Apart from backstage antics and recording your first track at home, choosing a band name will probably be one of the most memorable things in your music career. Just imagine your mates sitting around in your granny’s living room, tossing around names like fish at Pike Place Market. Fast forward a few months when you…
How to Record Clean and Crisp Audio at Home
In the dinosaur days of recording music, the only way to get clean and crisp audio was to rent a professional studio and hire a grey-haired, chain-smoking sound engineer to lay down your album’s tracks. But today, to get your music out in this creator-driven world, all you need to do is invest in some…
SUMMUS, Behind the Scenes
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…