When I first heard about SUMMUS, I thought it was a misspelling of ‘zumos’ (juices, in Spanish), but as we started to get ready for the 3rd biennial event, it dawned on me that SUMMUS goes a step beyond its definition. More than a gathering place for forward-thinking experts, the event proved to be a…
Re: How Venues Turn Into Revenues
After a night out on the town, we decided to do some research on how music identification systems used at venues might have an impact on the revenue generated in the indie music scene. Results show that music played at venues increase the industry’s long-tail and provide a significant source of income for non-mainstream artists….
Ben Turner: “Education is the key. Artists, managers – everybody needs to understand the flow of money”
Ben Turner co-founded Muzik Magazine, he’s a director of Bestival, the International Music Summit and the Association for Electronic Music (AFEM). He’s CEO of the music management and brand services company Graphite and artist manager for a number of leading electronic music artists. Brais: Ben, how has your viewpoint of the music industry changed pre-Muzik Magazine,…
The World of Sound Effects
When we started to develop our audio fingerprinting technology, we made sure it worked with every sound we recorded but we still had a way ahead to delve into its nuts and bolts and overcome some of the oddities of our industry. This leads us on to the fascinating world of sound effects. Some weeks…
Songs From the City
Elvis sings “home is where the heart is” and we may be Barcelona born but formed by twenty nationalities and set in twelve cities, our home is everywhere. This along with our chart addiction made us wonder which cities everyone is singing about and how we could measure it. We have the curiosity, the tools…
Keep Learning Deep Learning
You never know when you’ll close the loop. After a brief encounter with Neural Networks, Àlex decided to go find an algorithm somewhere else. Two decades later they met again and became pals. Now called Deep Learning, Neural Networks showed up last year at BMAT to help us solve one of our biggest challenges: teach…
How We Identify Songs. Audio Fingerprinting
Our motto is “We hear everything everywhere and tell everyone who wants to know.” Something we don’t mention so often but we feel equally proud of is how we do it: audio fingerprinting. It’s literally our identity sign, the system that allows us to identify 52 years of audio against 60M sound recordings every day….
Lluís Torrents: ‘Clubs’ managers like to see how the fees they pay get to the artists they play’
Lluís Torrents is to Barcelona as a bassist is to a rock song. Although unnoticed at first glance, he’s essential for the city to keep up its fantastic musical shape. He’s always been very close to music, managing clubs, agencies, labels and concert promoter companies for more than 30 years. Nowadays, as the Co-CEO of…
How We Built Our Brand – Part 2: Our Colours Are a Soundtrack
Our web, our catalogues, our blog and our newsletter, they all shine at certain light frequencies, the colours of BMAT. In our first How we built our brand we explained the story behind our logo, here we want to explain the story behind our brand palette. Etymologically, the term music refers to the arts of muses….
BMAT’s Melody Identification – Part 2: Running Out of Melodies
See Part 1 – Music and Language. The long awaited second part is here. No matter how you represent a melody, as long as the representation uses limited and quantised metrics – like a music score over a certain number of bars does – the number of possible melodies is finite. Despite infinite expression nuances…