It’s been 16 months since TikTok acquired an AI music platform in Jukedeck. Now, there’s been another major corporate acquisition of a company that specializes in the creation of music via artificial intelligence.
New York-based stock photography firm Shutterstock, Inc – which generated $650.5m in revenues last year – has today (November 11) announced the buyout of AI-driven music platform Amper Music for an undisclosed sum.
The move adds to a growing trend of stock image sites getting involved in rights-free music: earlier this year, Shutterstock rival Adobe inked a deal to carry rights-free music catalogs from both Epidemic Sound and Jamendo, while Getty Images also hosts a royalty-free music library powered by Epidemic Sound.
Shutterstock, though, is going the AI route: Amper Music enables its users to create and customize original music by using over 1 million individual audio samples recorded by musicians on thousands of instruments.
The company claims to hold the world’s largest dataset of musical composition algorithms.
As part of the transaction, Amper’s employees will join the Shutterstock team.
Shutterstock’s acquisition of Amper strengthens its capabilities in artificial intelligence, particularly in content search and discovery of tracks composed by Shutterstock’s community of artists as well as editing tools for Shutterstock users.
Shutterstock is already one of the world’s most prominent providers of licensed photographs, vectors, illustrations, videos and music to businesses, marketing agencies and media organizations.
At the close of last year, Shutterstock’s library offered its users 314 million images, in addition to 17 million video clips.
The company’s brands include Bigstock, a stock media offering; Shutterstock Custom, a custom content creation platform; Offset, a high-end image collection; PremiumBeat, a royalty-free music library; and Shutterstock Editorial, a source of editorial images and videos for the world’s media.
Shutterstock stated today that its Amper acquisition will augment its R&D efforts to “bring valuable new innovations that enable faster and simpler content production for prosumers, businesses and professional content creators”.
“We’re deeply focused on finding ways to deliver differentiated customer experiences via innovation in our product & services offering.”
Stan Pavlovsky, Shutterstock
“We’re delighted to welcome the Amper team to Shutterstock,” said Stan Pavlovsky, CEO, Shutterstock.
“We’re deeply focused on finding ways to deliver differentiated customer experiences via innovation in our product & services offering.
“The infusion of Amper’s technology and talent augments our efforts on this front.”
“We’re excited to be acquired by Shutterstock as this partnership will bring Amper’s Creative AI to Shutterstock’s global customer base.”
Drew Silverstein, Amper
Amper’s Chief Executive Officer Drew Silverstein, added: “We’re excited to be acquired by Shutterstock as this partnership will bring Amper’s Creative AI to Shutterstock’s global customer base and represents a great advancement in enabling anyone to express their creativity through music, regardless of their financial resources or technical and artistic expertise.”Music Business Worldwide
