Apple share price up, acquires British start-up company Semetric

Apple Inc has acquired British music analytics start-up Semetric as the iPhone maker gears up for the international release of its Beats Music streaming service later this year.

Semetric, which is most famous for its Musicmetric brand, was founded in 2008 and provides information about music sales and downloads as well as opinions for artists published on social media.

The London-based company also intents to expand its services to audio streams and YouTube, the popular US video-sharing website, during the coming years.

Apple declined to comment, but a person familiar with the deal said the worlds largest company by market capitalization paid around $50 million for Semetric.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plan,” a spokesman for the company said.

Semetric employees around 40 workers, with the majority of which were moved to Apple, and its clients include record labels and music streaming services, like Spotify. In January 2013, Semetric raised $4.8 million in its latest round of funding, with backers like Imperial Innovations and Pentech Ventures.

The agreement indicates increased interest towards Londons music-service providers. On Wednesday Shazam, the application best known for its music identification capabilities, raised $30 million in a funding round, putting the value of the company at more than $1 billion.

The deal with Semetric outlines Apples effort to boosts its presence in the digital music industry amid declining iTunes downloads.

Spotify, currently the leader in the industry, could also be affected by the acquisition as it is unlikely the company to continue its partnership with Semetric. Similar actions were taken by rivals when Spotify purchased music analytics company The Echo Nest last year.

The acquisition would help Apple to optimize its service provided by Beats Music, which was purchased in May, as the company is preparing to implement the music service into the operating system of its iPhones and iPads, making the application available to hundreds of millions of users.

Apple Inc climbed 2.58% on Tuesday and closed at $108.72 on NASDAQ. The stock jumped 4.41% to $110.64 at 15:50 GMT, marking one-year increase of 40.89%. The company is valued at $637.63 billion.

According to CNN Money, the 43 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Apple have a median target of $125.00, with a high estimate of $150.00 and a low estimate of $60.00. The median estimate represents a 12.98% increase from the last price of $110.64.