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Business News Labels & Publishers Management & Funding
Sentric Music and Imperial College granted funding for new digital publisher tools
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 17 December 2014
Government funded Innovate UK (what was the Technology Strategy Board, in case you wondered) has awarded music publishing service provider Sentric Music and Imperial College London funding to carry out a project titled ‘Data Exploration And Predicative Analytics For Music Publishing’. Sounds exciting, no?
Using Sentric’s catalogue of over 300,000 songs from more than 65,000 songwriters and the brains contained within ICL’s Department Of Mathematics, the project aims to “create tools and algorithms [that] will enable predictive modelling based on data drawn from a wide variety of sources, including song registrations, royalty reports, streaming media, social media, and crowdsourced reviews”.
Are you following this? Good. Anyway, once the boffins have polished up these tools and sharpened their algorithms, Sentric plans to use them to identify artists and tracks that have potential to become super popular, and identify instances where royalties are being underreported. The company’s clients – labels and artists primarily – will be given access to these tools via online and mobile apps.
I think that means you’ll be able to put a song in and it’ll tell you that no one is ever going to like it, but that there are royalties not being claimed on the few plays it has got. So everyone’s happy.
Sentric CEO Chris Meehan said of the new funding: “Our successful funding application is a great measure of validation for the technology that we’ve been building and deploying that will be further developed to become more useful to the music business and our artists”.
Dr Christoforos Anagnostopoulos from Imperial College London added: “Our collaboration with Sentric Music is a unique pathway to ensuring that cutting-edge advances in machine learning and data science can permeate the music publishing industry, introducing efficiency gains for Sentric, and empowering the songwriter community, while simultaneously inspiring exciting developments in statistical methodology, designed to handle the heterogeneity and complexity of the song-songwriter data ecosystem”.
And I think that we can take some comfort in how long and impenetrable that last sentence was. This project’s in good hands.
