In the music industry, it would typically take one person a full day to listen through 50 music tracks in a bid to identify the next music talent, and this has become an issue for the music industry to keep growing, according to Aron Pettersson, the CTO & Co-founder of Musiio in an interview with KrASIA.
And Singapore-based Musiio, founded by Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson, intends to solve this issue by combining AI technology with the process of music curation, or, literally, to let technology be the ears for the music industry.
With a wealth of working experiences at Shazam, Pandora Internet Radio, and Universal Studio, Savage is acutely aware of business needs in the music industry and how technology is the answer. Petterson, on the other hand, has a solid background in AI and 17 years of coding experience that lay the foundation for building the AI-based infrastructure to automate and solve the curation and content problem in the music industry.
Ears for the music industry
According to Musiio, there are as many as 30,000 new songs uploaded to the internet on a daily basis in the hopes of being heard by a music label. SoundCloud, a German online audio distribution platform, for example, already claims of having more than 170 million music tracks by end-2017.
The burgeoning number of music content being uploaded online makes it a bigger challenge for the music industry to screen and search tracks to source for talent. This is the core issue that Singapore-based Musiio is looking to solve via leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).
The company’s objective is to enable the music tracks of different artists to have an equal opportunity to be heard – in accordance to the standards of ‘success’ of a company’s Artists and Repertoire (A&R) team – the department responsible for scouting talent.
Hazel Savage, the CEO & co-founder of Musiio, believes that efficiency and timeliness are the two pillars her startup is looking to offer sync companies, music label firms, and streaming companies.
To emphasise her point, Savage elaborates that often, it is usually too late for music companies to find the next talent only after popular songs start trending on platforms like Spotify, Youtube, and Facebook. It would not have been a ‘new discovery’ by then and music companies face the risk of lagging behind their competitors in the competition for talents.
The firm claims to be the only AI firm in the market to use audio data – digital audio stored on computer systems – rather than metadata, which refers to the title, description, and meta tags that assist in search optimization, where audios are only identified after getting many hits on social media platforms.
This effectively means that Musiio’s AI technology may help to improve the process for music label companies to spot talents faster than their competitors. The startup has achieved a significant milestone: reducing the time required to search through 100,000 music tracks from 30 minutes to five seconds (both using AI).
The founders’ love for new challenges and the huge market potential in Asia’s nascent music industry market led them to set up an office in Singapore.
According to an account by The Edge, citing a PwC report, it is forecasted that music streaming, one of the core business targets of Musiio, will account for 90% of the market in Singapore by 2022.
Currently, Musiio works with 3 existing partners that provide access to more than 500,000 music tracks. Its private demo product has been available since the beginning of July. Users simply need to log in, upload their preferred track, and algorithms will search from the 120,000 music tracks for comparables in terms of genre, vocal tone and other attributes.
The company claims there are 65 inbound leads and 22 potential customers looking to try the demo to date. In terms of B2B user traffic, there have been 2,000 unique visits over the past 60 days.
With regards to monetisation, Savage revealed that Musiio will charge a monthly subscription fee based on volume and usage across three tiers. Target customer segments include the likes of sync companies who are looking for music tracks that fit advertisements/TV shows/films; major and independent music label companies; as well as streaming services.
Startup Profile
– Musiio is an AI-powered music technology company that accelerates and simplifies the music ‘listening’ process for music content.
– The startup is founded by CEO Hazel Savage, who has 12 years experience in the music industry, and CTO Aron Pettersson, who spent 17 years writing code and has built an AI that played the Swedish stock market.
– By accessing metadata, music companies can search through music content to find the next talent before the talent’s vocals flood the market.
Editor: Shiwen Yap, Ben Jiang
