Apple Reportedly Buys Analytics Company Semetric Ahead of Beats Music Relaunch

Apple has acquired Semetric, a London startup that runs the music analytics service Musicmetric. The move, reported by the Guardian, citing documents filed this month with the Companies House in the UK, comes as Apple prepares to relaunch its Beats streaming service.

Apple's Beats Music Relaunch Reportedly Coming in March

Launched in 2008, Musicmetric is a dashboard tool that helps artists, labels and others track social media activity, sales, streaming and file sharing data. It raised $4.7 million in January 2013 to help expand its business, and that month it struck a deal to integrate data from Spotify into its dashboard.

The California-based tech giant may be planning to use Musicmetric as its in-house dashboard within Beats to help artists and labels track their sales and streams. Requests for comment were not immediately returned, but Apple did provide a statement to the Guardian. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plan," it said. 

In the Companies House documents, Semetric's address was changed to the same registered address as Apple Europe Limited. Another document, dated October 2014, indicated that senior Apple attorney Gene Levoff had been appointed director of Semetric.

Apple has not announced a relaunch date for Beats, which it acquired in April 2014 for $3 billion, though a rebranded version of the Beats Music app will reportedly be bundled with an upcoming version of iOS as early as March.