Chennai: The global music industry revenue right now is close to $9 billion and in India, the industry is growing at a massive rate, with revenues crossing Rs 750 crore this past year, a growth of over 37 per cent.
Gracenote Inc has been in the business for nearly two decades now and provide music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies, worldwide.
News Today had an exclusive interaction with Brian Hamilton who is at the helm of the company, being the general manager – Music and Auto. He spoke about the Indian market, innovations, operations of Gracenote among others.
Brian was asked what he thinks about the Indian market with respect to other developing nations and he said, “As the world’s second largest mobile market, India is very much in a growth stage and on its way to becoming a mature music market. According to the IFPI, India is the #19 music market, but the industry has set a goal to become a top ten market by 2022.”
“India is very different from other emerging markets with its close ties to Bollywood. What we’ve seen is that Bollywood songs have largely served as a
promotional vehicle to drive movie revenues. An independent focus on music centering on artist development, coaching and building brand recognition beyond the movie is important to grow the music industry beyond Bollywood. Music services in the region have been observing consumption growth in this area of music for the past year. We believe India also has a unique opportunity to grow outward as well. We anticipate the trend of increasing consumption of Indian music by listeners around the world will continue with Gracenote Global Music Data as a major facilitator,” he added.
Music Streaming is the major growth driver in the country and Brian, said, “Music streaming is currently driving growth across the global music market. Two thirds of India’s revenues come from streaming today, reflecting 60 per cent growth in 2017. Converting streaming users to paid subscribers will be the biggest challenge. Similar to other major markets, like China, addressing piracy will also be critical in creating a sustainable business model and driving revenues.”
“Structured and clean metadata for artists, songwriters and producers which power next generation search and discovery across streaming services is also
critical. It can help provide differentiating features between free and paid services that encourage consumers to switch,” he said.
Speaking about the difficulties that the Indian market threw at them, Brian, said, “India is a very complex music market primarily due to the heavy emphasis on music from film soundtracks, as opposed to specific artist releases, and the multiple languages required to properly support in the region. But this complexity also brings a sizeable opportunity. The greatest challenges have to do with the categorization and organization of India’s music and capturing the long tail. We can address much of the popular Bollywood music through our work with the top record labels and streaming services. Organizing around the multiple artists associated with these releases makes this work more challenging than the single artist releases that are common in the rest of the world.”
Brian added that his firm is currently tapping all data sources from artists to record labels to distributors, to ensure the completeness of their metadata and applying structure to that data to ensure it works in all UIs and recommendation algorithms across all platforms, services and devices regardless of language or region.
Asked about the need to innovate at all times, the GM of the music services company, said, “Continual innovation is imperative to Gracenote especially as entertainment consumption continues to grow rapidly across all categories, services and platforms around the world and new media formats emerge. When you combine the penetration of connected devices, new virtual assistants and voice-control with the growth of streaming services and cross-media entertainment experiences, there’s a constant need for innovation with a singular focus on improving the ways consumers search for, find and enjoy digital entertainment.”
Take for example, voice control. With the widespread adoption of Amazon Echo and Google Home products in homes around the world, we’re having to imagine new types of cross-media metadata required to deliver the ‘right’ results on increasingly complex search queries.
He also had a word to say on customer requirements as well, “Consumers are also starting to request music playlists based on parameters like activity, genre, era and mood. This type of contextual understanding requires deep descriptive metadata developed through a careful balance of human music experts and advanced machine learning and AI technologies ascribing descriptors to the world’s music.”
Finally, Brian was asked to mention about what his predictions will be for his firm and he had this to say, “Gracenote Global Music Data has the potential to change the game in terms of driving consumption of Indian music both inside of India and globally. If mature music markets like the US are any indication of what the future music market might look like in India, we believe that music consumption will move from a lean-forward experience centered on search to a more lean-back experience powered by personalized recommendations based on preferences, playback history, mood and listening context. We’re far from this today. But with the widespread adoption of connected devices, broad internet accessibility in the region and the growing music catalogs of Indian streaming services, it won’t be long before music fans in India enjoy this new experience.”
“With Gracenote Global Music Data, we can make possible better personalization which considers the style of millions of individual songs and leverages data to curate more perfectly targeted playlists,” he ended.
| New innovations |
| “Gracenote has a huge team of music experts who work in every region of the world and possess unmatched knowledge of local as well as global music and artists. These humans use editorial judgments and assign descriptors such as genre, era and artist origin to songs. Gracenote then applies machine listening and supervised machine learning technologies to ‘teach’ proprietary algorithms to apply new descriptors to music recordings at scale. Examples of this include sonic mood and style descriptors that increasingly power personalized playlists and recommendations.” |
| Upcoming products |
| Mentioning about their upcoming products, Brian, said, “Through our acquisition of What’s On India in 2014, our Mumbai team continues to provide video data, such as TV schedules and listings and descriptive movie and TV information, to the region’s top pay-TV services, including Hathway, Dish TV and Airtel. And, we will continue to bring innovative technologies and data-driven products and services to media customers throughout the region to serve the growing demand of fans.” |