The latest startup hoping to offer music A&Rs some algorithmic assistance is Andrson, from Ireland. It launched this week as a subscription-based app, with the ambition of signing up 30,000 artists to create profiles and add music and videos, in the hope of being discovered by A&Rs scouting for new talent (and also bookers, promoters and producers on the lookout for emerging artists).
The startup says it recently raised €430k ($471.4k) of seed funding, on top of the €150k it had already secured from angel investors.
Andrson certainly isn’t alone, although some of the other companies trying to take an analytics approach to A&R have already been snapped up by bigger fish. Asaii, for example, saw its team hired by Apple in 2018, while Sodatone was acquired by Warner Music Group. Instrumental has remained independent, and raised a $4m funding round in March 2018. Like those companies, Andrson’s task will be to win round A&Rs who still don’t trust that an algorithm can calculate that “an act sounds 70% like Beyoncé” (one of the startup’s claims for its audio-analysis tech). Or, of course, to reach a new breed of A&Rs who are happy to leverage this kind of tech to find new talent.
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