AIMS API, an AI-powered music similarity search tool designed specifically for production music companies, is announcing its recent partnership with Warner Chappell Production Music Germany. The company is using AIMS to boost efficiency and support its experienced creative team by speeding up and simplifying search, using reference tracks to find tracks that fit the brief. 

“I was skeptical at first,” admits Sascha Peters, Director of Warner Chappell Production Music Germany. “But I was shocked at the accuracy. It’s like having a colleague who knows the catalog fantastically well and suggests tracks from deep catalog and unexpected composers.”

“We built and trained AIMS API to help production music professionals find excellent results that worked well in the music for picture context,” Martin Nedvěd, co-founder and CEO of AIMS API noted. “As production music veterans ourselves, we wanted to make an AI that would help people be more creative and efficient.”

AIMS API uses audio files, not tags or other metadata, to find similar tracks for TV, film, broadcast and other video uses. For libraries with huge and diverse catalogs, this can lead to discoveries of unique or older works, works whose metadata may be minimal or misleading. It expands the options for clients and frees up professionals to do more of the creative work they love. It can also provide an easy way for clients to get ideas, even if they are looking for the perfect music outside of office hours or on an extremely tight deadline.

Knowing your catalog is an act of devotion for production music professionals, and deepening that knowledge has gotten far easier thanks to AIMS. “There is a lot of human knowledge still required, but AIMS delivers a handful of good suggestions for what the customer is looking for,” says Peters. “Since we have implemented AIMS into one of our search sites, we can speed up searches for customers dramatically. Instead of an hour in the past, I can respond within 10 minutes. For me, it’s a game changer.”

About AIMS API

AIMS is an API service that uses powerful AI to search for and recommend music within your catalog based on reference audio tracks. Designed and trained by music supervisors, composers, machine learning specialists, and production music experts, AIMS understands how music professionals search, be it for film, TV, games, or other sync uses. Its tools can be integrated seamlessly into websites and catalog management workflows. AIMS finds the right tracks, even ones you never suspected you had, offering new, better ways to use your catalog. 

AIMS’ unique “similarity search” audio technology to be integrated on UPPM websites globally
 
SANTA MONICA/ PRAGUE – May 14, 2020 -- European AI-powered music recommendation and audio search company AIMS API (AIMS) is announcing an alliance with Universal Publishing Production Music (UPPM), the world’s leading production music company and a division of the Universal Music Group. The deal will see the implementation of AIMS similarity search technology on all UPPM websites globally, enabling the music company and its clients to search for songs by audio similarity and common traits across its extensive catalog.
 
The technology will be implemented for all UPPM companies including Universal Production Music worldwide, as well as other UPPM brands Firstcom Music and Elias Music in the US, and Kapagama in France. The AIMS technology facilitates similarity search across UPPM’s owned and administered catalogs, expediting and expanding quality search results and significantly increasing discoverability for music compared to traditional search methods.
 
“AIMS lets you search for tracks with similar musical traits based on a reference track,” explains AIMS CEO and Co-Founder Martin Nedvěd. “This can surface the hidden gems in large catalogs that fit the brief, and opens up new, creative ideas for production music teams.”
 
AIMS has created this proprietary technology to serve the music for picture and sync world, offering results designed to assist sync professionals in finding the right music for their projects in the shortest amount of time. AIMS ingests a client’s catalog and, through its unique technology, provides users with a seamless, accurate way to discover new music that shares the right feel or emotion with reference tracks. 

“We tested other tools on the market that search for music similarity and the AIMS technology consistently returned superior results,” said Patrick Appelgren, VP of Continental Europe for UPPM. “We are extremely pleased to be working with Martin and AIMS in bringing this great technology to our global customers.”
 
About AIMS API

AIMS is an API service that uses powerful AI to search for and recommend music within your catalog based on reference audio tracks. Designed and trained by music supervisors, composers, machine learning specialists, and production music experts, AIMS understands how music professionals search, be it for film, TV, games, or other sync uses. Its tools can be integrated seamlessly into websites and catalog management workflows. AIMS finds the right tracks, even ones you never suspected you had, offering new, better ways to use your catalog. 

About Universal Publishing Production Music

Universal Publishing Production Music (UPPM) is home to the world’s leading production music brands including Universal Production Music (formerly Killer Tracks), FirstCom Music, Elias Music and Kapagama. The organization’s premier music catalogues are crafted specifically for media use. Covering all genres, moods, emotions and project types, UPPM’s ever-expanding repertoire is created by a roster of top artists and composers from around the globe. UPPM produces imaginative music and builds creative partnerships to form a suite of labels that add depth and individuality to its catalogue - each with its own unique style and heritage. Dedicated to helping clients create emotional and memorable audiovisual experiences, UPPM also offers full music supervision services including: music searches, bespoke music edits, re-versioning and commissioned music around the world.

Somewhere among those 100,000 tracks in your production music catalog is the right one for that TV, film, video, or game. Trouble is, you or your client have to find it. “It’s common for people to be surprised at what they have in their catalog,” says longtime production music professional Martin Nedvěd. “People can know a few thousand tracks at most, but never the entire catalog.”

The composers and production music experts at AIMS API set out to find tracks efficiently. They harnessed the power of machine learning to find the right music fast, using a reference track as a guide. And they did it from a perspective grounded in how the production music economy works.

“Production music has increased in quality in recent years to match and often surpass commercially released tracks,” explains Nedvěd. “Now, the biggest problem for music-for-picture professionals is how to find the right track in an endless supply of music when time is always of the essence. We think we have a solution.”

AIMS API was built to eliminate these challenges. It recommends and discovers great music options for these professionals in ways that surpass manual search by tags. It can detect similarity quickly at a massive scale and captures the high level of nuance required to serve music supervisors and other sync teams.

Its algorithms were trained specifically for production music, focusing the company’s efforts on surfacing results that fit briefs. “While it may seem that domain knowledge is no longer important for successfully training a machine learning model, we strongly believe the opposite is true,” reflects Viktor Parma, AIMS co-founder and head of research. “Being a music producer as well as a machine learning engineer, I find that understanding what is going on in the sound recording is incredibly important for properly setting up training experiments. Creating a state-of-the-art model that truly serves users’ needs requires patience and true dedication.”

Nedvěd knows these needs firsthand, as he spent fifteen years running Studio Fontana, a large production music sub-publisher serving clients around Central Europe and managing sub-publishing deals with partners around the world. With AIMS business development lead Einar Helde, he founded an agency to collect neighboring rights royalties for production music performers and libraries in Europe. He’s also been running a production music catalog for nearly a decade. Nedvěd knows the challenges rights holders and music teams face, how the pace of production has skyrocketed while budgets shrink. Music supervisors and library owners need to do a lot more with less, and this “more” often involves digging up the right music fast from catalogs with millions of tracks.

The AIMS team saw a great opportunity lurking in the problem, one that machine learning could unlock. Yet it had to yield results that would serve the production music community’s existing needs. To do this, AIMS API doesn't simply suggest something similar based on simple audio characteristics like BPM. It hones in on the mood, that certain feel that makes a track work in a particular moment or scene.

“As we were evaluating the results, we were asking if a client sent us this as a reference track, would we send this result back in a playlist?” says Nedvěd. “It doesn’t have to be similar in the typical meaning of sounding alike. The right track can be a different genre or tempo, but it has to have the feeling, the use, the vibe.”

This foundation in the music for picture and sync ecosystem sets AIMS apart from other music tech companies attempting to build tools for production teams that identify, classify, or search for music using AI. “We initially built AIMS for ourselves, and we’ve been able to expand our customer base because our results work so well for people in the industry,” says Nedvěd. “We’re not looking just at surface similarities; we’re looking for what makes music work for the industries we serve.”

About AIMS API

AIMS is an API service that uses powerful AI to search for and recommend music within your catalog based on reference audio tracks. Designed and trained by music supervisors, composers, machine learning specialists, and production music experts, AIMS understands how music professionals search, be it for film, TV, games, or other sync uses. Its tools can be integrated seamlessly into websites and catalog management workflows. AIMS finds the right tracks, even ones you never suspected you had, offering new, better ways to use your catalog.