Cyanite, a tech company with various solutions in AI-powered music tagging and search, has signed a global deal with music giant BMG to unlock new value from its three-million-track catalogue.
Bertelsmann-owned BMG, the world’s largest music company outside the three ‘majors’, has appointed Cyanite with the aim of making its entire repertoire more searchable and accessible for Synch – i.e. placing music in movies and advertising. Cyanite’s automatic tagging will support BMG’s internal and external creatives to identify “hidden gems” in the search for the perfect song for film, TV, games and advertising usages. Before deciding on Cyanite, BMG tested all available technologies extensively.
BMG’s catalogue has grown exponentially through acquisitions and organic growth since its formation in 2008. Cyanite’s tech will allow BMG to easily integrate newly acquired catalogues such as that of Telamo, the largest independent record label in Germany.
Cyanite’s technology is being integrated into BMG’s internal content management system BMG Songs, the market-leading repertoire, creative and licensing platform used by BMG’s synch teams around the world. BMG’s tagging team can now focus their efforts away from manual tagging, while the company gets on with exploiting its entire catalogue.
The BMG development team is currently overseeing the integration of Cyanite’s Application Programming Interface (API), which will enable employees to leverage Cyanite’s creative metadata. Once integrated, BMG’s repertoire will be processed by Cyanite’s AI technology and the results delivered back via the API to BMG’s software.
BMG VP Group Technology Gaurav Mittal said, “BMG is committed to using AI technologies to optimize our revenues so we can speed the flow of royalties to artists and songwriters. We are delighted to be working with Cyanite to enhance our Synch services.”
BMG SVP Global Synch Licensing Allegra Willis Knerr said: “In a world in which there are literally tens of millions of tracks available to Synch, AI offers the ability to simultaneously improve the accuracy of pitches and level the playing field for artists and songwriters. AIready, wherever the brief allows it, BMG has abandoned the distinction between ‘frontline’ and ‘catalogue’. Our objective with Cyanite is to maximise the chances for every single song in our repertoire to be licensed.”
Markus Schwarzer, CEO, Cyanite, said: “We are very proud to announce this deal with BMG, a company which shares our vision of a universal intelligence that understands, indexes and recommends the world’s music. Working together, BMG and Cyanite will uncover the potential of every single track in the catalogue.”
The news comes after Cyanite announced in August that it has closed an €800,000 seed investment round to further expand its AI-based solution for the music industry. This investment was led by former finetunes founders Oke Göttlich and Henning Thieß. The goal is to sustain the company’s vision of universal music intelligence to revolutionise how music is selected in entertainment and advertising.
BMG is the second division of Bertelsmann to sign a deal with Cyanite, following RTL Group, the Luxembourg-based international media conglomerate.
