- industry insights
Six ways sync teams at music publishers and record labels use AIMS
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We've been talking to sync teams at publishers and labels about how they use AIMS in their day-to-day work. The use cases they shared range from answering briefs faster to onboarding new team members and putting newly acquired and older music into pitches. Let's get into how each of these works in practice.
1. Searching in plain language
Teams working on briefs can now describe the project the way they'd explain it to a colleague: the mood, the scene, the setting, a pop culture reference. Prompt Search takes that description as it is, so the team doesn't have to translate the brief into keywords or rely on remembering which tracks might fit. Some teams even paste the whole brief straight in.
"The biggest cool thing is now we can just verbatim copy and paste our brief directly into the search. Being able to describe what we need in our own words has been very intuitive."
2. Building a pitch from a reference track
When a brief comes with a reference, that's usually where the search starts. The team pastes a link (YouTube works best, since AIMS can analyze the full track) or uploads a file, and works through the matches.
Often only part of the reference matters, like the chorus or the bridge. The team marks that section with the Segment tool and searches from it alone. When a result comes close, the team runs a new search with that track as the reference, which brings up more music with a similar feel from across the catalog. A few rounds of that, and the pitch builds out from one good find.
"One feature that has made a real difference is the ability to select a specific section of a track and search for similar music based on that particular moment. We couldn't do that before, and it has made our search process much more efficient."
3. Keeping up with more briefs
In a busy week, briefs stack up faster than the team can work through them, and the first job is deciding where to spend time.
A couple of quick searches per brief show whether the catalog has strong options. Where it does, the team goes deep on listening and building the shortlist. Where it doesn't, they move on and focus on the briefs where a placement is more realistic.
"We've had more briefs coming in at a faster clip. Thanks to AIMS, we're able to keep up and accommodate the increase, and not sacrifice the quality of our music pulls as we increase the quantity."
4. Onboarding new team members
A new team member's first weeks usually mean a lot of listening and a lot of questions for colleagues who've been around longer.
With AIMS, they can start working on briefs early, searching by description or reference before they know the catalog well. That brings onboarding down from months to weeks, as new team members can start pitching music immediately.
"When you join a publisher with 15,000 or 20,000 songs, you're not going to know all of them. AIMS helped me get familiar with the catalog a lot faster. It surfaces tracks you wouldn't have heard of, or wouldn't have had top of mind."
5. Getting new catalogs into pitches
A catalog acquisition adds music nobody on the team has heard yet. The team doesn't need to listen through it first, though. The new tracks are searchable in AIMS right away, whether or not they've been tagged.
"The impetus for us enabling AIMS was the rapid growth of our catalog. Over the last year we have made several exciting acquisitions that meant our track count grew by around 20,000 tracks in a very short timeframe. We knew that AIMS would not only help us manage this from a metadata standpoint, but would also enable us to maximize the pitching and revenue potential of the repertoire."
6. Putting the back catalog into play
When the team searches with AIMS, results come from the whole catalog, back catalog included. Older tracks show up next to recent releases even when their metadata is thin.
That goes for alternate versions and submixes too, which helps when a brief calls for an instrumental or an underscore. Once the results are in, keywords and metadata filters still help narrow them down.
"With AIMS, we're able to surface individual tracks (and even versions of tracks) that would previously never show up for specific client queries. We can find tracks that relate to each other in ways that aren't obvious from their album or genre groupings."
A fair shot for every artist you represent
Under deadline, teams tend to pitch the tracks they already know. AIMS ranks results only by how well the audio fits the search, so every artist and songwriter on the roster has a real chance at each brief.
That's better service to the roster, and a big part of why publishers and labels bring AIMS in. We take on the heavy lifting of search, so sync teams can focus on what they do best: picking the right music for each brief, with full control over every pitch that goes out.
"Results are based purely on the merit of individual songs, rather than any search habits or go-to tracks that we've picked up over the years. [...] As someone working at the coalface of pitching, my favorite thing about working with AIMS is that I never feel that the tool is replacing the human work that I'm doing. Rather, I feel it enhances my discovery, eliminates the noise, and ultimately helps me select better ideas."