Features
Finding Unsigned Talent With Andrson While Live Gigs Are Gone
– Zach Miller-Frankel (left) and Neil Dunne.
Co-founders of Andrson.
Government restrictions introduced in reaction to Covid have forced everybody in this industry to look digitally, even companies whose business revolves around live events with live audiences.
Audio analysis and recommendation have traditionally been topics relevant to the recorded music sector. But since A&Rs have no options of checking out talent in the real world at the moment, the technology has a use case in live, as well.
A company by the name of Andrson is hoping to facilitate the emergence and discovery of new (live) talent during this unprecedented crisis that has paralyzed an entire industry and all of its supply chains.
– Music discovery reimagined.
Music professional looking to work with new artists can ask Andrson to find something sounding similar to what they already love.
When company founders Zach Miller-Frankel and Neil Dunne decided to set up Andrson last year, it wasn’t with Covid in mind, of course. The plan was simply to create a digital music discovery platform, which uses predictive analytics and audio AI to link unsigned, un-monetized talent with music industry professionals.
They closed their first seed funding round in April 2019 and launched their first minimum viable product at Ireland Music Week in October 2019. A soft launch in New York followed – two key events to get artists and professionals using the platform.
More than 7,500 artists signed up to Andrson since going live in June, including “industry executives spanning every sector of the industry, from synch to major labels to booking agents, in most major music sectors of the world,” Dunne told Pollstar.
Key hires were made around audio analysis and machine learning, as those are the technologies fueling the platform. As opposed to other discovery tools, whose recommendations are usually based around user behavior, Andrson only uses audio analysis when finding similar tracks.
User behavior can be valuable data, especially when growing in scale. But when it comes to music discovery, “focusing solely on user behavior is resulting in a very small percentage of artists being discoverable,” Dunne explained. After all, there’s only so many people you can listen to.
What is more, Miller-Frankel added, a lot of audio discovery is using esoteric data like percussiveness and danceability, which doesn’t mean much to an agent or label rep. Andrson tells them that “the melody of this song is x-percent like this Ariana Grande song. It’s immediately contextualized, benchmarked against something tangible,” Miller-Frankel explained.
– Signing up to Andrson, users select whether they
The team behind the platform believes it has created a much for sophisticated music discovery tool than any currently out there.
As opposed to Shazam, which matches songs via finger printing technology or ISRC codes, Andrson does full-spectrum tonal analysis, pulling more 600 data points per song and analyzing them. As not all of that data is detectable by a human ear, a machine learning aspect has been part of Andrson’s technology from the get-go.
Aside from allowing people to search music by sound, the technology also offers licensing opportunities. “We can license out our API to other music management systems, scouting tools, synch library databases,” Dunne explained.
Artists sign up to Andrson not just to be discovered, but also to collaborate. “We’ve got one artist from Canada and one from the West Coast of North America, who met on Andrson and, given Covid, are now remotely creating an EP together,” said Dunne.
Several labels, including two of the three majors, are actively using the platform, Miller-Frankel said, as do managers in the UK and synch agencies in the U.S. Professionals can search for new artists by choosing an established name and searching for a match. They can then look into the artist’s social media stats, music and live videos, bios, and artists they’re collaborating with on Andrson.
As Miller-Frankel and Dunne didn’t want to charge artists struggling to make an income during Covid, the platform has been free since launch. From 2021, Andrson will offer a full-freemium pricing structure. The premium offering will be priced at 9.99 in most Western countries, with a familiar pricing model in place elsewhere.
The b2b side is based on breadth of scope and ways companies intend to use Andrson’s API. “If you use the API, we operate on a per song analysis basis. Pulling an example out of thin air, if a major label has a catalog of three million songs, and we charge 5 cents per song to analyze it, that’s $150,000 per month. But obviously we’ll be charging a small, independent manager a lot less than we would a major,” Miller-Frankel explained.
Plans for the future include the introduction of a tour calendar functionality, which should be particularly interesting for booking agents.