOs and governments,” said Bly.

“We are thrilled to now be joining forces with Spotify – a pioneer in shaping culture with data – to create the leading advanced analytics organisation in the world,” he added.

Henrik Landgren, VP of Analytics at Spotify added: “Adam and the entire team at Seed Scientific blew us away with their insights around data and analytics, and how to apply those insights to solve real world problems for clients.”

“We are incredibly excited to welcome Seed Scientific to Spotify as we continue to build a world class analytics team tat will allow us to accelerate our plan to leverage data and insights throughout the entire organisation.”