Snafu Records - a label using algorithms to find the next big artist

Snafu Records is a California startup officially launched this week, with $2.9 million in seed funding, and their approach, as its founder and CEO Ankit Desai told TechCrunch, is using technology "to essentially turn everyone listening to music into a talent scout on our behalf". The company’s algorithms are supposedly looking at around 150,000 tracks from unsigned artists each week on services like YouTube, Instagram and SoundCloud, and evaluating them based on listener engagement, listener sentiment and the music itself - Desai said the sweet spot is to be 70 or 75% similar to the songs on Spotify’s top 200 list, so that the music sounds like what’s already popular, while also doing just enough to “break the mold”. AI should find 15 do 20 tracks per week, and then the human team gets involved.