Echoes from Music Biz 2024

The must-attend music industry event of the year coincided with the surge in consumer generative music AI. As text-to-song consumer solutions gain popularity and quality, hundreds of thousands of fully generated tracks have flooded streaming platforms. Consequently, the focus has shifted to quality across the supply chain and catalog protection. Major players like Universal Music Group are seeking artist-centric solutions to the AI threat, while Deezer removed 25 million tracks last year, many of which were presumably AI-generated. The stakes have risen even higher with the emergence of new generative AI platforms, Suno and Udio, which are suspected of training their models on copyrighted content without proper licensing. This has put rights holders at the forefront of the battle. Sony Music Group, for instance, felt compelled to send letters to over 700 AI companies, including a 'declaration of AI training opt-out' for its recordings and publishing catalogs.

We are transparency and quality enablers

With our Audio-as-a-Service platform, we enable creative industries to harness the power of audio analyzing, editing, and processing AI to ensure transparency and quality for their customers. We set to Music Biz with tools designed to streamline and enhance the quality assurance workflow, allowing music stakeholders to achieve the promises they make on quality, for the artists and fans alike. We were thrilled to demonstrate at our booth the accuracy of the first independent AI music detector publicly available on the market. It made a strong impression on most of the execs visiting our booth and convinced them to the extent that discussions quickly turned to technical and practical questions around implementation. We will be following up in the next few weeks with all the engaged contacts to help them integrate our technology into their supply chain to launch AI music detection at scale as soon as possible.

Transparency to your customers is not all about AI-made tracks. When it comes to devising the best strategy to increase streaming remuneration, hi-res audio platforms (Qobuz and Tidal, to name them) and spatial audio formats (with Apple Music's higher royalty payouts) constitute relevant bets. The problem is, the greediness leads many independent artists to fool the hi-res audio purveyors, streaming platforms, and in the end their fans alike. To the first, by providing CD-quality or worse MP3 files encoded in FLAC; to the second, by submitting basic stereo upmixes of their tracks as true spatial audio. As long as the DIY distributors, through which the astonishing majority of these tracks originate, do not have the technical ability to automatically analyze and detect such flaws in the digital signal, so should the streaming platforms offering hi-res and spatial audio. To them, we’re proposing the dedicated tools Quality Check and Spatial Control, two analysis algorithms designed to elevate their quality assurance workflow, with automated results. And hopefully, we will propel music streaming into the true quality era, as we initiated great discussions with some DIY distributors keen on tackling these faults before submitting tracks to streaming operators. The music industry as a whole shares the same interest here.

Music libraries and catalog are full of quality

While the music streaming industry supply chain must equip with the right tools to meet their transparency standards statement, it should not forget to leverage the yet large library and stock music catalog it’s sitting on. It can rely on the highest quality of existing catalogs, prior to the mass market generative AI phenomenom. New usages are emerging, driving promising sync opportunities, along with the traditionnal TV shows, films, and commercials licences. Following the video game massive adoption and the virtual reality development, the demand for musical tracks to support these interactive experiences are going high. Hence the need for music libraries and production music owners to tag their complete collection with metadata, allowing their catalog to be discoverable and searchable. That’s when our Music Tagger engine comes in! It instantly extracts the most comprehensive technical metadata profile (genre, mood, instrumentation, key, chords, BPM) from any musical track, or will provide the only metadata your base was missing to complete it, according to the command you make. Trusted by none other than Universal and Believe, we will soon unveil an improved version, capable of giving the most granular and extended list of genres and moods. Stay tuned!

👉 Should you face the same challenges as discussed in this Music Biz recap, we would be delighted to empower your business with our innovative tools. Sign up on our Audio-as-a-Service platform, give a try at our analyzing, editing and processing AI modules, and let’s talk!