Oct. 15 (UPI) — Musixmatch on Wednesday announced deals with three major music publishers to develop analytical and non-generative artificial intelligence services with revenue streams.
The private lyrics and music data company, founded in 2010 and headquartered in Bologna, Italy, signed trial arrangements with Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group and Warner Chappell Music.
Musixmatch has more than 80 million active users for searching 12 million lyrics, including translations in more than 100 languages. For general users, plans vary from $1.59 per month to $14.99, and a free service is available for independent artists.
The company already was developing AI tools, including tagging “on things such as moods, genres, tempo, instruments and structure,” the company said on its website.
Musixmatch is now the first company to work with music providers for “new ethically trained services and revenue streams using authorized catalogs.”
The company will gain access to catalogs of more than 15 million musical works for AI purposes.
“We’re looking forward to this collaboration with our trusted partners to build and share entirely new revenue streams together,” Musixmatch Founder & CEO Massimo Ciociola said in a news release. “Put simply: Without songwriters, there can be no music industry. These agreements will ensure the writers of today and tomorrow are compensated for their creative works, not only in today’s marketplace, but also in the dynamic, AI-powered world that is rapidly emerging.”
The company already partnered with more than 225,000 publishers and nearly 3 million songwriters for such platforms as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Google, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio and Instagram
For more than 15 years, Musixmatch has had established relationships with music publishers and rights owners.
The new arrangement will allow music business professionals to search through catalogs more easily.
Billboard noted that users could ask for romantic songs or ones about protests from a certain time period. Or they can query for information such as: “Why are love songs in decline over the last few decades?” or “What consumer brands were most frequently referenced in song lyrics last year?”
Ciociola said they can “confidently build new services that will properly compensate songwriters while delivering value to music publishers and all who recognize the power of a song to move culture and provide meaning to our world.”
Also, Musixmatch might develop AI tools for financial analysis and reporting to track the performance of a catalog.
“Musixmatch has created line-by-line synchronisation of lyrics and is now pioneering word-by-word and even letter-by-letter synchronization to further increase the visual exploitation of the music for service providers,” the company said on its website.
Other companies have lyric databases, including LyricFind, Genius, Apple’s Shazam, SoundHound and Tunefind.
