Apple acquires startup behind analytics service Musicmetric

Apple has acquired the London-based startup behind Musicmetric, a real-time music analytics service.

Documents filed with the UK's Companies House earlier this month, and obtained by Music Ally, suggest Apple has purchased Musicmetric’s parent company Semetric. The documents show Semetric’s address was changed to the registered address of Apple Europe Limited, and that in October last year, Apple attorney Gene Levoff - who bases himself at Apple’s global headquarters in California - was appointed as a director of Semetric.

Both Music Ally and The Guardian did get a statement from Apple, but it’s the generic response the company gives when asked about acquisitions: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plan.”

With Apple’s 2014-acquired streaming service Beats Music falling behind behemoths like Spotify and Pandora in the US, the purchase of Semetric could play a major role in its impending relaunch in the US. It’s believed the service will relaunch as part of iTunes this year in a move to improve on declining digital sales figures (down 11%) released in December.

Australia will be the second country to get Beats Music. However no definite date has been set for when Beats will replace the MOG streaming service and launch with Telstra.

Musicmetric is predominantly used by artists and publishers to track the performance of their works online; it tracks digital sales, BitTorrent downloads and social media mentions, a future update will see it track YouTube plays also.