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AI Music Discovery: How Marmoset Uses Cyanite | A Case Study

AI Music Discovery: How Marmoset Uses Cyanite | A Case Study

Founded in 2010, Marmoset is a full-service music licensing agency representing hundreds of independent artists and labels. At the heart of it, their core experience involves browsing for music. They offer music discovery for any moving visual media. From sync (movies & TV) to advertisements, video games, and wedding videos.  Powered by Marmoset is Track Club, which is subscription-based as opposed to a la carte or custom licensing. Find out below how they use Cyanite for both of their services to amplify AI music discovery.

In 2019 Marmoset became the first Certified B Corporation music agency on the planet, providing tangible metrics, social sustainability, and fulfilling environmental standards.

2 Screenshots of Marmoset Music and Tracklcub - both utilizing AI music discovery through Cyanite.
We sat down with Alex Paguirigan, product manager at Marmoset, to learn more about how Marmoset uses Cyanite both within their internal processes and on the front end of their services through AI music discovery and more. Cyanite and Marmoset have been working together for over 1.5 years now.

“We utilize Cyanite’s API and web app on a daily basis for auto-tagging, and similarity search.”

Alex Paguirigan

The Key Elements Within this Case Study

  • Challenges that Marmoset encountered before engaging with Cyanite.

  • Exploring the specific Cyanite solutions currently employed by Marmoset.

  • Understanding the benefits Marmoset derives from Cyanite’s AI solutions.

  • Delving into the integration process.

  • Marmoset’s future roadmap and strategic outlook.
A screenshot of a youtube video on how Marmoset uses Cyanite for AI music discovery with a middle aged man smiling.
Check out this 2-minute summary of our video interview.

“What made you initially reach out to us and how do you use Cyanite today?”

“Before I was a product manager, I had a catalog management position tagging music with metadata manually. Because of how subjective music is, we always wanted to make sure that a human was behind the wheel to attribute metadata.”

“But when it comes down to calculating the BPM and key of any given song, you would have to put someone behind a piano with a metronome, which is completely unsustainable and a strange use of labor. So that, plus the challenge of significantly growing our catalog told us – we are behind the times here.”

Initially, Marmoset was trying to improve and speed up their tagging process with Cyanite. 1.5 years later they ended up with much more than only a tagging solution. To make their catalog even more discoverable they integrated an additional solution powered by Cyanite: the Similarity Search

The Products that Marmoset Currently Uses

Web AppAllows you to upload your entire catalog into your Cyanite library, creating your own Spotify with our Similarity Search and Free Text Search. No coding required.

APILets you integrate Cyanite into your own system. Implement Cyanite’s full-scope analysis and search technology into your current environment! Coding skills required.

Auto-TaggingLet Cyanite tag your music with Genres, Moods, Keywords, Brand Values, Auto-Descriptions, and much more. Explore all the tags.

Similarity SearchGet similar songs recommended for either tracks from your library or external reference tracks from Spotify and YouTube. 

Using these in combination allows for superior AI music discovery.

How Marmoset Benefits from Cyanite – AI Music Discovery

[Click on any of the headings below to find out more about them.] 

Reduced search time for the right songs

“With this feature we allow our users to discover similar songs to the ones they think work best for their needs.”

We never want to be a site or a product that you spend hours of your day on. We would much rather you look through fewer things and get what you need within 10 minutes and never visit the site again because you already have exactly what you need. And this feature definitely helped with that.”

Faster song-to-market time

“Getting our artists onboarded faster with us quite literally has been a major benefit of integrating Cyanite.”

“Some artists and labels offer us their entire back-catalog dating back over 20 years. There’s only so much time in the day for a human to tag all of that and although we are still humanly involved in the tagging, Cyanite gives us a head start with this.”

“We don’t want to tell an artist ‘Hey, you’re gonna have to wait a bit because it takes time to tag your music and get it in the system.’”

AI music discovery with a consistent language across Marmoset's catalog

“Cyanite’s Auto Tagging makes our catalog more discoverable by people who are not you.”

“After I learned Marmoset’s internal tagging system and got a lot of practice with tagging the first 50-100 songs without any assistance, I suddenly developed my own system within a system. And I stuck with that.

When you’re tagging the music with the help of Cyanite, it forces the person behind the computer to reconsider what they hear.”

“On the worst days, that means you are questioning your musical knowledge. But on most days, Cyanite hears something that you don’t, and you expand your knowledge of music because you reconsider your judgment call. Or it gives out the exact tags that you thought of before and simply reassures you in your confidence.”

“And that only makes our catalog stronger.”

“Someone in Germany may have a very different definition of confidence, so it allows us again to close that gap of mistranslation or misunderstanding between people who may come from completely different cultural backgrounds, but still need to get their confident song into their Instagram Reel for 2024.”

Want to know what tags we are talking about? Check out our full tagging taxonomy here.

Exploitation of hidden and unknown parts of the catalog

“Cyanite has maybe most significantly improved our work, with its Similarity Search that allows us to enhance our searches objectively, melting away biases and subjective blind spots that humans naturally have.”

When getting a brief like ‘sunny and happy, with an acoustic guitar, piano, et cetera, et cetera’ we are talking about tens of thousands of possibilities here. Plus sometimes you only have half an hour to answer that brief.”

“While our catalog and search team are very well versed in our catalog, they naturally have their own internal biases and favorites—after all, that’s human. Cyanite adds some objectivity to that.” 

As Jakob, one of our founders would say: “The AI doesn’t care if you’re Ed Sheeran or a bedroom producer. If your track fits the reference, it will surface it.”

Using Spotify & YouTube references to answer briefs

“With other types of briefs such as Hey, this is what the head of music at McDonald’s loves but we can’t afford this song.’, using external reference tracks from Spotify or Youtube to find similar-sounding tracks in our catalog made things very easy for us.”

Increasing fair treatment of artists

“Using Cyanite we provided a more fair game for our artists to play. At the end of the day, that means more money in their pockets.”

“The moment we press ‘show similar songs’, the AI gives chances to people who may not have had the benefit of having that one crucial tag that would have surfaced their song to the top of our browse experience.”

“Maybe we’ve missed that when we tagged it back in 2016. Cyanite doesn’t care about that. Cyanite just says ‘This is a pretty good track based on what you’ve liked so far.’”

This way all artists benefit from AI Music Discovery.

Faster onboarding of new team members.

“What has been integral in onboarding new staff members, is allowing them to have a more organic discovery experience, because of the Similarity Search. Whether it was uploaded yesterday or uploaded 10 years ago, they’re gonna find it more easily.”

How Long did the Integration Take?

“Markus and Joshua were fantastic partners. Overall it took a few months to launch the ‘show similar songs’ button. But to be fair…could it have taken a shorter amount of time? Absolutely.”

“We did it in a very careful and methodical way. We put Cyanite under quite a serious magnifying glass, before committing and giving it out to our users.”

Check out the API docs to learn more about the process of integrating Cyanite into your system. 

  y -y – Where Is Marmoset Heading With All This?

“We are in a transitional period and we’re going to be considering full auto-tagging. There also always will be a human verification step, so it will always remain a human process. Compared to how we do things now, the idea is that Cyanite fits in a little earlier in the process as opposed to later.”

“We will start trying to find creative ways to utilize what is ultimately a very robust, very flexible amount of metadata not just to our benefit, but of course, to our end users’ benefit so that they can find the music they want faster.”

Marmoset AI Music Discovery – Long Story Short

Marmosets’ seamless integration of Cyanite into their workflow demonstrates the transformative impact of technology on the music industry – both facing the user front-end as well as internally improving workflows.
Combining trust in human processes and cutting-edge AI, Marmoset continues to define the future of music and AI music discovery.

Interested in trying out Cyanite for your company? Get in touch with us, or click the sign-up button below.

Many thanks to Alex Paguirigan for providing these amazing insights about how Marmoset uses Cyanite!

Video Interview: How DJs, Artists, and Labels Can Use Cyanite’s AI

Video Interview: How DJs, Artists, and Labels Can Use Cyanite’s AI

Managing Music Catalogs with Cyanite

Following up on our presentation at Music Tech Germany, we recently did an Interview with Berlin House Music, discussing what tools we offer the music community here at Cyanite through our Web App

We summarized the most important topics to provide you with a short overview of what we talked about. Scroll down to check out the full 13-minute interview on YouTube.

Features for DJs, Artists, Labels:

    • Cyanite aims to empower DJs by assisting in set-building and suggesting tracks based on energy levels and various tags.
    • DJ features include a similarity search where users can find tracks with a similar vibe.
    • Using the Camelot wheel for harmonic mixing

Promotion Tools:

  • Labels and agencies use Cyanite for categorizing new music, finding suitable songs, and making product decisions.
  • Cyanite helps in selecting preview sections for music distribution to platforms like TikTok.
  • Users have successfully used Cyanite’s Augmented Keywords to instruct ChatGPT-3 in generating detailed song descriptions.

To find out more about this read our how-to blog article about it here.

Playlist Matching Feature (BETA):

    • Cyanite has just released a BETA feature to recommend playlists on Spotify that match a user’s uploaded song.
    • Future plans include recommending DJ crates and suggesting where in a playlist a song should be placed

 

Curious? Click here or on the video embedding above to watch the full interview on Berlin House Music’s Channel. 

In case you don’t have a Cyanite account yet, click the button below to Sign Up for free!

The Future Of Catalog Management: A Rep(e)rtoir Revolution

The Future Of Catalog Management: A Rep(e)rtoir Revolution

Managing Music Catalogs with Cyanite

In a recent panel discussion hosted by Digital Music News and Reprtoir, industry experts, including Cyanite’s co-founder & CEO Markus Schwarzer, discussed the challenges that music professionals encounter in effectively managing music catalogs and assets.

We summed up the most important points from the over 1-hour long panel talk for you below.

The Issue with Subjective Metadata 

Juvenal Juarez from Gerencia 360 mentioned the difficulty music companies encounter in comprehensively knowing their entire catalog. This challenge is further complicated by the subjective nature of metadata tagging in music, where subjective interpretation often prevails. To tackle this, Danny Dunlap from Beacon Street Studios pointed out the advantage of leveraging AI-powered tools like Cyanite and Reprtoir to introduce a level of standardization, removing subjectivity from metadata tagging.

Shifting Power in the Industry

The incorporation of Cyanite in catalog management, as expressed by Markus from Cyanite, is transforming how professionals interact with their catalogs. The goal is to make catalog value accessible to all, not just large companies with massive resources. Lara Angelil from Reprtoir then emphasized that anyone can now harness their catalog’s potential without years of study.

Additionally, with our Free Text Search, we allow users to articulate their preferences in natural language and receive personalized recommendations. This aligns with the current demands of the industry, particularly in the realm of sync, where Cyanite helps to find the perfect track for any occasion.

A peek into the Future

Later in the panel, there was a focus on AI’s role in predicting trends and its potential impact on the discoverability of new artists. As the industry grapples with an influx of data and metadata, concerns about managing this information effectively are growing with it. Lara Angelil addressed these concerns, pointing out that scalability and the right tools, such as Reprtoir, which uses Cyanite, enable professionals to navigate the increasing volume of information and maintain transparency.

 

For a more in-depth exploration, feel free to check out the panel discussion replay here.
AI-Powered Music Marketing feat. Chromatic Talents

AI-Powered Music Marketing feat. Chromatic Talents

Chromatic Talents acts like a music brand consultancy providing a comprehensive range of services in artist management, development, digital branding, and business development. Find out how they use AI-Powered Music Marketing powered by Cyanite.

The goal of the Germany-based consultancy is to empower artists and brands to achieve their vision, serving a diverse clientele in the music industry, including newcomers, established artists, labels, and more. 

A recent success story was a collaboration with UK label C2 to market Matt Sassari’s “Give It To Me”. The song has been streamed over 300 million times.  You can find out more about Chromatic Talents here: https://chromatictalents.com/ 

Chromatic Talents Team

Chromatic Talents’ Team

We sat together with Julia and Simon from Chromatic Talents who have been using Cyanite since the beginning of 2023 and wanted to find out more about how exactly they use Cyanite to support their daily work with AI-Powered Music Marketing.

The key areas are:

  • Automatic categorization of demos
  • Pre-selecting songs for songwriter and sync-briefs
  • Using Cyanite for TikTok pitches
  • Data-driven decision-making in product management

Read the full interview below.

Cyanite: What made you initially reach out to us and how do you use Cyanite today?

Julia: We realized the importance of streamlining our demo categorization in our publishing service, particularly for international song pitches. The extensive music catalog we had, posed a challenge in terms of manual tagging and search efforts. We came across Cyanite’s analysis and automated tagging solution after the partnership announcement with BMG and it proved to be a game-changer in efficiently pinpointing the right songs.

Simon: In addition to improving our publishing service, we use Cyanite’s AI for our product management, specifically for Spotify pitches.  We conduct in-depth song analysis and employ Cyanite’s Track-mood analysis to curate mood-based playlists. This thorough methodology has resulted in increased playlist placements, benefiting both our publishing and product management services.

Playlist Mood Analysis Cyanite

An example of mood track analyses from the “4am” playlist on Spotify.

Similarity Search: Keeping up with pitching and sync

Julia: For specialized briefs like Tiesto’s, it’s essential to precisely align with the artist’s unique style for an impactful collaboration. Timely responses to briefs increase the chances of songs being heard. Speed and precision in pitching are important, especially when the brief includes specific requirements, like “uplifting,” “euphoric melodies,” or “female.”  We often use Cyanite’s Similarity-Search function for a quick pre-selection of songs for answering a brief. This method not only enhances our time management but also ensures cost-effectiveness for our clients.

A similarity search example with a Spotify reference showing similar library results.

Finding TikTok snippets with Cyanite

Simon: One area where Cyanite has made our lives easier is product management, especially when creating snippets for TikTok and social media platforms. We frequently discuss this aspect in our distribution talks to request social media-related content, and it has proven highly effective in helping us choose the right snippets.  This approach has enhanced the quality of our materials for distribution and song pitches, resulting in increased success rates.  While the 30-second suggestions are usually accepted as is, it ultimately depends on the artist, management, label, or distributor if they want to propose different parts for their campaigns or content ideas.

A screenshot highlighting the 30 seconds Most Representative Segment

Augmented Keywords – A Shortcut To Writing Song Bios

Julia: We actually also use the augmented keywords in combination with other AIs to help us write pitches. In this use case, one AI system generates keywords to describe songs, while another AI takes these keywords and assists in crafting engaging artist bios. This collaborative process simplifies product management and is particularly beneficial for the team. It’s a smart approach that streamlines tasks and enhances the quality of their work in the music industry. Tip: For a more detailed guide on this you can also check out How to Write a Song Bio for DSPs with Cyanite+ChatGPT

Cyanite: How long did it take to properly start working with Cyanite? 

Julia: It was really easy, and we adopted Cyanite early in our workflow. Simon’s choice to integrate Cyanite into our pitching process was a significant step.  We set up a straightforward process that starts with uploading songs and automatically tagging them before moving the data over to Songspace. Right now, uploading the songs takes up most of our time. Once we get them cataloged, we put together pitching playlists and send them out to our partners.

Songspace interface including Cyanite tags.

Case Study Wrap-Up

Chromatic Talents is at the forefront of reshaping the music industry through innovation and technology.  In collaboration with us, they have achieved remarkable results.

AI-powered Music Marketing and Pitching: Utilizing Cyanite’s Track-mood analysis for Spotify playlist pitching and placements, along with using the “most representative segment” for TikTok clips. 

Precision in Pitching and Sync-Briefs: Cyanite’s Similarity Search ensures swift pre-filtering of Chromatic Talents’ catalog and enables faster responses to artists & A&R briefs, saving time and costs for clients.

Streamlined Pitching with Augmented Keywords: Augmented keywords, in collaboration with other AI systems, accelerate the writing of song bios, simplifying product management.

Chromatic Talents’ seamless integration of Cyanite into their workflow demonstrates the transformative impact of technology on the music industry. By blending creative expertise with cutting-edge AI, they continue to define the future of music.

 

Interested in trying out Cyanite for your company? Get in touch with us here, or click the sign-up button below.

A Look Behind the Curtain: Podcast Interview with Roman Gebhardt

A Look Behind the Curtain: Podcast Interview with Roman Gebhardt

A.I. Podcast featuring CAIO Roman Gebhardt

Our Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, Roman Gebhardt, was a guest in this week’s podcast episode of The Illiac Suite – Music and Artificial Intelligence by Dennis Kastrup. The podcast features an A.I.-generated version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not sung by Freddie Mercury, but by Whitney Houston. This shows how far A.I.-generated music has already come. It has become fairly easy to train an A.I. model on a single vocalist, but what about entire songs? How do we make A.I. understand music to a degree where it would feel like you’re asking a professional musician to find you the perfect song for any scenario, and it never misses?

 

Metadata

At the core of A.I.’s grasp of music is metadata—categories like moods, genres, instruments, and styles help an A.I. understand songs like we do. We at Cyanite automatically tag these features using our A.I. once our customers, such as Slip.stream or BMG, upload songs into our system. The text-to-music search is not translated into tags but is directly mapped from text to music. So, unlike tag-based music search, Cyanite offers Free Text Search. How do we do that? We use sets of music and text descriptions to let our systems understand everything that comes to your mind, as long as you are able to put it into words.

 

We are not searching for certain keywords that appear in a search. We directly map text to music. We make the system understand which text description fits a song. This is what we call Free Text Search.

Roman Gebhardt, CAIO at Cyanite

The Problem

Music is art. You can’t unanimously define art, or else it probably wouldn’t be art in the first place. That’s the beauty of it all: subjectivity. While we love that about music, it’s one of the biggest challenges for our A.I. model. Just as Dennis Kastrup beautifully said in the podcast: while some people listen to sad music and find solace, others might get even sadder. Images, for example, are much easier to analyze than music. Imagine a picture with a yellow wall and a TV standing in front of it. While all people see color slightly differently, no one would identify the TV as a record player. Now think of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. Good luck unanimously agreeing on the genre or even the mood of this song.

Never-Ending Solutions

The key to successfully training a model like ours is to provide meaningful audio descriptions with the songs that we feed into our system. From there, we do a lot of reverse engineering. We analyze our models and get feedback from our customers to see where our models lack understanding. Then, we search for meaningful metadata to make up for that. So, it’s a never-ending cycle in which we build and refine, just to build again and refine from there. On and on and on.

Unleashing What We’ve Built

At the end of all of this, we work together with numerous companies that integrate our search technology into their systems and websites. A good example showcased in the podcast is Slip.stream. With Slip.stream, you can browse a massive royalty-free catalog, and with the power of Cyanite, you can find the perfect song for any situation using the Free Text Search. For example, “music to enjoy the moment.” Listen to what Cyanite came up with here. We at Cyanite are building the tools necessary for you to shape tomorrow’s music industry. Feel free to check out the Podcast above.

Your Cyanite Team.

 

10 000 Users of Our Free Web App – Announcement

10 000 Users of Our Free Web App – Announcement

Our free web app has reached 10 000 users! 🎉 We spent $0 on ads and grew organically with the help of an amazing community and their ideas. To celebrate this milestone, we are sharing insights from the recent user survey. These survey results provide novel insights into how AI is being used by music professionals worldwide.

Here are our key finds:

  1. Getting a second opinion on music is the most popular use case of our AI web app
  2. Our biggest audiences are musicians and producers, followed by DJs and publishers
  3. Genre, Key, and Moods are our most popular tags.

See below for full survey results and responses.

We’re super proud and thankful to have achieved this milestone. Our web app developed from a showcase product to a tool that helps artists in everyday understanding and pitching of their music with the help of AI. Seeing this user base grow, connect and contribute to product development has been the most rewarding experience.

We’re looking forward to the next milestone and developing new algorithms every day!

I want to try Cyanite’s free web app as well – how can I get started?

If you want to get the first grip on Cyanite’s technology, you can register for our free web app to analyze music and try similarity searches without any coding needed.

Please contact us with any questions about our Cyanite AI via sales@cyanite.ai. You can also directly book a web session with Jay here.