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The writer and singer Maya Angelou used to say that “everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances”. If we stop to think how many times a day music enters our ears, we will not be able to count them. Because many times we are not even aware that the music is there. But this. For example, between 40 and 50% of the content we see on any television includes music.
Movies, series, advertisements, reports … And on digital platforms, whether musical or not, there are hundreds of millions of listeners a day. Behind every song, ambient music or soundtrack that feeds our soul there is someone who composed it or who owns its rights and whose food, literally, depends on the number of reproductions of this. How to count all the times Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ plays on Youtube, Youtube music, Spotify or Deezer?
Before the boom of digital platforms, which began to function in 2010, it was counted manually: a human listened to the radio or television for hours and wrote down all the songs that were playing and while, perhaps, he had a coffee or a snack. Now there is no pause to bite anything, no sleep, no downtime: counting is done by algorithms at a dizzying pace, relentlessly, in parallel on thousands of platforms around the world.
The barcelonan BMAT is one of the pioneer companies in indexing music to create a fingerprint of each composition and offer a report of the total reproductions to its clients, so that they can pay the authors / musical owners. These clients are television and radio channels; rights management entities (such as the SGAE in Spain); Record labels and music publishers or ‘digital service providers’, ‘streaming’ platforms such as Spotify or Soundcloud.
Two technologies are responsible for detecting and identifying the music that is playing; on the one hand, the algorithms in charge of listening, differentiating and separating speech from music, and on the other, those that identify that song in the middle of an immense sea of data with more than 80 million musical works registered with your ‘name and surname’. Each new song that an artist uploads to a platform, comes to BMAT to get their fingerprint and monitor it.
Two technologies are used in BMAT: the algorithms in charge of listening, differentiating and separating speech from music and those that identify the property of each composition
The project was born in 2005, in a group of musical innovation of the Pompeu Fabra University, by the hand of four young engineers who decided to give a commercial application to the musical technologies they were developing. But their big leap was in 2010, when they started selling monitoring services, beyond music identification technology.
“We take off when we close the circle and make things easier for the client, saying: ‘in such a minute that song has sounded for so many seconds and the owner of the rights is so and so'”, he explains Jaume Vintró, director of operations of BMAT. The million dollar question, required at this point: How much does the owner of a musical work charge? It depends on several factors, from the country where the user reproduces it to the fame of the artist or the platform.
For example, to get to charge a euro in Spotify, 250 reproductions are needed (average payment per reproduction: 0.00437 $ or 0.004 €); YouTube still pays less for each play, $ 0.00069 or € 0.00063 (1,587 views are needed to win one euro). Apple Music, $ 0.00735 or € 0.0066 on average per play (152 plays to get to the euro), depending on thetrichordist.com, association of artists who claim an ethical use of music on the internet.
For an author to get to charge 1 euro, 152 reproductions are needed on Apple Music, 250 on Spotify and 1,587 on YouTube
BMAT now has a team of 150 people of 34 nationalities who work from all over the world and have in common their passion for music. “It is not a necessary condition to work with us that you know about music, but most of our team plays in groups or even has small labels and you know how this business works. This is essential to offer a good service, especially from the customer service side ”, he explains. Salvador Gurrera, one of the founding engineers, who plays the keyboard and confesses himself a lover of electronic music.
In the 15 years of the company’s life, Salvador and his team have seen how the music market has evolved, from the dissemination of content on television and radio to the birth and consolidation of video and streaming platforms. Today 4,746 companies use its operating system. Since 2010, they have been growing at the rate of 20-30% per year. The year of the pandemic was no exception.
“Despite the stoppage of live concerts and the closure of nightclubs, which are also among our clients, in 2020 we grew by 20%, driven by the increase in the consumption of audiovisual content from home ”. Streaming accounted for 62.1% of global recorded music revenues in 2020 and more than half of revenues in 48 markets worldwide, an increase of 12 markets compared to 2019, according to data of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
Every day they give their clients 27,000 million identifications of musical pieces that, a year, get paid to authors 2,000 million dollars
The liberalization that is taking place in the sector, with increasingly diversified musical rights among more hands, also means new business opportunities for this company in the form of more clients. An example is that of Shakira, who in January sold the rights to her catalog, of 145 songs, to the investment fund Hipgnosis Songs Fund, following the example of Bob Dylan or Neil Young, in a context of paralysis of the earnings that came from live concerts.
“Every year is a challenge and we look for different lines of business, either through R&D or acquisitions of companies with which we have synergies,” they explain. Vintró and Gurrera, that every day, they deliver to their customers 27,000 million identifications of musical pieces that get authors paid $ 2 billion a year thanks to the metadata they provide.
In order to continue expanding, this small large multinational has had during its history, and continues to do so today, with the financing and advice of Banco Santander through the Smart Fund. “We went to explain the project to them and they believed in it. We have already worked with different teams of the entity ”, says Vintró. “They have given us a lot of support and free consulting.”
It is likely that the reader has asked a second million dollar question: What songs sound more times in our country? According to the ranking carried out by BMAT, the second week of April, when this report was recorded, the first place in number of reproductions went to Borat (with Melendi) with ‘Desde Cero’, followed by Sam Smith, with ‘Diamonds’ and Alvaro From Luna with ‘Eternal Oath of Salt’. Among the top ten places were also C. Tangana with ‘Tú Me Dejaste De Querer’, above Sia and Dua Lipa.
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