THE HIT MACHINE
Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson set a new piece of software running on a laptop then went to a nearby mall to get a sandwich for lunch. They hoped, on their return, to have the answer to a question that would change the music industry: can a computer pick a hit record?
They had let their software loose on the Free Music Archive, one of the largest collections of copyright-free songs. These are written by little-known artists and commonly used for soundtracks and podcasts. They had instructed their computer to pick 20 songs based on their similarity to a tune Savage liked: I Wanted Every thing by Kurt Vile. Back in the office, they listened. “Every song was great,” says Savage, “and every song was of a similar genre.”
Three years have passed since the pair founded Musiio in Singapore.
