Taiwanese streaming service KKBox announced a partnership with Microsoft at the end of 2019, and while on the surface it was a fairly dry B2B story about cloud infrastructure, there’s more to it. So yes, KKBox will be migrating its service to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, but the press release for the deal outlined another aspect to the companies’ collaboration.
“KKBox will leverage Microsoft AI technology to build an AI-assisted music arrangement system and an AI-assisted lyric generator,” it explained. “In addition, the group will create a predictive model that uses data and AI to forecast the commercial success of a song. KKBox and Microsoft believe that the digital entertainment industry is facing a transformation and must use technology to make content faster and smoother for users and to use a data-driven approach to create personalised services.”
It’s not the first example of a streaming service exploring AI music generation. Spotify’s creator technology research lab, headed by AI-music guru François Pachet, created tools used for Skygge’s recent ‘American Folk Songs’ EP. Meanwhile, a year ago Tencent Music struck a deal with AI music startup Amper Music to make the latter’s technology available for its users.
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