Spotify just bought an AI startup to help it stay ahead of Apple Music

Music streaming service Spotify on Wednesday disclosed it has acquired the team and technology behind Niland, a French start-up with a service for delivering music recommendations. The move signals that Spotify wants to incorporate more artificial intelligence (AI) into its system as it fights off competition from alternatives like Apple Music. Niland is not well-known in the field of AI. But for years its CEO, Damien Tardieu, has done research on ways to extract meaningful information from raw music content in order to form connections with other music. This approach differs from collaborative filtering, one of the techniques that Spotify and others use.