Music giant BMG has signed a global deal with Cyanite, a tech company with AI-powered music tagging and search solutions, to unlock new value from its three-million-track catalogue, Synch.
Bertelsmann-owned BMG, the world’s fourth largest music company after the three ‘majors’ (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group), aims to make its entire repertoire more searchable and accessible for Synch – i.e. placing music in movies and advertising – with the help of Cyanite’s AI.
The tech company’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.
BMG VP Group Technology Gaurav Mittal said: “BMG is committed to using AI technologies to optimise our revenues so we can speed the flow of royalties to artists and songwriters.”
“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,” added BMG SVP Global Synch Licensing Allegra Willis Knerr.
“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.”
A vision of universal music intelligence
As BMG’s catalogue grows organically and through acquisitions since its formation in 2008, Cyanite’s tech will allow them 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 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.
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.
BMG’s goal is to sustain the vision of universal music intelligence to revolutionise how music is selected in entertainment and advertising, according to the company.
BMG is the second division of Bertelsmann to sign a deal with Cyanite, following RTL Group, the Luxembourg-based international media conglomerate.
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