- case studies
How Concord uses AIMS to score major sync placements
“I use it for every search; it lets me search more precisely and deeper into the catalog. It’s refreshing how on the money it is.”
About Concord
Concord is the world’s leading independent music company, supporting more than 125,000 artists and songwriters. With a catalog of 1.3 million songs, compositions, sound recordings, films, plays and musicals, it’s one of the most culturally relevant collections of creative rights in history. And now that “everybody on the team uses AIMS,” it’s all discoverable.
Concord’s Adam Travis (Senior Manager of Publishing Sync [Ads]) gives a detailed look at the company’s experience with AIMS.
The Challenge
High-volume briefs, complex asks & limited search flexibility
Concord has piles of requests coming in daily. Sync briefs are often very hard to decipher, with contradictory references and requests for tracks about niche lyrical themes. The team needed an advanced search for its catalog, one that could interpret complexity and ambiguity — not just as well as the pros but even better. It also had to be the fastest, most precise AI on the market.
The Solution
Scoring sync wins with tracks impossible to find otherwise
For advanced AI search that analyzes the actual audio and lyrics without relying on tags, there’s rarely such a thing as “too niche.” Adam recalls successful ad placements thanks to AIMS uncovering genre-defying, often hard-to-define tracks.
“I’ve gotten an obscure song placed in a commercial that I’m confident came from an AIMS search — by a band with a very niche, particular sound.”
Copy/pasting briefs into a search feels almost too easy
Getting results in seconds by pasting a full brief or portions of it directly into AIMS is a whole new world. It’s comparable to Google; now that we get answers at a click, we wonder how we ever spent hours shuffling through resources. And how much great stuff we probably missed.
“Everybody on our team uses AIMS. I do far less scrolling because the results are so much more accurate. I’d miss it tremendously.”
An intelligent search that lets you info-dump, then kills it
Because AIMS Prompt Search understands natural language, Concord turns to it daily with briefs that take a lot of navigating. When the team needs a sounding board or creative momentum, this is the way to go. It’s quickly become a nonnegotiable not just for Adam but for the entire team.
“I like being able to talk out what I'm looking for, and that's what I can do just by typing in what I want.”
Finding music based on the deeper meaning of lyrics
With half of Concord clients asking for some sort of lyrical topic or sentiment, AIMS Lyrics Search has become the team’s go-to. They can paste the client request into the search verbatim to find songs based on the underlying meaning of lyrics, or with exact words if needed.
“One of our favorite features is describing a sound using lyrics and lyrical themes, which is about 50% of our searches.”
Great for references with no common thread (or so it seems)
From his ad sync perspective, Adam explains that clients often give tons of reference tracks as they try to “describe a vision for themselves” — but you can tell they’re not sure what they want. When he struggles to figure out what they mean, AIMS Similarity Search either cracks the mystery or “at the very least really hones in on a good starting point.”
“Ad briefs can be very broad yet specific. That's what AIMS is best at; I can take each piece and find 4–5 songs for every reference very quickly, really digging deep into the catalog. It starts playing things, and I'll then expand on a sound.”