Spotify’s latest acquisition could push it further ahead of rival Apple in the battle for superiority in the on-demand music streaming industry. In May 2017, the Swedish-born business announced that it had joined forces with Paris-based machine learning startup, Niland –  a business that’s already proven its nous in using AI to optimize music search and recommendation capabilities since its inception in 2013.

While Spotify and similar platforms have favored a technique called collaborative filtering – where music predictions are made based off of a user’s previous track selections – Niland has pioneered a machine learning alternative that extracts meaningful information from raw music content in order to create a nexus of styles, genres and artists that a specific user may like.

The news has left Spotify fans eagerly anticipating new features to a software that has already received plaudits for intuitive in-program designs such as Daily Mix and Discover Weekly.

Apple Music – Spotify’s biggest competitor in the industry – has been less keen to adopt AI techniques, instead preferring a more personalized approach in the form of Beats 1 – a 24/7 radio station owned and operated by Apple.

However, even though Apple has gone to the lengths of employing superstar services from the likes of Dr. Dre, Pharrell Williams and Elton John, it’s still lagging behind Scandinavian rival Spotify, which boasts 50 million subscribers compared to Apple’s 20 million.   

Of course, Apple is a company that is never easily beat, but as Spotify forays further into the world of AI, it could be about to unleash a wave of new, ingenious features that put further that allows it further edge on the on-demand music streaming industry.