David Courtier-Dutton, CEO, said: “Music search is a notoriously tough nut to crack with existing catalogue navigation typically resembling an iTunes experience - largely based around keywords and metadata. SoundOut Search is closer to a Google experience and represents a major leap forward in semantic search for music.”
Daniel Spencer, SoundOut Search SVP, commented: “Music is emotive, personal and subjective and, until now, it has been difficult to label tracks in a way that enables intuitive music search. Because SoundOut Search understands user driven description in context as well as emotional nuances, it delivers a better experience for the user and ultimately enhanced opportunities for a far wider range of artists.”
As sales revenues continue to shrink across the recorded music industry there is an increasing focus on better monetising core catalogue assets. Some catalogue owners are unfamiliar with up to 85% of the copyrights they own. In larger catalogues this can stretch to hundreds of thousands or even millions of tracks, meaning lucrative commercial opportunities are being missed on a regular basis. SoundOut Search is currently trialling with a number of major catalogue owners in the UK and USA.
Key features of SoundOut Search include:
• The ability to search using a complete music brief of any length or a free text description of the music required;
• a ‘more’ button beside each track which refines the search by using the selected track as a reference track to perform a new search across the catalogue – this delivers a ‘Pandora’ like result;
• the option to find an artist that sounds like a well known artist by simply entering the artist name into the search field;
• the ability to upload any track as a reference track to get the closest matches; and
• searching by artist name, track title or lyric.
A key benefit is that this fuzzy matching semantic technology avoids the intrinsic subjectivity of ‘tagging’, so rather than requiring exact matches, it instead returns the closest matches available within the catalogue.
SoundOut has secured exclusive global rights for the music industry to the underlying technology that powers SoundOut Search which has been developed by CFL Software (www.cflsoftware.com) over the past 15 years and is already used in multiple commercial applications in other markets around the world.
