What will Grainge make of news that a startup has created an eight-hour playlist of functional music for Amazon Music? Endel declined to comment on the business model of this relationship (i.e.
Universal Music Group boss Sir Lucian Grainge recently criticised “lower-quality functional content… generic music that lacks a meaningful artistic context, is less expensive for the platform to license or, in some cases, has been commissioned directly by the platform.” The announcement also comes at an interesting time. Today’s news follows Endel’s collaborations with artists including Grimes, Plastikman and James Blake, as well as funding rounds of $5m in 2020 and $15m in 2022. The latter’s Alexa Fund was one of Endel’s first investors, in 2018, when the startup joined its Alexa Accelerator. However, Endel and Amazon are not strangers on a corporate level. While the company has released albums of its AI-generated music before, via a distribution deal with WMG’s ADA, this is its first direct partnership with a streaming service.
This is the kind of music that is already produced for Endel’s own apps, including an Alexa skill for Amazon devices.
The playlist starts with Endel’s reworking of a track by electronic artists Kaskade and deadmau5’s Kx5 project, followed by a ‘soundscape’ created using the startup’s Endel Pacific AI engine. The Berlin-based startup has worked with the streaming service to create an eight-hour playlist called ‘Sleep Science’, which launches today. AI music firm Endel has found a new frontier for its sleep tracks: Amazon Music.
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