[Justin Stanizzi]

Hey Ty,

You’re music sounds great! We currently host music via proxy. We have partnerships with Pond5, Audio Jungle, and Jamendo. We’ll be adding Shutterstock and Alibi music shortly.

Another options is our longer term partnership with SourceAudio. We’ll be working with the artists that utilize their platform to allow us to access their music through a newly developed API.

If none of those options interest you, I would love to get in contact with you more directly to talk about what kind of methods you do use, and how you would like people reaching out to you (as you normally sell licenses to your music).

[Justin Stanizzi]

Thanks for sharing that! And Pandora just sold for 3.5 billion with ~80 million subscribers, and 6 million paying subscribers!

Pandora’s finger print fell to a lot of the same problems other matching systems do; it’s subjective, and ultimately has to do broad assumptions to avoid false positives. Pandora was great for its time.

Bard, as a product, is primarily an aggregator to get a grip on the ballooning production music industry. Anyone who has had to deal with production knows there are tons of sources for music. We’re trying to do what Kayak did for travel, and create a platform that makes it easier to shop across multiple catalogs. We have about 1.4 million songs that we can query currently.

We have a proprietary data system that we call koreography to fingerprint music. We actually identify things like beat, song structure, instrumentation, and map it in music time. Think of it like MIDI markup, but it can contain more descriptive information.

Our hope is to algorithmically derive the information using the latest MIR (music information retrieval), map it against the timing of the music, and use machine learning to make observation about similarities between music.

[Justin Stanizzi]

@Richard, thanks for the follow up. This is indeed for US rights management, although a lot of the production libraries we work with can manage across boarders due to the way they manage sync licenses. For label music, this is 100% true. The label doesn’t even consistently represent an artist across boarders, so getting the rights to a song that will play in multiple regions can be a huge pain.

As you mentioned, Harry Fox agency is a good resource for finding non-recording rights. Tivo’s Rovi has a lot of the other rights information as well.

Thanks again for the follow up!