Meet Hazel Savage, CEO & Co-Founder of Musiio, an AI Company for the Global Music Industry

Hazel Savage is the rock-loving, guitar-toting CEO and co-founder of Musiio, a multi-million-dollar valued AI company that helps everyone from DJs to major streaming services by allowing them to search and tag vast music catalogues with ease.

Having done everything from stacking shelves in HMV to working at the forefront of multinational music with companies such as Universal, Pandora, and Shazam, Savage has a unique vantage point on the entire music industry.  Today, she travels the globe, helping to educate appreciative audiences about how emerging AI technology works, how it can be leveraged, and the case for it being adopted at all levels of the music business.

For Anyone Who Hasn’t Heard of Musiio, Tell Us About the Business, and How It Came About.

Absolutely, I always describe Musiio as an Artificial Intelligence company for the Music Industry, but at it’s core we are a data processing company. It just so happens the only data we process is music. 10 years ago when I worked at HMV on Oxford St, there was maybe 10 max new singles a week, today streaming services get 60,000 new tracks uploaded daily.

More music comes out every day than used to come out in a whole year, 10 years ago. That’s the challenge we address at Musiio, making music data more manageable. I started Musiio when I joined the incubator Entrepreneur First in Singapore nearly 4 years ago. It’s where I met my co-founder and my first investor!

What Challenges Have You Faced This Year?

As a purely digital business Covid-19 hasn’t had too detrimental effect on our business in 2021, clients and customers have been happy to work and meet fully online with zoom and hangouts.

I have seen a segment of the music industry also double down on spending during the pandemic, as an opportunity to work on their tech stack without the distraction of conferences and meetings, but I have to say I look forward to the conferences and events coming back. Meeting new people is one of the best parts of being a founder and working in the music industry.

What Have You Learnt?

I have learnt that I miss live music a lot, and I would even go as far to say it’s a large part of what brings me joy and how I navigate the world. I’ve also re-learnt the importance of family, living abroad is fine until you don’t have the freedom to travel, I always suspected that would be true, but sadly the last 2 years we got to put the theory into practice.

I’ve also learnt that team is the most important part of building a startup, you need people around you, good people who can follow your vision and help you build it.

Do You Have a Favourite Musiio Moment from 2021?

We are fortunate as a company that there are always a lot of things to celebrate, signing Hipgnosis as a client, signing Vans as a client, raising money on a $10m USD valuation, scaling the technology to tag 5,000,000 tracks a day. All of these are great achievements.

But when I heard this question, one memory came to mind, it was our last company social in Singapore just before office working was disallowed and we took a selfie to commemorate, but before we took the selfie we needed to figure out who had the longest arms (for the best angle to fit us all in the frame) and we all took turns guessing, we even wrote a short song about it (very silly) but really it’s having the team in the same place, having fun and being social. That was my favourite moment so far.

What Can We Hope to See From Musiio in the Future?

Expansion. We have spent the first few years proving the product market fit, we are now getting the technology in the hands of as many clients as we can and to do that we are expanding our reach. Watch this space for the new European office, coming soon!