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Guest post for Hypebot: How AI can generate new revenue for existing music catalogs?

Guest post for Hypebot: How AI can generate new revenue for existing music catalogs?

by | Jun 9, 2023 | Company, Music Industry

Our CEO Markus Schwarzer has published a guest post on UK-based music industry medium Hypebot.

In this guest post, our CEO Markus elaborates on how AI can be used to resurface, reuse, and monetize long-forgotten music, addressing concerns about its impact on the music industry. By leveraging AI-driven curation and tagging capabilities, music catalog owners can extract greater value from their collections, enabling faster search, diverse curation, and the discovery of hidden music, while still protecting artists and intellectual property rights.

You can read the full guest post below or head over to Hypebot via this link.


by Markus Schwarzer, CEO of Cyanite

AI-induced anxiety is ever-growing.

Whether it’s the fear that machines will evolve capabilities beyond their coders’ control, or the more surreal case of a chatbot urging a journalist to leave his wife, paranoia that artificial intelligence is getting too big for its boots is building. One oft-cited concern, voiced in an open letter from a group of AI-experts and researchers calling themselves the Future of Life Institute calling for a pause in AI development, is whether, alongside mundane donkeywork, we risk automating more creative human endeavors.

It’s a question being raised in recording studios and music label boardrooms. Will AI begin replacing flesh and blood artists, generating music at the touch of a button?

While some may discount these anxieties as irrational and accuse AI skeptics of being dinosaurs who are failing to embrace the modern world, the current developments must be taken seriously.

AI poses a potential threat to the livelihood of artists and in the absence of new copyright laws that specifically deal with the new technology, the music industry will need to find ways to protect its artists.

We all remember when AI versions of songs by The Weeknd and Drake hit streaming services and went viral. Their presence on streaming services was short-lived but it’s a very real example of how AI can potentially destabilise the livelihood of artists. Universal Music Group quickly put out a statement asking the music industry “which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.“

“there are vast archives of music of all genres lying dormant and thousands of forgotten tracks”

However, there are ways that AI can deliver real value to the industry – and specifically to the owners of large music catalogues. Catalogue owners often struggle with how to extract the maximum value out of the human-created music they’ve already got.

But we can learn from genAI approaches. Recently introduced by AI systems like Midjourney, ChatGPT or Riffusion, prompt-based search experiences are prone to creep into anyone’s user behavior. But instead of having to fall back to bleak replicas of human-created images, texts, or music, AI engines can give music catalogue owners the power to build comparable search experience with the advantage of surfacing well-crafted and sounding songs with a real human and a real story behind it.

There are vast archives of music of all genres lying dormant, and thousands of forgotten tracks within existing collections, that could be generating revenue via licensing deals for film, TV, advertising, trailers, social media clips and video games; from licences for sampling; or even as a USP for investors looking to purchase unique collections. It’s not a coincidence that litigation over plagiarism is skyrocketing. With hundreds of millions of songs around, there is a growing likelihood that the perfect song for any use case already exists and just needs to be found rather than mass-generated by AI.

With this in mind, the real value of AI to music custodians lies in its search and curation capabilities, which enable them to find new and diverse ways for the music in their catalogues to work harder for them.

How AI music curation and AI tagging work

To realize the power of artificial intelligence to extract value from music catalogues, you need to understand how AI-driven curation works.

Simply put, AI can do most things a human archivist can do,but much, much faster; processing vast volumes of content, and tagging, retagging, searching, cross-referencing and generating recommendations in near real-time. It can surface the perfect track – the one you’d forgotten, didn’t know you had, or would never have considered for the task in hand – in seconds.

This is because AI is really good at auto-tagging, a job few humans relish. It can categorise entire music libraries by likely search terms, tagging each recording by artist and title, and also by genre, mood, tempo and language. As well as taking on a time-consuming task, AI removes the subjectivity of a human tagger, while still being able to identify the sentiment in the music and make complex links between similar tracks. AI tagging is not only consistent and objective (it has no preference for indie over industrial house), it also offers the flexibility to retag as often as needed.

The result is that, no matter how dusty and impenetrable a back catalogue, all its content becomes accessible for search and discovery. AI has massively improved both identification and recommendation for music catalogues. It can surface a single song using semantic search, which identifies the meaning of the lyrics. Or it can pick out particular elements in the complexities of music in your library which make it sound similar to another composition (one that you don’t own the rights to, for example). This allows AI to use reference songs to search through catalogues for comparable tracks.

The power of AI music catalog search

The value of AI to slice and dice back catalogs in these ways is considerable for companies that produce and licence audio for TV, film, radio and multimedia projects. The ability to intelligently search their archives at high speed means they can deliver exactly the right recording to any given movie scene or gaming sequence.

Highly customisable playlists culled from a much larger catalogue are another benefit of AI-assisted search. While its primary function is to allow streaming services such as Spotify to deliver ‘you’ll like this’ playlists to users, for catalogue owners it means extracting infinitely refinable sub-sets of music which can demonstrate the archive’s range and offer a sonic smorgasbord to potential clients.

“the extraction of ‘hidden’ music”

Another major value-add is the extraction of ‘hidden’ music. The ability of AI to make connections based on sentiment and even lyrical hooks and musical licks, as well as tempo, instruments and era, allows it to match the right music to any project with speed and precision only the most dedicated catalogue curator could fulfil. With its capacity to search vast volumes of content, AI opens the entirety of a given library to every search, and surfaces obscure recordings. Rather than just making money from their most popular tracks, therefore, the owners of music archives can make all of their collection work for them.

The tools to do all of this already exist. Our own solution is a powerful AI engine that tags and searches an entire catalogue in minutes with depth and accuracy. Meanwhile, AudioRanger is an audio recognition AI which identifies the ownership metadata of commercially released songs in music libraries. And PlusMusic is an AI that makes musical pieces adaptive for in-game experiences. As the gaming situation changes, the same song will then adapt to it.

Generative AI – time for careful reflection

The debate on the role of generative AI in the music industry won’t be solved anytime soon and it shouldn’t. We should reflect carefully on the incorporation of any technology that might potentially reshape our industry. We should ask questions such as: how do we protect artists? How do we use the promise of generative AI to enhance human art? What are the legal and ethical challenges that this technology poses? All of these issues must be addressed in order for the industry to reap the benefits of generative AI.

Adam Taylor, President and CEO of the American production music company APM Music, shared with me that he believes it is vital to safeguard intellectual property rights, including copyright, as generative AI technologies grow across the world. As he puts it: “While we are great believers in the power of technology and use it throughout our enterprise, we believe that all technology should be used in responsible ways that are human-centric. Just as it has been throughout human history, we believe that our collective futures are intrinsically tied to and dependent on retaining the centrality of human-centered art and creativity.”

The debate around the role of generative AI models will continue to play out as we look for ways to embrace new technologies and protect artists, and naturally there are those like Adam who will wish to adopt a cautious approach. But while there are many who are reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace generative AI models, andthere are many more who are willing to embrace analysis and search AI to protect their catalogues and make them more efficient and searchable.

Ultimately, it’s down to the industry to take control of this issue, find a workable level of comfort with AI capabilities, and build AI-enhanced music environments that will vastly improve the searchability – and therefore usefulness – of existing, human-generated music.

If you want to get more updates from Markus’ view on the music industry, you can connect with him on LinkedIn here.

 

More Cyanite content on AI and music

PR: Cyanite acquires sample platform aptone to expand music AI services

PR: Cyanite acquires sample platform aptone to expand music AI services

by | May 31, 2023 | Announcement, Company

PRESS RELEASE

Cyanite acquires sample platform aptone to expand music AI services

  • AI-powered music tagging and search firm Cyanite acquires AI-based sample platform aptone 
  • The acquisition will allow Cyanite to drive international growth and expand its AI solutions for the music industry
  • aptone co-founder Johannes Giani joins Cyanite’s board as Director of Information Technology

Berlin/Cologne/Mannheim, May 31, 2023 – Cyanite, one of the world’s leading AI companies for music analysis and recommendation, has acquired aptone, an AI-based service which allows music producers to classify and search samples. The acquisition will enable Cyanite to drive international growth and expand its AI solutions for the music industry.

Johannes Giani, one of the founders of aptone, will join the Cyanite board as Director of Information Technology with immediate effect. With his expertise in cloud-based system architecture, he will help Cyanite to further develop its technology and continue to enhance and expand the offering for Cyanite’s international customers such as BMG, Pond5, APM Music and RTL.

The acquisition of aptone will help Cyanite to take one step closer to achieving its vision of creating a universal intelligence that understands, indexes and recommends the world’s music. Cyanite’s technology will now be able to increase the accuracy with which it analyses and tags samples, which offer a growing opportunity for music publishers to maximise the monetisation of their catalogues. The integration will also allow Cyanite to improve its system architecture and scale its technology to increase the reliability of analysis of the millions of audio files on its platform.

Markus Schwarzer, CEO of Cyanite, said:
“I have been mentoring the aptone team for quite some time now and have always been impressed by their growth and technological finesse, and I’m delighted they will formally be part of Cyanite.  Johannes’ expertise in product management and system architecture will be a valuable addition to our team and he will help us provide our customers with the best and most reliable AI solutions. Johannes’ addition to the team comes at a crucial time – there has never been more music available than today; we need technology to help us to handle it. Our vision of a universal music intelligence has always been clear, and with this acquisition we will be able to advance this vision even further.”

Johannes Giani, Director of Information Technology at Cyanite, said:
“Through our ongoing contact with Cyanite, we have built a fruitful relationship of trust over many months. Now we are extremely excited to join forces and develop innovative solutions together in the future. By working together, we not only complement each other technologically, but also in terms of content. We believe that our combined expertise in AI, software and the music industry will create new opportunities to provide a unique offering to our customers – from creation to exploitation. I have spent three years with my co-founders Basti and Tim building up aptone, and we are extremely proud to be part of the Cyanite family which marks a successful end to our startup.”

aptone Co-founder Bastian Werner will continue his career at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), while Co-founder Tim Franken will take a career break.

Both Cyanite and aptone are music tech startups based in Germany. Cyanite emerged from the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg and aptone is supported by Gateway TH Köln.

The acquisition is effective immediately. aptone’s community and producers can sign up to a mailing list on the aptone website to be kept up to date.

ENDS

About Cyanite

Cyanite helps music companies turn their catalogs into their own personal Spotify – providing music libraries with the usability, transparency and functionality users have become accustomed to. 

From their headquarters in Mannheim, Germany, Cyanite’s team develops AI-powered music analysis and recommendation software that enables effective keywording and efficient music research based on it. This enables music, entertainment and advertising companies to quickly and cost-effectively deliver the right songs for their customers’ search queries based on keywords, reference titles or free text. 

Via API or no-code solution, Cyanite supports some of the most renowned and innovative players in the music, entertainment and advertising industries. These include production music libraries APM Music, Pond5 and Far Music (RTL), music publishers BMG, Nettwerk Music Group, Sugar Music and Schubert Music, and sound branding agencies amp sound branding, Antfood, Universal Music Solutions, and Human Worldwide. 

Cyanite’s vision is to become the universal music intelligence that understands, connects, and recommends the world’s music – an intelligence that can translate music into everything and everything into music.

Website: https://www.cyanite.ai/

Web App: https://app.cyanite.ai/register

API: https://api-docs.cyanite.ai/

LinkedIn: Cyanite.ai

Twitter: Cyanite.ai

About aptone

aptone is a cloud-based software service that allows music creators to better sort and use large sound collections more intuitively through artificial intelligence (AI).

With the help of aptone, music producers can automate the sorting of their sound collections through AI and make them easier to find. These collections consist of many small audio files, also called samples, which are used for sound compositions of various kinds. Samples can be found in the entire spectrum of the music business and range from personal music productions to sound backdrops in films.

Debating the upsides of Universal Music Group’s recent AI attack (guest post on Music Ally)

Debating the upsides of Universal Music Group’s recent AI attack (guest post on Music Ally)

by | May 5, 2023 | Company, Music Industry

Our CEO Markus Schwarzer has published a guest post on UK-based music industry medium Music Ally. In the post, Markus addresses the concern that major labels and other large music companies have shown recently about the use of Artificial Intelligence in music and business – and the importance of stepping back and thinking carefully about as-yet unknown repercussions, before moving into a future where AI benefits us all.

You can read the full guest post below or head over to Music Ally via this link.

In recent months, Universal Music Group has become the ringleader of a front that has formed against generative music AI companies – and latterly all AI companies.

After news made the rounds of UMG’s recent actions, people everywhere (including myself) spoke out about the positives of AI. AI has the potential to improve art, create a better environment for DIY artists, and foster new musical ecosystems. However, whilst the industry was debating the prosperous future of music fuelled by AI, with leveled playing fields, democratised accesses, and transparency, we forgot one thing. All of these positive outcomes might be true in the future, but the current reality of generative AI is different.

Currently, it is an uncontrolled wild west where new models have shown that they’re not just some game for the tech-interested individuals among us, but an actual threat to the livelihoods of artists.

Reading through and experimenting with recent generative music AI advancements, I can’t help but feel reminded of Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, which was directed at developers of large language models (LLMs) like Open•AI’s GPT-4 or Meta’s LLaMA. It urged them to halt their developments and think about the implications of their projects for at least six months.

The open letter made some requests which are equally applicable to the music industry. Just like LLMs, some generative music startups see themselves “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds”. Just like LLMs we may run into the risk that “no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control” them. Just like LLMs, we need to ask ourselves “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?”

The latter is a question that we at Cyanite and other AI companies also have to ask ourselves frequently. Do we automate meaningful jobs, or just tedious unloved chores to free up time for creative work?

But unlike LLMs, the music industry has copyright law to enforce the temporary halt of new training models (at least in those areas where it is enforceable). So what if the UMG-attempted halt of new generative AI training allows us to take a step back and try to get an objective perspective on recent developments? This is something that is not possible with LLMs, because training data is so much more accessible and less controllable. Which is the reason people have to write open letters in the first place – a strategy which has somewhat questionable expectations of success.

Many in the industry have criticised UMG’s approach as a general barrage of fire launched at any company working with AI, in the hope of hitting some of their targets; one that will ultimately also harm companies working on products beneficial for the industry, while also eventually forcing advancements in the generative space into the uncontrollable underground.

Despite this being undoubtedly true, we can’t deny that it has sparked a very important debate on whether we need to slow down the acceleration of AI. I would argue that if UMG’s actions will let us pause AI for a second, take a deep breath, imagine the future of music AI and then start developing towards exactly that goal, their actions would have a hugely positive effect.

If you want to get more updates from Markus’ view on the music industry, you can connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Cyanite Partners With Web3 Music Marketplace Dequency.io

Cyanite Partners With Web3 Music Marketplace Dequency.io

by | Apr 27, 2023 | Announcement, Company

Cyanite’s AI integration in Dequency will enhance discovery on web3 sync licensing platform.

AI-powered music tagging and search firm Cyanite launches Free Text Search which provides users with a completely new and intuitive way of searching for music

Los Angeles/Berlin, April 27, 2023 – Dequency has partnered with AI music tagging and recommendation engine Cyanite, with a view to enhancing discovery on its own decentralized music licensing marketplace.

Launched in 2019, with headquarters in Berlin and Mannheim, Cyanite develops algorithms for music analysis, tagging, search and discovery. The company’s goal is to help clients better understand their repertoire and unlock its full value with artificial intelligence. It has a broad client base across publishing, record labels, production music companies and music tech, with big names including BMG, Nettwerk, UMPG Music Solutions, RTL, Pond5, APM Music and many more.

Built on Algorand, Dequency’s marketplace is the only option for on-chain sync licensing for blockchain-native content such as motion-visual digital art, NFT projects, games, and metaverse productions. Analogous to Bitcoin’s trustless digital payments, Dequency eliminates third parties from music licensing transactions to increase speed of payment, reduce fees, and give control of the system to market participants.

The platform’s v1.0 launch in July last year created a two-sided marketplace, allowing any music rightsholder that owns both the recording and publishing rights of a track to license their music directly without an intermediary in between the transaction. Music rights owners that use the Dequency marketplace are also able to set their own licensing fees, making this a first of its kind proposition for an online sync platform.

This new partnership with Cyanite will make discovering new, original works on the Dequency platform for use in content easier than ever.

Cyanite CEO Markus Schwarzer said: “We are really happy to partner with Dequency as we bring together the strengths of blockchain and artificial intelligence to make original music easier to license in the metaverse. We see huge potential for the music industry to further diversify its revenue streams and are proud to contribute with our algorithms to provide the best possible music search experience.”

Dequency CEO Keatly Haldeman said: “We’re excited to bring Cyanite’s AI-enabled tagging to Dequency’s growing library of licensable music. Not only does this mean licensees can find the perfect track for their project, but also it enables them to find those ‘diamond in the rough’ tracks based off of their attributes — giving even more artists the chance to participate in the global market for sync. This is cutting edge technology for easy and accurate song recommendation that will benefit all Dequency users.”


About Cyanite

Cyanite helps music companies to turn their catalogues into their own personal Spotify – powering music libraries with the simplicity, visibility, and functionality to perform how they and their users expect them to.

From its offices located in Berlin and Mannheim, Cyanite builds powerful AI-based analysis and recommendation solutions to efficiently tag and search music. This enables music, entertainment and advertising companies to quickly and cost-effectively deliver the right songs for their customers’ search queries.

Cyanite supports some of the most renowned and innovative players in the music and advertising industry via API or no code solutions. Among the music companies using Cyanite are the production music libraries APM Music, Pond5 and Far Music (RTL), the music publishers BMG, Nettwerk Music Group, NEUBAU Music and Schubert Music, and the sound branding agencies amp sound branding, Universal Music Solutions, and Human Worldwide.

Cyanite’s vision is to become the universal intelligence that understands, connects and recommends the world’s music – an intelligence that can translate music into anything and anything into music.

About Dequency

Launched in 2022, Dequency is a web3-powered, decentralised marketplace for on-chain sync licensing, allowing music rightsholders and visual creators to connect, collaborate, and transact directly with one another quickly, efficiently and transparently.

Initially servicing blockchain-native content such as motion-visual digital art, NFT projects, games and metaverse productions, Dequency’s arrival has implications on the broader music licensing space, with its technology enabling unprecedented speed and control around transitions, usage and payment.

Dequency allows any music rightsholder that owns both the recording and publishing rights of a track to license their music directly to a licensee without an intermediary in between the transaction. Music rights owners are also able to set their own licensing fees, making this a first of its kind proposition for an online sync platform.

Website: https://www.cyanite.ai/

Web App: https://app.cyanite.ai/register

API: https://api-docs.cyanite.ai/

LinkedIn: Cyanite.ai

Twitter: Cyanite.ai

PR: Cyanite launches technology that can find music based on full text for the first time

PR: Cyanite launches technology that can find music based on full text for the first time

by | Feb 1, 2023 | Announcement, Company

PRESS RELEASE

Cyanite launches technology that can find music based on full text for the first time

AI-powered music tagging and search firm Cyanite launches Free Text Search which provides users with a completely new and intuitive way of searching for music

Mannheim/Berlin, January 25, 2023 – Cyanite, a tech company with various software solutions in AI-powered music tagging and search, has launched the first search engine that can instantly translate complex text input into its closest musical equivalent. Similar to image creation services like Dall-E and Midjourney, users can now find matching music by telling the AI exactly what they need – in their own language and unbound to a prefixed set of keywords. 

Now, users can insert a full scene description, a synch briefing or just a hunch about a sound, and Cyanite’s Free Text Search will provide a list of suitable tracks. The search requests may be as complex as “A city lost to time, its buildings half buried by the jungle that has claimed it” or as simple as “Walking down a dusty highway”. 

The technology empowers any user – regardless of their music knowledge – to delve deeper into huge music libraries to discover the perfect music for a specific application such as a movie trailer or YouTube video, vastly reducing the complexity of music search. It also opens up new licensing opportunities for music companies to a far wider range of potential music buyers.  

Markus Schwarzer, CEO, Cyanite, says: “We are seeing a steep increase in audiovisual content creation – both professional as well as user generated. Music rights holders are bombarded with requests from both sides of the professional spectrum, from branding agencies to DIY content creators. They cannot possibly meet all of them in a timely manner with a consistent high quality. With Free Text Search, we provide music companies with a tool that catches the first wave by giving a variety of music choices to broad requests for users to drill down from – or very targeted music recommendations to specific requests.” 

Joey Goldberger, Sync Manager at Canadian music publishing group Nettwerk agrees: “We’ve been lucky to get early access to Cyanite’s new Free Text Search and in this short period of time, songs which we found through this super intuitive system have already gotten licensing requests and one successful sale. We are big fans.“

Free Text Search may be applied to choosing music for a wealth of scenarios, from library music, gaming, film, sonic branding and advertising, to new developments in areas such as the metaverse and Point of Sale (POS) and takes a step closer towards the company’s goal of creating a universal intelligence that understands, indexes and recommends the world’s music. 

Markus Schwarzer: “There is a lot of interest in AI-generated music, mainly because of its applicability for specific use cases like concentration, sleep, and so on. We believe this is partly down to music discovery for human-created music being too one-dimensional. With Free Text Search, we aim to put the spotlight back on human-created music, by applying the cutting edge of artificial intelligence to music catalogues.”

Jeroen Vreugdenhil is Managing Director of Brilliant Classics, a music label working with original classical recordings. He adds: “It’s a huge challenge to set up a new YouTube channel with playlists for specific activities and situations like studying, sleeping, and relaxing with 100,000 songs from our catalogue, which consists entirely of classical music. For that, we seamlessly integrated Cyanite’s new Free Text Search into our workflows and I can already say that it’s never been easier to search for suitable music. It empowers my team to tap into the very deep layers of our repertoire and realise its full potential.“

Next to Brilliant Classics and Nettwerk Music Group, music agency Marmoset Music, and independent production music library MediaTracks are using Free Text Search. At the same time, many of Cyanite’s global customers are evaluating integration with their existing libraries.

William Saunders, Director Media & Creative at MediaTracks, says: “Our team was blown away by Cyanite’s new Free Text Search as it offers an intuitive and easy way to start a music search by simply typing in what you are looking for. We will deeply integrate it into our workflows to faster and better answer our clients’ requests for music.“

Cyanite’s Free Text Search is based on the latest Transformer technology, which is also used for current image generators or ChatGPT, for example. Cyanite fed its transformer technology with complex musical descriptions e.g. from music reviews, to teach the AI to understand any kind of written text input. This input is then translated into suitable music. The decisive advantage of such a model is the fact that it learns free text instead of discrete classes, which allows semantic relationships to be recognized.

Anyone who wants to try out Free Text Search with a showcase database of Spotify, can register for free here for Cyanite’s Web App and access the search via this link.

ENDS

 

About Cyanite

Cyanite helps music companies to turn their catalogues into their own personal Spotify – powering music libraries with the simplicity, visibility, and functionality to perform how they and their users expect them to. 

From its offices located in Berlin and Mannheim, Cyanite builds powerful AI-based analysis and recommendation solutions to efficiently tag and search music. This enables music, entertainment and advertising companies to quickly and cost-effectively deliver the right songs for their customers’ search queries.

Cyanite supports some of the most renowned and innovative players in the music and advertising industry via API or no code solutions. Among the music companies using Cyanite are the production music libraries APM Music, Pond5 and Far Music (RTL), the music publishers BMG, Nettwerk Music Group, NEUBAU Music and Schubert Music, and the sound branding agencies amp sound branding, Universal Music Solutions, and Human Worldwide.

Cyanite’s vision is to become the universal intelligence that understands, connects and recommends the world’s music – an intelligence that can translate music into anything and anything into music.

 

Website: https://www.cyanite.ai/

Web App: https://app.cyanite.ai/register

API: https://api-docs.cyanite.ai/

LinkedIn: Cyanite.ai

Twitter: Cyanite.ai

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PR: Cyanite signs up BMG to use AI tagging across entire catalog

PR: Cyanite signs up BMG to use AI tagging across entire catalog

by | Oct 7, 2022 | Announcement, Company

PRESS RELEASE

Cyanite signs up BMG to use AI tagging across entire catalog

AI-powered music tagging and search firm Cyanite will categorise BMG’s catalog of three million tracks to unlock new value for Synch

Mannheim/Berlin, September 27, 2022 – Cyanite, a tech company with various solutions in AI-powered music tagging and search, has signed a global deal with music giant BMG to unlock new value from its three-million-track catalogue.

Bertelsmann-owned BMG, the world’s largest music company outside the three ‘majors’, has appointed Cyanite with the aim of making its entire repertoire more searchable and accessible for Synch – i.e. placing music in movies and advertising. Cyanite’s automatic tagging will support BMG’s internal and external creatives to identify “hidden gems” in the search for the perfect song for film, TV, games and advertising usages. Before deciding on Cyanite, BMG tested all available technologies extensively.

BMG’s catalogue has grown exponentially through acquisitions and organic growth since its formation in 2008. Cyanite’s tech will allow BMG to easily integrate newly acquired catalogues such as that of Telamo, the largest independent record label in Germany. 

Cyanite’s technology is being integrated into BMG’s internal content management system BMG Songs, the market-leading repertoire, creative and licensing platform used by BMG’s synch teams around the world. BMG’s tagging team can now focus their efforts away from manual tagging, while the company gets on with exploiting its entire catalogue.

The BMG development team is currently overseeing the integration of Cyanite’s Application Programming Interface (API), which will enable employees to leverage Cyanite’s creative metadata. Once integrated, BMG’s repertoire will be processed by Cyanite’s AI technology and the results delivered back via the API to BMG’s software. 

BMG VP Group Technology Gaurav Mittal said, “BMG is committed to using AI technologies to optimize our revenues so we can speed the flow of royalties to artists and songwriters. We are delighted to be working with Cyanite to enhance our Synch services.”

BMG SVP Global Synch Licensing Allegra Willis Knerr said: “In a world in which there are literally tens of millions of tracks available to Synch, AI offers the ability to simultaneously improve the accuracy of pitches and level the playing field for artists and songwriters. AIready, wherever the brief allows it, BMG has abandoned the distinction between ‘frontline’ and ‘catalogue’. Our objective with Cyanite is to maximise the chances for every single song in our repertoire to be licensed.”

Markus Schwarzer, CEO, Cyanite, said: “We are very proud to announce this deal with BMG, a company which shares our vision of a universal intelligence that understands, indexes and recommends the world’s music. Working together, BMG and Cyanite will uncover the potential of every single track in the catalogue.”

The news comes after Cyanite announced in August that it has closed an €800,000 seed investment round to further expand its AI-based solution for the music industry. This investment was led by former finetunes founders Oke Göttlich and Henning Thieß. The goal is to sustain the company’s vision of universal music intelligence to revolutionise how music is selected in entertainment and advertising.

BMG is the second division of Bertelsmann to sign a deal with Cyanite, following RTL Group, the Luxembourg-based international media conglomerate.

About Cyanite

Cyanite helps music companies to turn their catalogues into their own personal Spotify – powering music libraries with the simplicity, visibility, and functionality to perform how they and their users expect them to. 

From its offices located in Berlin and Mannheim, Cyanite builds powerful AI-based analysis and recommendation solutions to efficiently tag and search music. This enables music, entertainment and advertising companies to quickly and cost-effectively deliver the right songs for their customers’ search queries.

Cyanite supports some of the most renowned and innovative players in the music and advertising industry via API or no code solutions. Among the music companies using Cyanite are the production music libraries APM Music and Far Music (RTL), the radio station SWR, the music publishers Nettwerk, NEUBAU Music and Schubert Music, and the sound branding agencies amp sound branding, Universal Music Solutions, and Human Worldwide.

Cyanite’s vision is to become the universal intelligence that understands, connects and recommends the world’s music – an intelligence that can translate music into anything and anything into music.

About BMG

BMG – est. 2008 – is the world’s fourth-biggest music company, the first new global player in the music business of the streaming age, and a record label and music publisher in one. Named in 2020 one of the world’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company, BMG’s pitch is unique – a relentless focus on fairness and transparency and service to its artist and songwriter clients. BMG’s 21 offices across 12 core music markets now represent over three million songs and recordings, including many of the most renowned and successful catalogs in popular music history. BMG’s fresh approach includes production music, films, books, artist management, merchandise, neighboring rights, and live as well as music publishing and recordings off the same service platform. BMG is owned by international media, services and education company Bertelsmann, whose other content businesses include the entertainment company RTL Group and the trade book publisher Penguin Random House. With its multi-platform perspective, integrated technology platform and commitment to help artists maximize their income, BMG aims to be the best company in music to do business with. www.bmg.com 

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