"AIMS is a great tool that helps everyone work more efficiently."
Ron Mendelsohn, Megatrax Production Music, CEO
Hi, Ron! Thanks for chatting with us today. Hope it’s sunny in California.
How long have you been using AIMS and why did you choose AIMS over other music similarity search tools on the market?
Our Music Directors started using AIMS internally about 9 months ago and just last week we went public with it when we launched our new website.
Over the years we tried several music similarity search tools, and none of them seemed to work very well. You put in a big band track and you get back a country track with pedal steel guitar. It’s not very useful, like a completely random result, especially for more difficult tracks. Anyone can find something like the theme from Star Wars, but with all kinds of other instrumental music, AIMS is very helpful for finding tracks buried deep in the back catalog that we wouldn’t have gone to.
And remind us: how big is your catalog?
We have over 200,000 tracks, with many different versions and mixes. And if you’re looking for a dub house track or something, well, it’s not necessarily on an album called Dub House. Maybe it’s on an album called City Life, and no one would think to look there.
AIMS is unbiased. It’s not looking at album titles or artwork, it’s just looking at the audio and that’s very helpful.
Sounds like you’re really taking advantage of the tool. What are the features of AIMS you find most useful?
Link Search and File Search are the features we use, though I’m definitely curious about some of the other features you have and are developing, like Playlist Builder and Segment-Specific Search, because clients are always telling us that the selection of a track they want to match starts at 20 seconds or 45 seconds or something like that.
How big is your team and how are you using AIMS on a daily basis?
We have three Music Directors using AIMS, and more than 50 percent of requests from clients come with a link to a reference track. We’re talking about hundreds of searches every week.
I specifically made the decision to include AIMS in the launch of the new site because I wanted something we could point to as an exciting new feature. I didn’t just want to launch the site and say it’s pretty, it has new branding and nice marketing videos. I wanted to point to exciting new functionality, and that has definitely been appreciated by clients. We’ve been featured in the press partly because of the AIMS search feature.
Excellent! What benefits is your team getting out of AIMS?
All of our Music Directors use AIMS differently. One of our Music Directors in particular uses it for every search and says that AIMS saves time, enables him to work more efficiently and is a good starting point for every search.
So you’re trying to get your team to use AIMS even more?
Yes, I have championed AIMS from the beginning. As good as any one Music Director is, no one is going to know all 200,000 tracks in the catalog as well as a computer. There are always time constraints, searches are coming in every few minutes, and everyone is rushing to get searches out to clients. Even the best people can use the tool to work faster and more efficiently, so I’m urging them to use AIMS for every possible search.
How has AIMS helped you save time or work more efficiently?
AIMS is a great tool that helps everyone work more efficiently. It’s also very useful with track IDs. Every week clients ask us to ID tracks, such as “hey, we used this track three years ago. Is it yours?” Using AIMS to find those specific tracks saves a lot of time, without question. Music Directors don’t have to search through 200,000 tracks by themselves, they just pop it into the system. That’s a big win.
We’re happy to hear it! So, if you were to recommend AIMS to others, what would you say?
The system is great and we look forward to further improvements in its functionality, such as better handling of tracks with voiceover and vocals.