An Introduction

By Jakob Höflich, Co-Founder and CMO of Cyanite

From Hunches to Data-Driven Insights

If you own or work with a music catalog, you likely have a solid understanding of its character. But what if the number of songs goes in the tens of thousands or even beyond? How confident can you be to know the profile of the catalog and what it stands for? When making important decisions about the creative direction of your catalog, especially with multiple stakeholders involved, this ‘feeling’ can tend to be subjective and leave room for guesswork. It’s the music’s subjective and “magical” nature that makes it hard to quantify and discuss.

That’s why keywords remain crucial when managing and developing a catalog where AI can be so helpful to your work. By providing data insights, AI can turn these hunches into consistent and concrete knowledge.

Here are three benefits of leveraging music Auto-Tagging for your content strategy.

1. Deep Understanding of a Catalog’s Character

AI music Auto-Tagging dives deep into the sound character of a catalog. By translating the complexity of music into concrete datapoints such as genres and moods, it allows for a shared, objective and consistent understanding across your team or company. Imagine having a precise breakdown of your catalog’s characteristics at your fingertips. Like, which percentage of my repertoire is Rock, Funk, Disco? Does it stand for upbeat or more melancholic tones? Do I maybe have a gender problem by favoring one more over the other? This not only enhances internal cohesion but also aligns strategies and decisions.

Pro Tip: Our Auto-Tagging focuses on creative metadata, extracting information such as genres, BPM, key, and energy. Curious? Check out our full taxonomy. It does not extract copyright or performance metadata. A smart move here is to pair the AI-driven insights with other data pools. For example, pairing AI-insights with performance and sales data can reveal things like: Only 2% of my catalog is Hip Hop, yet this content has a 200% higher performance rate.

2. Uncovering Blind Spots and Highlighting Trends

AI’s ability to uncover blind spots and highlight trends within a catalog is another significant benefit. This data-driven approach can reveal underutilized niches or trends when data is placed on a timeline. Whether it’s identifying a resurgence in a particular genre or pinpointing areas with high sync opportunities, AI insights shed light on the hidden corners of a catalog. Particularly for sync teams of companies that do not have a distinct genre profile it is beneficial to have a balanced catalog to answer to the upmost possible amounts of briefs with adequate content.

3. Informed Decisions for Catalog Acquisition

Lastly, AI-driven insights are not limited to managing your existing catalog. They are invaluable when evaluating to-be-acquired catalogs. While frontline repertoire might be familiar, B-sides and deep cuts often remain mysterious territories. By thoroughly analyzing these lesser-known tracks, AI can contribute a creative due diligence aspect by providing a comprehensive understanding, which in turn informs better acquisition decisions. This ensures you’re investing in a catalog that has the ability to complement your existing one.

Contrarily, if you want to sell a catalog, comprehensive tagging data on your repertoire can help you identify the perfect acquirer or prove the future longevity of your catalog to drive up the multiple.

A Real-World Example

A German publisher utilizing Cyanite’s AI insights discovered previously underappreciated genres, allowing them to optimize their catalog strategy effectively. The analysis showed that the genres Hip Hop, Funk, and RnB and the mood Epic were underrepresented even though both have been extremely valuable qualities for successful sync placements in the last years.

Visual representations, such as pie charts and graphs, can further show how AI can dissect and categorize catalog elements, providing clear, actionable insights.

Conclusion: Embracing the Future with AI

AI music Auto-Tagging can be a great help for developing content strategies in the music industry. These actionable insights provide a deep, data-driven understanding of catalogs, uncover blind spots, highlight trends, and inform strategic decisions for catalog acquisitions.

Undoubtedly, AI can’t and shouldn’t replace the final decision-making process as it can’t anticipate the future as us humans do. But it can be used as a great tool to navigate this process with data that make it easier – and often more convincingly – to talk about the magic of music.

As we live in a time where content production is at an all-time peak providing the sync market with opportunities as never before, every song in the catalog should have the same chance of being discovered. Having a well-organized and indexed catalog is key to that.

The burgeoning field of artificial intelligence has brought forth more tools than we can count, aiming to revolutionize the music industry. Amidst this landscape, AI-based music tagging and search stand out as proven technologies with quantifiable benefits for music companies worldwide.

This article aims to demystify the potential of AI music search and recommendation systems, offering insights to help music catalog owners and distributors determine the relevance of this technology for their businesses. Whether navigating a vast catalog or seeking innovative solutions for content discovery, this guide is tailored to your needs.

If you are also interested in Auto-Tagging music, please check out our article on The Power of Automatic Music Tagging with AI.

Assessing Your Needs

Understanding the suitability of AI music search begins with assessing your specific requirements. Consider the following prompts:

• • Has your catalog experienced significant growth from various sources?
  • Do a variety of different users access and search through your catalog?
  • Is sync a key aspect of your company?
  • Do you find yourself repeatedly using the same tracks while underutilizing others?

If you answer affirmatively to at least two of these questions, further exploration of AI music search is advisable.

Exploring Options

Two primary AI-driven search options dominate this landscape:

Similarity Search: Ideal for discovering tracks similar to a reference song, this feature aids sync and licensing teams worldwide. Whether finding similar songs in your catalog to worldwide hits or augmenting your song collection for your sync pitch, this tool enhances any music search.

Free Text Search (Searching by natural language): Utilizing text prompts, this search method facilitates music discovery for visual projects and instances where translating thoughts into keywords proves challenging. Its versatility extends from B2B applications, common in music licensing, to B2C scenarios, as demonstrated by Cyanite’s collaboration with streaming platforms like Sonu.

Lyrics Search: Enhance your search experience by delving into the lyrical content of songs. This feature adds a contextual dimension to sound-based searches, allowing users to find songs based on specific words or themes within their lyrics. Whether you’re searching for songs containing a particular word like “love” or exploring themes such as “falling in love,” this functionality offers a nuanced approach to music discovery.

If you want to test those AI music search options, you can easily create a free account for Cyanite’s web app and try it out.

Building vs. Buying

Choosing between building an in-house AI solution or licensing from an external provider hinges on several factors:

• • Do you possess an internal data science and development team?
• • Do you have a meticulously tagged library of at least 500,000 audios?
• • Can you allocate a significant budget for AI development (mid-six-figure sum) and ongoing updates?
• • Are you prepared to invest in monthly maintenance costs for a proprietary AI system (monthly five-figure sum)?

Building your AI may be viable if you answer at least two of these questions positively. Alternatively, partnering with an AI provider like Cyanite presents a compelling option for those lacking the resources or expertise for independent development.

To book an individual and free consultation with our experts, please follow the button below.

Long Story Short

AI music search offers a transformative solution for navigating the complexities of music catalogs, empowering businesses with enhanced efficiency and discovery capabilities. Whether leveraging similarity search or text-based prompts, the adoption of AI-driven technologies promises to redefine content discovery in the music industry.

Explore the possibilities of AI music search with Cyanite, and unlock the full potential of your music catalog today.

Your Cyanite Team.