Quincy Jones invests in emotional AI music startup Musicmap

The company says it has developed a ‘psycho-emotional profiling engine’ called MusiMe, which builds emotional profiles for listeners that indicate the mood, feelings and values based on their listening history.

Jones will be a special adviser for Musimap, using his wealth of industry knowledge to assist the business to develop. Additionally, former president of Dolby International and CEO and founder of Silicon Castles, Andreas Spechtler, has also become an investor in Musimap as well as a member of the board of directors.

“I’m incredibly impressed by Musimap’s technology and I am delighted to be able to help them grow with this investment,” Jones said. “I was pleasantly surprised by how accurate my personality profile was when testing MusiMe, and it’s apparent that the product has a tremendous amount of potential.”

Andreas Spechtler said: “I have been following Musimap for many years. This company has married deep music metadata with other relevant data in their unique AI engine to serve the entertainment markets and beyond. Musimap will support all markets where emotions are key for consumer behaviour like in e-Commerce, dating and advertising. I am happy to join the Musimap team as a new board member.”

Musicmap’s AI technology can automatically generate emotional and contextual metadata, personality profiles and emotional states of mind purely based on music consumption. The company also analysed and manually marked one million songs to develop its recommendation system.

Determining personality traits based on music listening behaviour is becoming an emerging trend. Spotify was recently granted a US patent for methods and systems for personalising user experience based on personality traits.

In July, a research study called Just the Way You Are was conducted. The study links music listening on Spotify to personality, detailing a research project in which the authors analysed 17.6 million songs and over 662 000 hours of music listened to by more than 5 800 Spotify users in the US over a three-month period.

The move adds to Jones’ growing investment portfolio in the music technology, which includes interests in companies such as Spotify, Playground Sessions, as well as Jammcard.

In 2017, Jones launched Qwest TV, a platform which offers high-definition streams of jazz and classical music content, including concerts and musical documentaries.

Jones' career spans more than seven decades, with an impressive list of achievements. He also produced Michael Jackson’s all-time best-selling album titled Thriller.