musiXmatch Blog

Summer Intership 2013 @musiXmatch: Apply NOW !

Thu, 02 May 2013 01:10:00 +0200

We are offering the chance to be one of the FIRST, and one of the very FEW people who will get the opportunity to Intern at musiXmatch for our Summer Internship.

This won’t be like any others Internship, we’re talking about Italy, spend the summer in Italy, being in Bologna, just 27 min from Florence and 1 hour by Venice and 2 and half from Rome.

More than all ….just 40min from the beach. Yep.

We know you’re talented, we know you’re smart and we know you’ve got a wealth of knowledge to offer us, as we do to you, so why don’t we learn from each other? We can’t promise there won’t be a little photocopying or a bit of toilet cleaning (we all do that, starting from our CEO), everyone has to pull their weight right? There will however, be so much more!

Our business is growing fast, musiXmatch apps are enjoyed everywhere in the world but sometimes, important projects get left as no-one has the capacity to take them on, projects which could make a real difference to how we operate, that’s where you come in!

We’re looking for enthusiastic, well-educated individuals with a passion for music and an ambition to go far, just like us. You should be studying for your Bachelors Degree and looking for an internship where you can achieve something to set you up for your future career.

You will work on a project for 3 months (June, July, August) and be mentored by the team to achieve an awesome result.

If you act well and put good effort you’ll be our guest for August too and enjoy Italy during Summer…well … that is kinda of experience sometimes in your life you have to make…

This could be in our Content, Marketing, and more than all Development area and working close to all our engineers.

It will be hard work, but you will enjoy the challenge of putting your academic experience into a REAL work environment.

What we will offer:

- a seat in our wonderful and brand new musiXmatch HQ
- a flat n Bologna to share with some others being part of the Internship
- Coffee, Coffee . Not the Starbucks one. The real one. The best one.
- Food, food, and what a food. Have you ever heard about food in Italy?
- 3 months of challenging experience working closely with all the mXm team of one the coolest startup in the music space

If you fit the bill, are eligible to work apply now here , your first challenge will be the application, like us, it’s a little different! Go on, click the button, but make sure you do it quickly and by end of May 2013 as we won’t accept applications after that date!

Internship starts 1st of June. Apply here

musiXmatch hits 10M users, adding 1M new users per month, raises another 3,7 mln$ funding

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:18:41 +0100

London, 31 Jan 2013 - musiXmatch, the app featuring the world largest lyrics catalog, just hit the milestone of 10M users, all on mobile. musiXmatch, the second most used app on Spotify, also announced another fresh round of investment of 3.7M dollars, raised by current investors Micheli Associati and Paolo Barberis, former Dada’s founder.

“We’ve built the largest and official Lyrics database that, combined with our audio matching technology and synchronized lyrics is a unique experience for music fans. Many users say we’ve cracked the karaoke experience as people want to sing and read lyrics while listening to music anytime” said Max Ciociola, CEO & Founder of musiXmatch.” We are now aiming at the second screen & TV experience, and we are going to announce something very cool during the next World Mobile Congress in Barcelona”

Lyrics are one of the most important pieces of content in the music space. Whenever people search for an artist on Google, they primarily do that in order to search for lyrics (Google Trend http://bit.ly/SZlSXf ) and the keyword ‘lyrics’ is among the most popular searched terms (source Google http://bit.ly/Suk8GY )

Other facts about musiXmatch:

The majority of users come from Android handsets, although iPhone numbers are growing exponentially
The company has been recently featured by Apple as App of the Week in Europe and Best Music App in Best of 2012 in different Countries.
More than 40mln sessions per month which led to record in last December with almost 400 million screen views, exclusively mobile.
More than 60 million impressions in December were generated through Facebook.
Adding 1 million new users per month since from December
The majority of musiXmatch users come from the U.S. (about 40%)
UK and Germany are the two most important countries in Europe
Asia, South Korea and Japan represent 30% of musixmatch’s traffic
Currently #2nd most used app on Spotify with more than 1,5 mln hours streamed on December.
musiXmatch is currently in Top 30 in Music & Audio categories on Google Play in several countries
The company has closed deals 2 years ago with all the major music publishers and hosts a lyrics database available in more than 32 languages.
musixmatch is currently based between Italy and UK will use this funding for opening an office in NY and Asia

Stay tuned. Lots of things we’re cooking for you guys.

Best,

Max.

musiXmatch revamps its Spotify app with a Beautiful View. After only a few months musiXmatch became one of the most-used apps on Spotify.

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:18:00 +0100

Today is a big day here @musixmatch. We’ve been working to keep the music discovery and lyrics experience better and better for years and we’re pretty excited about our new Spotify launch.

Details are below.

London 3rd December 2012 - It is well known that lyrics are one of the most important pieces of content in the music space. Searching for lyrics was in fact probably our first kind of music discovery, when we used to buy CDs and browse the booklets to read song lyrics and sing along to the music.

Whenever people search for an artist on Google, they primarily do that in order to search for lyrics (see Google Trend http://bit.ly/SZlSXf ) and it is no coincidence that word ‘lyrics’ is among the most popular words submitted in search engines (source Google http://bit.ly/Suk8GY ).

Spotify users love lyrics too.

Launched in June 2012, the musiXmatch app has now appeared on the Spotify App Store charts worldwide as one of the most-used apps with over 5,2 million views in October.

The new musiXmatch app, (get it here now http://spoti.fi/TlbneM ) which is available on desktop for all Spotify users in all of the 17 countries in which Spotify is currently available, is able to improve upon your music experience within Spotify: listen to your music and have lyrics scrobbling with music, automatically.

And in the rare cases when the lyrics are not already synced with the music, users can put their lyrics in time with the music by simply clicking each lines as the song plays.

In the Explore section you can also build specific playlists based on words (e.g. ‘friday night’, ‘london’) or single phrases through the powerful musiXmatch search engine based on the world’s largest lyrics catalogue, with more than 7 million lyrics localized into 32 languages.

The official artists’ images then complete the experience, making the Spotify experience beautiful and more social as users can now play any playlist or track, open the musiXmatch App (directly from the Spotify App finder or here http://spoti.fi/TlbneM) and sing along with their friends.

With more than 8 million users worldwide, musiXmatch is the premier destination for lyrics discovery on connected devices, available for iOS, Android, WP7, Mac, Spotify and now Windows8 too. musiXmatch offers the best way for music lovers to find lyrics through a friendly and innovative search engine and the powerful MusicID(TM) helps you identify the lyrics directly from the TV, radio, or any audio source.

MusiXmatch mobile apps create a complete music discovery experience by offering an embedded Music Player, a lyrics/music search engine and the MusicID identifier which, compared to Shazam and SoundHound, offers a much better experience as you can immediately identify any tracks with lyrics from radio and TV , see the lyrics, and sing along.

“We have worked for last two years to provide the best user experience to make the discovery of music through the lyrics perfect. Today I’m proud to say that we have made it. We didn’t build an App, we built a service which offers a unique discovery experience to passionate music lovers. Every month we’re processing over 250 million tracks. We’re totally devoted to making the full screen lyrics experience on a second screen the new way of listening to and discovering music” said Max Ciociola CEO & Founder of musiXmatch.

More Apps screnshots here http://bit.ly/NewSpotifyMXM
App available here https://open.spotify.com/app/musixmatch

Say hello to Tuner.io Lyric analysis of the Billboard Charts

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 23:23:00 +0100

We love hacking and hackaton. And we started musiXmatch from there. Here a Guest post by @mutlu82 and @frasiocht, 2 hackers who built an awesome project based on musiXmatch API

Tuner.io was created over 12 hours at a hackday held by the great team at Mashape. It’s a website that looks at the lyrics of songs in the Billboard top 100, counts words and overall sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and then organises the most popular results using the APIs available from Musixmatch and Text Processing. We focused on some key areas such as profanity and love, hoping to draw some conclusions from the data about what type of songs make up the top 100.

The idea came from a discussion about ‘What really makes up a rap song these days?” and whether it was possible to show common elements to rap songs automatically.
This idea then expanded into looking at the entire Billboard Top 100 and using all this generally overlooked data to analyse songs in a new way. It’s really interesting take on music, but we’re only scratching the surface.

There’s some real potential with Tuner.io, especially if we add the ability to show trends over time. For example how much has profanity increased in songs over the last 20 years? Have songs been more positive or negative during the financial crisis? What type of song is more likely to get into the top 10?

Now for the technical part:

Tuner uses the MaShape API distributer to utilise a number of services to achieve it’s goals of Lyrical sentiment analysis. Initially we make a call to Musixmatch to retrieve the current billboard top 100. (The billboard top 100 changes every Thursday at 12:00 EST, Tuner will update weekly to reflect this).

Once we get all these tracks we then do separate calls for each to retrieve the lyrics (again from Musixmatch). We also use the Text Processing API service to gather the sentiment associated with each song. This API returns Negative, Positive and Neutral values associated with the lyrics.

While this is going on we explode the song lyrics and sort them against preselected values representing Profanity, Love, Sex and Materialistic features. The results are then presented as an HTML page containing integration to Spotify’s Javascript hooks and additionally their pop up player.

Voila!

We had a lot of fun making Tuner.io and can’t wait to take it to the next level, thanks to all the guys at Mashape, Musixmatch and Text Processing for your support!

@mutlu82 and @frasiocht

musiXmatch, world’s largest Lyrics DB lands on Spotify

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:58:51 +0200

Today is an amazing day here @musixmatch.

We’re so happy for what we’re announcing. We’re so happy for all our users and fan in the world. We’re incredibly happy to had the chance to work with such an amazing company like Spotify.

So proud of such amazing team we’ve @musixmatch.

Thanks for all the love.

Max

CEO & Founder musiXmatch

London - 15th of June 2012 musiXmatch, the world’s largest and official lyrics service launched today the new musiXmatch Spotify app which lets users discover the entire Spotify’s catalogue by simply searching songs by words and lyrics and gives the opportunity to Spotify users to sing their Spotify Playlist thanks to the power of the SyncNSing® technology. SyncNSing® shows automatically to all Spotify users the lyrics of the song they are listening to in real time or let them synchronize their own lyrics with the songs playing on Spotify with an easy tapping tool.

Singing with friends has never been so easy, social and fun!

You forgot that song’s name and you can only remember few words of it ? No worries, musiXmatch now identifies the song through a powerful lyrics search engine based on more than 6 million lyrics, currently the world’s largest lyrics Database licensed through worldwide partnership with Major Music Publishers like Sony ATV, Emi Publishing, Universal Publishing, Bmg Rights, Kobalt Music and Harry Fox Agency.
You can then build awesome playlist just based on lyrics!

By searching “google” users can now get a Playlist with all tracks having “Google” in their lyrics, here an example http://spoti.fi/IxclzR or by simply searching “Amsterdam” you can get a playlist with most of the track talking about Amsterdam http://spoti.fi/IxcCTl. That’s a new and unique discovery tool of music based on Lyrics!

Featuring more than 5 million users worldwide, musiXmatch is the top destination on mobile and connected devices for searching and identifying lyrics.
musiXmatch Spotify App can be accessed directly from Spotify App Finder. The application is open to all Spotify users in all countries Spotify is currently active.

“We’ve built a music discovery service around lyrics which is unique. We’ve made an analysis and discovered 90% of people forget the song’s name but they remember lyrics. It happens to all of us.. And now all Spotify users can benefit from this amazing feature - Max Ciociola, CEO and Founder of musiXmatch - On top of this we’ve built the largest database of synced Lyrics making easy for Spotify users to sing with friends while listening to any playlist. SyncNSing®. It’s addictive.”

Lyrics is currently one of the top shared content on Twitter (source Topsy Analytics http://bit.ly/lyricstwitter ) and the second most searched term on Google after Facebook (source Google Insight for search http://bit.ly/Google-insight) .

Summer Internship @musiXmatch: spend 3 months in Italy.. Apply Now !

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:08:46 +0200

We are offering the chance to be one of the FIRST, and one of the very FEW people who will get the opportunity to Intern at musiXmatch for our Summer Internship.

This won’t be like any others Internship, we’re talking about Italy, spend the summer in Italy, being in Bologna, just 27 min from Florence and 1 hour by Venice and 2 and half from Rome.

More than all ….just 40min from the beach. Yep.

We’re looking for enthusiastic, well-educated individuals with a passion for music and an ambition to go far, just like us. You should be studying for your Bachelors Degree and looking for an internship where you can achieve something to set you up for your future career.

You will work on a project for 3 months (May, June and July) and be mentored by the team to achieve an awesome result.

If you act well and put good effort you’ll be our guest for August too and enjoy Italy during Summer…well … that is kinda of experience sometimes in your life you have to make…

This could be in our Content, Marketing, and more than all Development area and working close to all our engineers.

It will be hard work, but you will enjoy the challenge of putting your academic experience into a REAL work environment.

What we will offer:

- a seat in our wonderful and brand new musiXmatch HQ
- a flat n Bologna to share with some others being part of the Internship
- Coffee, Coffee . Not the Starbucks one. The real one. The best one.
- Food, food, and what a food. Have you ever heard about food in Italy?
- 3 months of challenging experience working closely with all the team of one the coolest startup in the music space

If you fit the bill, are eligible to work apply now here , your first challenge will be the application, like us, it’s a little different! Go on, click the button, but make sure you do it quickly and by Friday 20th April as we won’t accept applications after that date!

Internship starts 1st of May. Apply here

The Echo Nest Blog: Musixmatch Brings Largest Lyrics Database to Rosetta Stone

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:45:03 +0200

The Echo Nest Blog: Musixmatch Brings Largest Lyrics Database to Rosetta Stone:

echonest:

Musixmatch tracks a lot of lyrics — that’s one reason why The Echo Nest enthusiastically welcomes Musixmatch onto our Project Rosetta Stone platform.

Project Rosetta Stone brings the unique ability to help music services “talk” to one another to the music and technology industries, by lining…

3,000,000 thanks. musiXmatch reaches 3 mln users worldwide and say welcome to new Android Lyrics Player

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:16:00 +0100

When it comes to communicating a milestone for a startup active in the music space by just 2 years, whatever it is it’s always exciting… Both for us spending night and day coding (and how many nights!) both for all our users.
If you happen to walk down the street and see people using musiXmatch or when it happens to go to a concert and to see a group of boys and girls singing with an iPhone in their hands, using the musiXmatch apps…..
…..well it makes you feel satisfied and happy.

Reading thousands of messages and feedback where people say “Thanks. Now I can finally read lyrics without googling anymore...”

Make us happy.

3,000,000 users worldwide access now to the world’s largest lyrics catalog ever created and developed by musiXmatch thanks to the worldwide licensing agreement with Top Major Music Publishers like Sony ATV, Emi Publishing, Warner Chappel, Universal Music Publishing, Kobalt Publishing, BMG Rights, Harry Fox Agency.

They do this through the mobile and desktop apps powered by musiXmatch.

We are pleased and proud, and as Lyrics market is still tough, with hundreds of illegal sites that provide lyrics without paying a single $ to Songwriters and Music Publishers, we are happy to be the preferred choice for the user who wants to sing….. anytime….and anywhere..

We celebrate today during Mobile World Congress 2012 our biggest milestone with the launch of the new musiXmatch Player on Android, an innovative player that allows you not only to look inside the largest lyrics database but especially to discovery new music, to identify Lyrics at any time from TV, radio and any music source… thanks to the powerful technology MUSIC ID powered by our friends at Gracenote.

Soon there will be updates on Iphone and many other news ..

It’s a long road and this is just a beginning for us.

One thing is for sure, we want everyone to use musiXmatch in the world.
We want anyone to sing thanks to musiXmatch.
We want to make happy as many people as we can.

3,000,000 people have made us happy today.

Thanks for all the love you gave us.
And do not stop following us.

Max Ciociola

CEO & Founder

Full Press Release is available here: http://bit.ly/musixmatchpress

Here we go with new musiXmatch web site

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:13:36 +0100

Just 18 months young, and we’ve just returned home through the snow from our 2nd Midem.

We wanted to say how excited we are with the buzz around musiXmatch. With our 2,6 mln app users, we have built a damn good database of lyrics covering more than 30 countries and 18 languages. But size doesn’t matter if you don’t have quality and that’s why we love feedback, especially positive ones telling us how great our service actually is. Our mobile app is available on Android, iOS, Nokia, and Windows and our desktop app is available for both Mac and now Windows too. We’re adding thousand of new users every day, so we think we’re doing something right and making people happy…. but this is just the beginning…

You may have noticed that we just launched our new website. The site features a fresh new look, easy navigation, and all the information consumers, partners, and developers need.

We received a lot of feedback in all this months on how to improve the site and one theme was for a more consumer focused approach. So, for all you non tecky geeks out there, less jargon to figure out!

We always said that musiXmatch is The world’s largest Lyrics Catalog so we have included a search bar where you can type in any lyric to any song and from our 6M large database and best in class matching ratios, we’ll display the song you’re looking for, instantly. No need to go Google and cross your fingers. LOL

And as always, we continuously look to improve and everyone’s feedback is welcome.

Thanks to everyone’s support and keep on singing!

Max Ciociola
CEO & Founder, musiXmatch

Former BMG Publishing CEO Nicholas Firth joins musiXmatch's Advisory Board as Chairman

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:34:18 +0100

musiXmatch has appointed former BMG Music Publishing CEO and chairman Nicholas Firth as chairman of its advisory board.

The move comes as the company announces it has signed up all of the major publishers to its site after closing a deal with Warner/Chappell and EMI Music Publishing earlier this month.

musiXmatch is building a fully licensed database of lyrics that other websites and mobile apps can plug into via its API. It matches the metadata submitted by publishers to the 6m+ lyrics on its database and presents this to third parties as a white label solution. Lyric searches can be treated by these third parties as a standalone proposition or as a value-add on, an existing music service.

Firth’s career in music publishing began in 1962, where he worked for the Chappell Group, then a division of PolyGram BV, culminating with simultaneous positions as President of Chappell International and Vice President of the PolyGram Publishing Division, which he held from 1981-1985. Subsequently, Mr. Firth was a shareholder and CEO of Music Theatre International.

His grandfather and great uncle, Louis and Max Dreyfus owned Chappell & Company in New York and London.

In addition to his duties at BMG, Firth is involved negotiating music publishing industry agreements in the U.S., Europe and the Far East.

Nicholas Firth serves on the Boards of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), the International Music Publishers Association (IMPA) and the Third Street Music School Settlement.

musiXmatch, The IMDB For Song Lyrics, offer now Lyrics app for Spotify and Itunes ; Passes 1M Mobile Downloads

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:34:23 +0200

I don’t know about you, but I’m awful at remembering the lyrics to songs, and I often find myself turning to Google search to answer my lyrical questions — and frequently, to lose arguments. Apparently, I’m not alone, as “lyrics” is one of the most searched-for terms on Google. While a quick search is often all one needs to flick on the light switch, overall, lyric search remains a pretty disappointing (and frustrating) experience. There are tons of lyrics sites out there, but most of them are unofficial, don’t have rights to broadcasting free lyrics, or they’re hiding malware.

Founded in 2010, musiXmatch is a startup trying to solve this very problem by building a database of legal song lyrics on the web in the hopes of becoming the IMDB for legal song lyrics. So far, the site has collected over 5.5 million songs (in 18 languages) and is not only building a database that meets with international rights management standards, but it is also developing an API to distribute its lyrics to music publishers, services, app developers, and hackers. Phew.

Today, musiXmatch is announcing the official launch of its “musiXmatch Lyrics App” for Mac OSX, which is available for $5 on the App Store. The plug-in enables users to automatically view full screen lyrics for the music they’re currently playing and includes support for iTunes and Spotify.

The widget is still in its early stages, and the team said that it will soon be giving music fans the ability to search for lyrics by artist, song name, or keywords, and browse discography info on albums and artists — and share that info with friends through social networks. (Another cool update coming down the pipeline: Enabling listeners to automatically embed the lyrics into the id3 tag of your songs.)

For iTunes and Spotify users like myself, musiXmatch’s widget is a pretty cool little add-on to the existing listening experience, as it automatically matches your iTunes and Spotify libraries (and automatically opens both), works with both platforms’ “radio” features, allows you to share lyrics to Facebook and Twitter, and receive Growl notifications. (And it works with Lion.)

In addition to today’s launch of its iTunes and Spotify compatible iOS plug-in, musiXmatch also shared with us that their mobile applications, which are available on iOS, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, have been downloaded more than 1 million times. Over 50 percent of those users are active on a daily basis.

musiXmatch’s mobile solution allows users to easily find and match lyrics for their entire mobile music library, and with desktop availability, a sweet API that lets developers easily distribute kosher lyrics, the startup is becoming a very appealing service for everything from radio streaming platforms and video services to tablet apps and OEM manufacturers. With partnerships that include BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony ATV Music, among others, musiXmatch is becoming a very interesting business and platform.

by Rip Empson

musiXmatch Lyrics app launched on Iphone and Android, fans gain access to the world's largest official lyrics database

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:35:46 +0200

Here’s an interesting fact for you – people search for ‘lyrics’ online in the US more often than they do for ‘sex’. musiXmatch brought this fact to our attention, and upon closer inspection it certainly seems to be true – indeed, ‘lyrics’ is the most common search term on Google in the US after ‘Facebook’.

With that in mind, musiXmatch must be onto a winner as the so-called ‘world’s largest official lyrics database’, and today it has announced dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.

musiXmatch has over 5 million officially licensed lyrics available via its API, and it delivers “100% licensed lyrics to any kind of music app or service”.

It enables developers and music fans anywhere in the world to harness the power of online lyrics, meaning it can be used for third-party services such as radio streaming platforms, video services, mobile audio devices, apps, and OEM manufacturers.

Now available for both iOS and Android, musiXmatch Lyrics uses music-matching algorithms to identify lyrics instantly that can then be matched with a user’s mobile music library.

Music fans can also search for lyrics by artist, song name, or specific keywords, as well as share and discover discography information for many albums and artists.

The app is simple and straight forward to use. I searched for a number of different artists and songs, across multiple genres and eras and it was pretty comprehensive. You can also share lyrics across all the usual social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and email.

Max Ciociola, CEO and Founder of musiXmatch, said:

“By creating a free solution for instantly matching your music library with officially licensed lyrics, musiXmatch is aiming to simplify the end user experience around lyrics for music fans everywhere. We hope that by seeing musiXmatch Lyrics in action, developers will be inspired to create their own lyrics-driven experiences using our award-winning API.”

The company has raised $3.7m in VC funding to date, and earlier this year, musiXmatch announced partnerships with BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony ATV Music and more.

Courtesy of : http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/08/16/musixmatch-lyrics-app-launched-fans-gain-access-to-the-worlds-largest-official-lyrics-database/

Forbes.com : Turning Lyrics into a Business musiXMatch’s Next Generation Lyrics API

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:41:46 +0200

Jennifer Hicks

DANTE’S SOMA

Recently, I attended a Lorenzo Jovanotti concert in Perugia, Italy. I’m a long time fan of the innovative Italian rapper for over a decade. Even though he sings in Italian, over time I have come to know most of his lyrics. Not that I know what they all mean, but I know them. At the concert, thousands of us were singing with him at the top of our lungs – lyrics committed to memory through repetition.

Then there are the songs I don’t know, but I THINK I know. When my brother was four, he used to toddle around singing More than a Woman by the Bee Gees – thinking it was Bald Headed Woman. We knew it wasn’t, but it was more entertaining to let him sing it that way.

When I want to look up lyrics today, I do it rather sloppily. Like most people, I go to Google, type in the band/lyrics and spend the next two hours slogging through the garbage Google dredges up. When I try and find a song on Spotify or iTunes and I can’t remember much about it, I search on key words, genre or lyrics I remember. I usually get the proverbial hand – or ‘try searching again with different terms’. I don’t like it, but I have come to accept this.

“Not many industries in our world have suffered so much disruption yet still exist, as the music industry has,” said Jeff Coe, serial entrepreneur and independent advisor in digital content. “That’s because music can never be superseded or replaced by technology, it’s just the way we consume it that has changed.”

According to Coe, with disruption comes innovation, and the music industry has spawned some of the most innovative technologies currently used. “The music industry and everyone inside of it have been forced to explore all the cracks and corners of the music world to find value for the consumer and clever ways to consume and experience music so that the money wheels keep turning.”

Coe is right. The music industry is a source of constant discussion and continual innovation – Shazam, Spotify, Pandora, Songkick – not to mention the grand daddy of them all, iTunes sitting on top of the heap with Apple working hard to keep the throne when it comes to music and content.

But, deep in the heart of Bologna, Italy, lies a new music start up who decided that lyrics are where its at in the new music value chain.

musixMatch is taking an unexpected approach to the shifting sands of the online music industry – they are focusing on lyrics. They adamantly say they aren’t a lyrics site, but the largest authorized lyrics catalogue in the world. The key word there is authorized. To date they provide 5.3 million authorized lyrics. They claim they will be the IMDB for music lyrics.

It’s pretty simple. musixMatch has created (continue reading here)

From Last.fm Blog : Lyric clouds, genre maps and distinctive words

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:07:59 +0200

One of the interesting things that sets even superficially similiar genres of music apart is their lyrical content. Last.fm tags can overlap to a great degree, but we were interested to see what the words can tell you about the subtler shades of meaning that go along with those tags. As usual around here, the best way to answer questions like these is by asking the data.

So I downloaded the musiXmatch dataset, a collection of lyric tables for nearly 240,000 songs from all around the world (and the musical universe). They are tables in the sense that they don’t contain the intact lyrics of each song, but rather a list of words present in each song, along with the number of times that word occurs. No use for karaoke, but perfect for investigating the overall properties of a genre. I then matched up the songs in the dataset with tracks in our own catalogue, and correlated this with Last.fm tag data, in order to count the number of times a given word appeared in each of several prominent genres.

Lyric clouds

Of course, lists of words and frequencies are a little dry, but thankfully IBM have released a Word-Cloud Generator which can take a weighted list of words and display it graphically, as seen on theWordle website. The more often a word appears, the bigger it will be rendered. Here’s what it came up with for the genres I tried — the software did the layout, but you can blame me for the font selection.

Continue reading here

We're Back(ed): musiXmatch Closes 3.7 million USD in Series A Funding

Mon, 09 May 2011 16:57:56 +0200

For the last 18 months, musiXmatch has been committed to providing simple solutions for the music industry. We created musiXmatch out of the belief that searching for lyrics should be simple, and that developers should be able to easily integrate music lyrics into existing music applications, without having to worry about distribution rights.

Our philosophy is that feedback cannot be discussed, it must be implemented. We believe that developer feedback and community involvement are the most valuable assets for product improvement.

In October 2010, we launched the first developer version of the musiXmatch Lyrics API, enabling hackers and developers to create and experiment using our platform. At the time musiXmatch did not even have an official site; just a Twitter account, an API and a dream.

The feedback we received from the developer and publishing community was incredible. We received hundreds of thousands of suggestions from developers from all around the world. We are incredibly grateful!

You helped us realize we were on to something big.

The more we worked on improving musiXmatch, the more we began to understand what factors motivate consumers to search for lyrics online. We realized very quickly that one of musiXmatch’s key product features was the ability to find matching lyrics for your existing music library.

Hence our name: musiXmatch

For us, the “perfect match” cannot be found through dating.

Instead, it is found in song metadata like this:

Title / Artist / Release / Music_Labels / Lyrics / Songwriters / Music_Publishers

There is no other service in the music industry today that associates and matches the music recording information Title / Artist / Release / Music_Labelswith music publishing data Lyrics / Songwriters / Music_Publishers

musiXmatch is first service in the world to provide this feature.

In terms of industry copyrights and legalization, we believe that we have helped the industry move forward, through creating a global distribution model and a simple monetization platform for digital lyrics.

Some skeptics have raised the question: “Why should developers even use a Lyrics API, when the lyrics are already on Google?“

Our response has always been:

”It’s inconvenient for users to search for Lyrics on Google“

Users want to have the most up to date lyrics perfectly matched to their music library. Instantly.

When you look at the fact that 10% of Google’s searches are music related and 70% of music queries are Lyrics related, you begin to understand the extent of the problem.

We aim to solve that problem.

In the coming months, musiXmatch will be expanding our service to include consumer focused solutions, offering the best Lyrics experience on the market.

Large problems require great solutions. If you bring passion and dedication to the table, you can create a huge business.

Today musiXmatch is pleased to announce that we have secured 3.7 million USD in Series A Funding, led by FMA fund.

This money will be used to improve every single experience of our API, and expand our distribution and content localization efforts in Asia and the U.S.

We will also open our first office in the U.S, acquire talented engineers, and significantly invest in improving our platform.

MusiXmatch aims to be the best Lyrics platform in the world, with a scalable API that allows anyone to access the largest database of legal lyrics online.

We want to thank the musiXmatch team, the developer community, and of course, our fans around the world. You make our dreams possible.

Ciao.

Max Ciociola
CEO & Founder
musiXmatch

The Echo Nest Blog: The Million Song Dataset gets lyrics, too

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:18:25 +0200

The Echo Nest Blog: The Million Song Dataset gets lyrics, too:

echonest:

The Million Song Dataset is a great collaboration between Columbia University’s LabROSA and The Echo Nest where 1 million songs worth of data was packaged up in a research-friendly format.

This week, the organizers of the MSD added lyric data with our friends at musixmatch. It’s not…

Copyright or Copywrong ? The mXm Escrow

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:39:00 +0200

Without a doubt the hardest practical problem to solve creating a legal music business online is getting your copyright ducks in a row.
You people already in the music business will know what I’m talking about. If you’re a developer just getting started, read on, this is stuff you need to know about.

The universe of song publishing rights is an extraordinary mess right now, and nearly impossible to sort out. Especially around Lyrics. There is no industry-wide clearinghouse or dataset for publishing song lyrics rights, and since these rights are often transferred from one publisher to another and country by country, with no centrally available records, the problem is compounded.

Incredibly, if I do say so myself, musiXmatch is the only company in the world to have closed international deals with almost all the major music publishers. Not to mention that tons of indies and small publishers are contacting us every single day and signing up en masse.

This has allowed us to claim a truly unique opportunity, to create the only dataset that can take a query and then match all the metadata — artist, song, track, album, music publisher and the lyrics themselves — in one coherent result.

Despite our best efforts, this stuff is so mixed up that we we don’t know if we get something wrong, perhaps exposing some lyrics that have been transferred to a different publisher without our knowledge, or exposing some lyrics in some countries we could not. OK, we’re human. But beyond that we strictly adhere to the DMCA and promptly honor all take down notices that we receive from legitimate copyright holders.

And when it comes down to the often thorny issue of revenues, we are white hat all the way. We track every use and monetization of each lyrics file in our database in order to pay music publishers their fair share. When we cannot immediately identify the beneficiary, we hold all revenues in a Special mXm Escrow account in order to be able to distribute these monies to the rights holders upon request. mXm Escrow is our copyright fund.

When we go to sleep at night, this is what we dream about:

Reorganizing the metadata for the world’s discography, including all instances of monetization, and to do so in a way that renders the data capable of yielding realtime reporting of usage and revenues;
Protecting the rights and livelihoods of songwriters who are seeing their work being used illegally and without retribution;
Educating developers and providers of digital music services that the future of music is one that respects copyrights.

But when we woke up in the morning, we realized that we needed another full-time person to make the dream happen. And so we just hired the incredible and indefatigable Susan Sabatini, new Head of Copyright & Catalogue.

Susan is perfect for this job: she’s got lots of experience dealing with the complications of rights management and huge libraries of music, plus she is unflappable even in the face of the thorniest issues — a must in this business. Susan will be keeping in touch with music publishers, managing the content team staff, the mXm Escrow and fielding all DMCA issues and rights holders’ claims.

Welcome aboard, Susan.

musiXmatch Tops the Billboard Charts with New Fuzzy Matching

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:00:00 +0100

Matching is our business.

You should be able to throw the lyrics of any song at our database and we should be able to match it with the correct track and artist. Period. Everything else is gravy. So, if you know anything about this business, We’re going to astound you with a little news flash.

We took every top 100 song on the official Billboard charts from 1946 through 2010 (that’s 65 years of top 100 songs, kids) and verified that musiXmatch can match nearly 95% of those songs to their tracks and artists (well, 93.2923% to be precise). No other service in the world comes close.

Here’s an unofficial source of Billboard Historic Chart. (We can’t share the official one here because of contractual issues.)

This is not magic. We reached this milestone by mashing up four elements: (1) signing agreements with nearly all the major music publishers, (2) carefully ingesting the lyrics and music metadata into an intelligently structured database (3) adding a programmable fuzzy logic capacity to our search algorithm and (4) a whole lotta love.

The fuzzy logic implementation (discussed here in the developer support area) is especially cool. It means that we can match a track whether the input is “Billionaire by Travie McCoy Featuring Bruno Mars” or “Billionaire (feat. Bruno Mars) by Travie McCoy” without missing a beat. Take a look at this graphic, showing results with and without the fuzzy search.

This is just the beginning for musiXmatch. We founded our company only one year ago with a single all-consuming obsession — to create the world’s largest fully licensed international lyrics database and to match it to 99.99999% of the tracks available in digital format. And we will get there. We despise phrases such as “not found”, “your search did not match any documents” or “try different words”. They make us nauseous!

We have matching in our blood, in our DNA, it’s baked into our very souls.

We have assembled a fearsome team of co-founders and developers with a burning passion for all things music, and we are all hackers to the core. Together we have created a wickedly wonderful platform (fuzzy logic included) and a kickass API that you can get up and running quickly and painlessly.

The music business is finally showing positive signs of catching up to what the technology allows. It may be a tough slog, but we are committed to working with the other awesome startups in our industry to shine a beacon on the future of music. But we need you. We can’t do it alone (and it wouldn’t be as much fun) without you hackers, startups, artists and fans.

This is going to be a wild ride. Watch this space!

P.S: The data displayed in the graph are based on the results of matching Billboard’s historic top 100 charts, obtained through our premium Billboard account, with musiXmatch’s own Lyrics DB.

Frank Denbow is The new musiXmatch hero : meet SongVooDoo

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:00:08 +0100

Let’s say you’re out somewhere and you hear a great song playing on the sound system but just as you’re getting into it, the tune ends. And now you’re singing the chorus to yourself and trying to figure out how to identify the song and artist.
Here’s where our hero comes in. Frank is the creator of SongVoodoo.
Send a simple mobile text message (SMS) of the lyrics snippet to +1 917 934 3979 and get back an immediate response with the name of the track and the artist. For instance, send Go shawty its ya birthday and SongVoodoo sends you: That song is In da Club by 50 Cent.
Simple, right? And powerful.
Song lyrics are the poetry that surround us everyday as we go about our lives and now there’s an easy way to identify and discover those new songs that are getting into your head! Once you know the name of the song you can even send an SMS to listen to a clip of the song to get you singing again. Just send the text #play Michael Jackson billie jean and you will get a call back playing a clip of “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. Sweet !
SongVoodoo is built on the API’s of three wonderfully hacker-friendly companies, Twilio (for the SMS/text features), 7digital for the music clips and our own musiXmatch for the lyrics and was built during MusicHackday in NYCFrank has just gotten started, as he says :

This has sparked an interest in understanding the lyrics space on the web, seeing if there are other ways in which I can expand SongVoodoo to serve the lyrics needs of people online.”

What about you? Do you have a music app trapped inside of you ready to be released into the wild? Add a lyrics feature to multiply its awesomeness.
Be a hero.
Be our hero.

Image courtesy of Erdaniz Erda

The Future of the Music Industry Starts Here

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:05:20 +0100

echonest:

The Echo Nest announced a partnership with Island Def Jam today that will finally bridge the gap between cutting-edge app developers and the most popular music in the world. First, a little background on how we got here…

A few months back at Boston Music Hack Day, I overheard some excellent developers — all of whom have built music apps you’ve heard of — passionately and intensely discussing the finer points of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), mechanical royalties, and Fair Use. As a recovering music lawyer, I usually dig those conversations. But I couldn’t help but leave that one feeling that somewhere along the line, we as an industry had gone astray.

Why were these guys, who aren’t lawyers and have no interest in becoming lawyers, spending the few hours they have together in Boston navigating the legal complexities of building music apps? Our industry should be better at figuring this out so that developers can focus on what they do best, while the music and technology industries provide a support network around them to handle licensing and monetization.

Virtually every other creative industry has solved this riddle. Why not music apps?

For years, we at The Echo Nest have looked toward a future where any developer can build a great commercial music app that includes the most popular music in the world and compensates artists fairly without being sidetracked by the hassles and transaction costs that have come to nearly define digital music. Most of the people reading this are well aware of the frustrating gap between innovative app developers and popular music. That gap hurts content owners, app developers and, ultimately, music fans, who never get to enjoy all the fantastic ideas that never see the light of day, due to licensing headaches.

Today, we take a big step towards closing that gap.

We’re pleased to announce the world’s first direct partnership between a major label and the app developer community. As part of this agreement, Island Def Jam, the leading division of the biggest record label in the world, Universal Music Group, will make its music and videos available through The Echo Nest’s APIs so that at long last, thousands of app developers on every platform will be able to build commercial music applications around Island Def Jam’s incredibly popular catalog of music.

Together, Island Def Jam and The Echo Nest send a clear message to the developer community: Focus on creating a great user experience, and we’ll handle the rest. The Echo Nest is supplying all of our deep music data and developer tools, while Island Def Jam provides top-flight music and videos, and manages the rights issues associated with distributing them within the apps you create. Our shared goal is to power new, highly-attractive experiences for music fans, to promote Island Def Jam artists and distribute their music in clever ways, and to create new revenue streams for the dual creative forces at the root of tomorrow’s music industry: app developers and recording artists.

I have to give major props to Island Def Jam and Universal Music Group for their vision and conviction in taking this major step. Expect a lot more to come…

- Jim