With Abbey Road Red now entering its fifth successful year in 2020, the next two start-ups joining the six-month incubator programme are MyPart, from Tel Aviv, and Audoo from London. Both companies are exploring technologies that will help songwriters get discovered sooner and artists get paid faster and paid more.

Israeli start-up MyPart is an AI-powered search and classification platform pioneering a new approach in the extraction of song qualities, using advanced natural language processing and music signal processing approaches combined with machine learning, which will hopefully vastly improve sync searches, music recommendations and the role of A&R.

UK start-up Audoo is creating a smart listening device for commercial venues that will track music played in public spaces to help artists get paid quicker and more efficiently, with the potential to inform PROs (public rights organisations, such as PRS in the UK), labels, publishers and managers more accurately and in real-time about where and when their artists’ songs are being played.

Both startups share their origins in song-writing and continue Abbey Road Red’s ambition of diversification across the value chain in the music industry.

Introducing the event, Abbey Road Red (ARR) managing director Isabel Garvey and innovations manager Karim Fanous discussed six key trends which they have identified in music technology and how the convergence of these innovations could lead to either a dystopian or a utopian society, in terms of future music creation and consumption. Naturally, ARR would prefer to see a ‘Redtopian’ society, essentially meeting somewhere in the middle, whereby technology is an assistive force for musical good, rather than a more oppressive, homogenising factor, smothering human creativity.

As with rapid technological advances in other areas of modern life – smart cities or autonomous vehicles, for example – there can be a tendency for people to jump to the extremes of future possibilities. Either smart buildings will help us save the planet by cutting carbon emissions or they’ll trap us all inside and roast us alive when their automatic door and heating sensors fail.

Garvey and Fanous posited similarly extreme utopian vs. dystopian futures (purely for entertainment purposes) regarding music technology. Will AI help create truly smart assistants that seamlessly provide the perfect soundtrack to our lives, as we move from place to place? Or will it reduce every moment in our lives to a bland cookie-cutter experience, based on general-population data analysis and pattern detection? Will AI really ever be able to detect our true mood and react sympathetically or appropriately?

Will the algorithms that determine what we listen to, and which suggest new music it thinks we might like, ever become truly useful, personal and broadminded? Or might we find ourselves increasingly shunted down an ever-narrowing road – a musical echo chamber – whereby we’re increasingly comforted and sedated by a diminishing repeated circle of ‘classic favourites’?

AI and creativity in a tech-led world is another intriguing area, with questions around the nature of music production; how songs are created in the modern world; what this might mean in relation to the intangible human elements inherent to artistic expression.

Will AI help expedite the process, as a compliant assistant taking on the routine chores of, for example, logging the session notes and DAW and studio equipment set-up of a recording session, thus freeing the humans to focus on the creative aspects of writing and recording? Or is there a danger that if left unchecked, AI could insidiously take over the recording process, subjugating the artist, resulting in robotised, predictable results that have been deemed ‘acceptable’ on the basis of market research and data analysis?

Garvey and Fanous also looked at near-future predictions for what will be important for music, with the types of technology already having an impact in other facets of modern life equally applicable to the music industry. ‘Wellness’ and sleep tech are a key growth area in consumer technology and this presents new opportunities for recorded music.

Similarly, voice and search, with peoples’ increasing use of smart assistants, is relevant to the music industry, in terms of getting people to explore an artist’s or a label’s wider catalogue, for example, and in terms of how they use their devices to access music.

2020 has also been termed the ‘year of the ear’, with podcasts, voice experience and recorded music all targeting a listening market which will be worth an estimated $23bn by 2023. This trend has an obvious impact in terms of music consumption, with the attendant monetisation, but also in terms of the wearable technology market as consumers increasingly adopt new ways to enjoy audio.

Naturally, it is in the digital sphere that the conundrum of threat/opportunity presents itself most clearly. The complex issue of copyright is a recurring theme. Technology is only now in a position to change things and unravel an ancient web of complex rights, spanning the globe across multiple territories, with blockchain solutions proposed as one possiblity. Existing song data needs to be cleaned up first, so there is a focus on creating much richer metadata, consistent across all territories.

There were also suggestions around adaptive advertising, using the moments inbetween song playback. With YouTube now the world’s biggest music platform, both the opportunity and the audience are there already.

Other major music apps such as Spotify and the rapid rise of TikTok are as likely to ‘break’ a song worldwide as the more traditional radio or TV route. If a song gets picked up by users on social media, it can very quickly go viral and reach millions, as was the case with Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ – a huge viral hit on TikTok. The challenge for the music industry is both how to track that usage, across all media streams, and also how to target new songs at that market in the first place. If your audience is on Twitch, that’s where your music should be.

With video in mind, the issue of synthesis and creating deep fakes of music artists is another consideration. For some, this could be a copyright issue, protecting their human artists from digital clones. For others, it could present an opportunity, creating and promoting digital-native ‘artists’.

Following these discussions, the latest Red start-ups, MyPart and Audoo, gave presentations on their recent work and plans for the future.

MyPart’s co-founders Matan Kollnescher and Ariel Toli Gadilov imagined a platform that would use a new benchmarking system to find hidden song gems based on a set of reference songs. They describe the system as “song mining unleashed”. With around 45,000 new songs released daily but song search still a manual process, finding those hidden gems is an onerous, near-impossible task.

Song metadata has largely focused on tagging and, while effective to a degree, MyPart argue that this text-based description doesn’t capture the “beauty” of a song. MyPart wanted a much deeper comprehension of a song, on an aesthetic level.

Kollnescher’s expertise in data science and passion for songwriting and words (he is a published poet) led him to develop automated feature extraction techniques around lyrics, enabling searches and recommendations to be based on the meaning, literary devices, vocabulary and structure of words in songs, in tandem with the musical aspects such as harmony, melody and rhythm.

Audoo’s founder Ryan Edwards channelled his own frustrations as a songwriter in Wolverhampton indie band, The Lines. One day when walking around Selfridges in London, he heard his band’s Top 10 hit ‘Domino Effect’ playing as background music. His wife asked him if he would get paid for that specific play, to which he could only utter a sceptical “I have no idea”.

He devised a hardware listening device that would identify and report precisely and in real-time when and where songs are being played as background music. That way, songwriters could get paid their performance royalties quickly and accurately. Audoo’s miniature device powers a ‘plug-and-forget’ service for small to medium-sized commercial venues that matches audio fingerprints of the music they play as background music and automatically sends an instant report to collection agencies.

Audoo is also planning a mobile app, CoLAB, for musicians, so they can track plays of their music around the world and gain much richer, detail-specific information about any royalty payments due to them.

As part of its re-optimised six-month programme, ARR will provide each start-up with a completely bespoke incubation, shaped to leverage Red’s expertise, assets and industry network to help solve problems or to reach strategic goals, such as getting to market, exploring platform developments and deployment, business case tweaking, technology advice, business development and interfacing with the music industry.

Fanous said: “We are doing important, exciting work with MyPart and Audoo that that will help songwriters and artists find opportunities and get paid faster and more accurately. We’re operating in the middle of the value chain and that’s new for us.

“The technology these teams are developing is flexible beyond primary use cases, so we will be working hard to think of new products and possibilities with their founders and teams, who, needless to say, we are very big fans of already.”

Garvey added: “Audoo and MyPart complement the evolution of Abbey Road Red, as they are bringing technology innovation to parts of the value chain that have been under-represented to date.”

With Abbey Road Red now entering its fifth successful year in 2020, the next two start-ups joining the six-month incubator programme are MyPart, from Tel Aviv, and Audoo from London. Both companies are exploring technologies that will help songwriters get discovered sooner and artists get paid faster and paid more.

Israeli start-up MyPart is an AI-powered search and classification platform pioneering a new approach in the extraction of song qualities, using advanced natural language processing and music signal processing approaches combined with machine learning, which will hopefully vastly improve sync searches, music recommendations and the role of A&R.

UK start-up Audoo is creating a smart listening device for commercial venues that will track music played in public spaces to help artists get paid quicker and more efficiently, with the potential to inform PROs (public rights organisations, such as PRS in the UK), labels, publishers and managers more accurately and in real-time about where and when their artists’ songs are being played.

Both startups share their origins in song-writing and continue Abbey Road Red’s ambition of diversification across the value chain in the music industry.

Introducing the event, Abbey Road Red (ARR) managing director Isabel Garvey and innovations manager Karim Fanous discussed six key trends which they have identified in music technology and how the convergence of these innovations could lead to either a dystopian or a utopian society, in terms of future music creation and consumption. Naturally, ARR would prefer to see a ‘Redtopian’ society, essentially meeting somewhere in the middle, whereby technology is an assistive force for musical good, rather than a more oppressive, homogenising factor, smothering human creativity.

As with rapid technological advances in other areas of modern life – smart cities or autonomous vehicles, for example – there can be a tendency for people to jump to the extremes of future possibilities. Either smart buildings will help us save the planet by cutting carbon emissions or they’ll trap us all inside and roast us alive when their automatic door and heating sensors fail.

Garvey and Fanous posited similarly extreme utopian vs. dystopian futures (purely for entertainment purposes) regarding music technology. Will AI help create truly smart assistants that seamlessly provide the perfect soundtrack to our lives, as we move from place to place? Or will it reduce every moment in our lives to a bland cookie-cutter experience, based on general-population data analysis and pattern detection? Will AI really ever be able to detect our true mood and react sympathetically or appropriately?

Will the algorithms that determine what we listen to, and which suggest new music it thinks we might like, ever become truly useful, personal and broadminded? Or might we find ourselves increasingly shunted down an ever-narrowing road – a musical echo chamber – whereby we’re increasingly comforted and sedated by a diminishing repeated circle of ‘classic favourites’?

AI and creativity in a tech-led world is another intriguing area, with questions around the nature of music production; how songs are created in the modern world; what this might mean in relation to the intangible human elements inherent to artistic expression.

Will AI help expedite the process, as a compliant assistant taking on the routine chores of, for example, logging the session notes and DAW and studio equipment set-up of a recording session, thus freeing the humans to focus on the creative aspects of writing and recording? Or is there a danger that if left unchecked, AI could insidiously take over the recording process, subjugating the artist, resulting in robotised, predictable results that have been deemed ‘acceptable’ on the basis of market research and data analysis?

Garvey and Fanous also looked at near-future predictions for what will be important for music, with the types of technology already having an impact in other facets of modern life equally applicable to the music industry. ‘Wellness’ and sleep tech are a key growth area in consumer technology and this presents new opportunities for recorded music.

Similarly, voice and search, with peoples’ increasing use of smart assistants, is relevant to the music industry, in terms of getting people to explore an artist’s or a label’s wider catalogue, for example, and in terms of how they use their devices to access music.

2020 has also been termed the ‘year of the ear’, with podcasts, voice experience and recorded music all targeting a listening market which will be worth an estimated $23bn by 2023. This trend has an obvious impact in terms of music consumption, with the attendant monetisation, but also in terms of the wearable technology market as consumers increasingly adopt new ways to enjoy audio.

Naturally, it is in the digital sphere that the conundrum of threat/opportunity presents itself most clearly. The complex issue of copyright is a recurring theme. Technology is only now in a position to change things and unravel an ancient web of complex rights, spanning the globe across multiple territories, with blockchain solutions proposed as one possiblity. Existing song data needs to be cleaned up first, so there is a focus on creating much richer metadata, consistent across all territories.

There were also suggestions around adaptive advertising, using the moments inbetween song playback. With YouTube now the world’s biggest music platform, both the opportunity and the audience are there already.

Other major music apps such as Spotify and the rapid rise of TikTok are as likely to ‘break’ a song worldwide as the more traditional radio or TV route. If a song gets picked up by users on social media, it can very quickly go viral and reach millions, as was the case with Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ – a huge viral hit on TikTok. The challenge for the music industry is both how to track that usage, across all media streams, and also how to target new songs at that market in the first place. If your audience is on Twitch, that’s where your music should be.

With video in mind, the issue of synthesis and creating deep fakes of music artists is another consideration. For some, this could be a copyright issue, protecting their human artists from digital clones. For others, it could present an opportunity, creating and promoting digital-native ‘artists’.

Following these discussions, the latest Red start-ups, MyPart and Audoo, gave presentations on their recent work and plans for the future.

MyPart’s co-founders Matan Kollnescher and Ariel Toli Gadilov imagined a platform that would use a new benchmarking system to find hidden song gems based on a set of reference songs. They describe the system as “song mining unleashed”. With around 45,000 new songs released daily but song search still a manual process, finding those hidden gems is an onerous, near-impossible task.

Song metadata has largely focused on tagging and, while effective to a degree, MyPart argue that this text-based description doesn’t capture the “beauty” of a song. MyPart wanted a much deeper comprehension of a song, on an aesthetic level.

Kollnescher’s expertise in data science and passion for songwriting and words (he is a published poet) led him to develop automated feature extraction techniques around lyrics, enabling searches and recommendations to be based on the meaning, literary devices, vocabulary and structure of words in songs, in tandem with the musical aspects such as harmony, melody and rhythm.

Audoo’s founder Ryan Edwards channelled his own frustrations as a songwriter in Wolverhampton indie band, The Lines. One day when walking around Selfridges in London, he heard his band’s Top 10 hit ‘Domino Effect’ playing as background music. His wife asked him if he would get paid for that specific play, to which he could only utter a sceptical “I have no idea”.

He devised a hardware listening device that would identify and report precisely and in real-time when and where songs are being played as background music. That way, songwriters could get paid their performance royalties quickly and accurately. Audoo’s miniature device powers a ‘plug-and-forget’ service for small to medium-sized commercial venues that matches audio fingerprints of the music they play as background music and automatically sends an instant report to collection agencies.

Audoo is also planning a mobile app, CoLAB, for musicians, so they can track plays of their music around the world and gain much richer, detail-specific information about any royalty payments due to them.

As part of its re-optimised six-month programme, ARR will provide each start-up with a completely bespoke incubation, shaped to leverage Red’s expertise, assets and industry network to help solve problems or to reach strategic goals, such as getting to market, exploring platform developments and deployment, business case tweaking, technology advice, business development and interfacing with the music industry.

Fanous said: “We are doing important, exciting work with MyPart and Audoo that that will help songwriters and artists find opportunities and get paid faster and more accurately. We’re operating in the middle of the value chain and that’s new for us.

“The technology these teams are developing is flexible beyond primary use cases, so we will be working hard to think of new products and possibilities with their founders and teams, who, needless to say, we are very big fans of already.”

Garvey added: “Audoo and MyPart complement the evolution of Abbey Road Red, as they are bringing technology innovation to parts of the value chain that have been under-represented to date.”