Apple just purchased media analytics company Semetric which owns Musicmetric tracking service. The company can track music sales, downloads, social networking stats for various artists and labels. Musicmetric also partnered with eminent streaming service Spotify to integrate data gathering for subscribers. Apple purchases a variety of smaller companies for various reasons, be it technology or personnel as well as integration into existing projects. The Semetric purchase is seen as a component to Beats Music, which Apple acquired last year and which many are expecting to be relaunched in 2015.
Source: The Guardian via Macrumors