

They loved that it is not a threat to music artists. I met Steve Boom who looped me in with Ryan Redington and Stephen Brower and they immediately grasped what we’re trying to do here.

We’ve been talking for a very long time: I’ve been going to Seattle at least a few times a year for conversations with different Amazon companies. Oleg Stavitsky: Amazon invested in Endel back in 2018, and followed on in subsequent times. Music Ally: What’s the backstory to this deal? Endel and Amazon go back a way already… An edited version of that conversation follows. However, Music Ally did interview Endel CEO Oleg Stavitsky ahead of the playlist’s launch, to talk neuroscience, creative AIs and, of course, to get his response to the UMG chief’s recent views. whether the playlist is generating royalties like regular music, or is an original/buyout commission).

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.
AMAZON MUSIC APP LICENSE
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. Tags: Amazon Amazon Music Artificial Intelligence Endel Playlists Top StoriesĪI music firm Endel has found a new frontier for its sleep tracks: Amazon Music.
