Innovative start-up and music company announce groundbreaking deal to use cutting-edge technology, improving music search and discovery.

Audio Network Limited, one of the world’s largest independent creators and publishers of original high-quality music for use in film, television, advertising and digital media, continues its focus on technology by partnering with Musiio to explore the power of AI to improve customer service and delivery.

This industry first will equip the global music company with an added interface to their existing search platform, to make their catalogue of over 170,000 tracks even more discoverable, whilst keeping the human touch that Audio Network has always been known for.

Singapore-based Musiio provides a new way of “listening” to music at scale, easily searching up to one million tracks in under two seconds and supercharging a team of music researchers to increase their efficiency in responding to music briefs.

“AI has been on the fringes of the music industry for the last few years, with talk of labels signing algorithms. But recently, more commercial and practical uses of this powerful computing technology have begun to surface,” explains Musiio CEO and co-founder Hazel Savage. “This deal demonstrates how AI and technology companies like ours can work with a company like Audio Network, to protect everything that is great about the music industry, the personal touch, the knowledge of experts and also to create tools that let the team step up to the challenge of a huge and fast-growing industry.” 

Being able to search an entire catalogue of music in seconds, lets a company like Audio Network keep up with demand. In addition, searching deeper within a catalogue helps maximise track usage, to bring an added layer of opportunity to the artists and composers creating the recordings. 

“Audio Network approaches Artificial Intelligence carefully with regard to music. We view machine learning and AI techniques as instruments for extending human creativity, not something that replaces it.” said Matthew Hawn, Chief Product Officer at Audio Network. “Many AI tools for music are clever technology hacks in search of an actual problem to solve, but our partnership with Musiio for extending music search and recommendations is about solving real problems for our customers. Blending Musiio's technology with our expert human curation will mean our artists and composers' music is more accessible to more customers globally.”

About Musiio:
Musiio is an Artificial Intelligence company working at the cutting edge of machine learning technology. They focus on B2B audio reference search, automated tagging and playlisting tools for the Music Industry. Based in Singapore and founded by British Hazel Savage and Swedish CTO Aron Pettersson, the company was founded in June 2018. For more information visit musiio.com. 

About Audio Network:
Audio Network is a tech-enabled global music company and one of the largest independent creators of original, high-quality music for use in video. The company’s music is uniquely featured in both high-end TV and advertising productions, through to user-generated content on digital and social platforms. Collaborating with over 1,000 composers, artists and producers, Audio Network has built a world-class catalogue of more than 170,000 tracks of original music spanning a broad range of genres and styles and benefits from owning 100% of the rights to license this music globally.
 
Founded in 2001 by music entrepreneurs Andrew Sunnucks and Robert Hurst and acquired by Entertainment One (eOne) in 2019, Audio Network has that disruptive, independent spirit throughout. By joining forces with a global entertainment group like eOne, they continue a commitment to being both artist-first and platform-agnostic, while unlocking the power of creativity.

Musiio insists that if the human ear can hear it, AI can learn it. And they have the link to prove it.

The Singapore-based startup wants everyone to experience how AI curation works. It’s providing a window into this often misunderstood world with its new DIY AI. Drop your favorite YouTube video link here, and watch Musiio generate at least eight custom tags, including genre, BPM, key, and mood, in approximately 10 seconds.

Musiio has created an AI model that uses audio fingerprinting to surface, tag, sort, and playlist tracks swiftly, accurately, and on a massive scale. It has been trained on music from around the world and can recognize a great swath of the planet’s music, especially East Asian and Pacific styles and languages. For music that falls within its largest training sets, like Western pop, its accuracy easily hits 99%. 

The DIY AI demo lets anyone play around with technology that promises to radically improve search, discovery, and curation, for everything from sync to ambient musical applications. “Smartphones and home studios have brought about the democratization of audio production, but one of the challenges for the music industry now is to figure out how to handle this volume,” explains Musiio co-founder and music tech veteran Hazel Savage, whose work has spanned the music business, from punk guitarist to record store clerk to an executive at Shazam. “It takes one person 83 days non-stop to listen to 40,000 new songs. Our AI can perform the task in under 4 hours. As music is created and released at a rate that is one million times greater than it was ten years ago, AI can solve problems that humans simply can’t.” 

Alums of talent investors Entrepreneur First’s incubator and Midemlab finalists, Musiio first built a powerful tool for search, ideal for finding the right track in huge catalogs. Its fingerprinting technology--turning the audio file into mathematical visuals--allows someone to drop a file in and find 10-20 other files with similar sonic features, no tags or other metadata required. “We didn’t build it around assumptions of ‘this is what music is,’” explains Savage. “You don’t need data; you just need to train the model to match patterns.”

As Musiio evolved, the team discovered that tags were in high demand. They taught their models to compare audio features, find similarities, and connect them with appropriate, completely customizable tags. The platform can also generate playlists based on these features. 

Musiio aims to turn the firehose of music into manageable streams, teaching AI to listen for us and help us. “We’re focussed on the curation of music using AI, not on generation or other aspects of the creation and listening process,” reflects Savage. “It’s important because in our world, AI for music is not scary: it contains no sentience; it definitely isn’t a robot trying to steal your job, quite the opposite in fact. We aim to help artists be found and labels and streaming services to deliver a better, more personalized product.” It’s a service music fans are coming to expect and music-based businesses desperately need, one that Musiio makes possible.