"AIMS is intuitive and time efficient, basically an extra set of ears!"
Catie Ginsburg, Partisan Records, Head of Sync and Partnerships
Hi, Catie! Thanks for agreeing to chat today. We’re especially excited for this interview because Indie Week is coming up. Can you start by telling us how long you have been using AIMS and why you chose it over other options on the market?
We’ve been using AIMS for about three months. It was Evan Plake at A2IM who connected me with Cory from AIMS. Cory and I chatted and it was clear that AIMS made sense for Partisan Records because I’m a one person sync department and typically don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of. I knew AIMS would help save time on music similarity searches.
Glad you’re finding AIMS useful! Can you describe how you use AIMS on a daily basis?
Even though we have a small sync department, we stay busy. Some days we get six briefs and every deadline is in two hours. That means you have to move quickly and send tracks off the top of your head. AIMS definitely helps me narrow everything down easily.
Clients tend to send us YouTube links with reference tracks. For example, one recent brief was for an advertisement for a tech company. They sent us six YouTube links and asked us to find something similar. One was an LCD Soundsystem track, one was a Justice track, things like that. I can put all those tracks into AIMS and narrow my results much faster.
Great to hear! What are the features of AIMS you find most useful?
The functionality and ability to search without vocals is a key feature that is incredibly effective. When I get a reference track it usually has vocals, so I’m trying to listen to the instrumental while ignoring the vocals, but it can be hard to fully separate the two in my mind. Having that ability with AIMS is great.
And do you see benefits of AIMS that might be specific to indie labels?
Most indie labels have a small sync team, if they have an in-house team at all. So using AIMS is like having someone to bounce ideas off of.
We have about 60 artists on Partisan, 20-30 of whom are active at one time. I also represent DFA and their masters’ catalog, and we’ve also started a publishing arm called Left Music. So that’s quite a lot of music altogether, it’s thousands of tracks. AIMS has really been helpful for digging into the catalog and it has brought up a lot of back catalog tracks I might have missed otherwise.
I’m often pitching artists that have new albums coming out, so my mind is on the most recent music. But AIMS might pull a song from 2001 that I never would have thought of. AIMS helps me discover more of the catalog. I’m only human, I’m not AI, so even though I know the catalog really well, there’s always little gems I haven’t thought of in a while or an instrumental track I’ve never pitched.
It sounds like AIMS is helping you maximize your back catalog and work faster. How much time do you save using AIMS?
An average search might take an hour by myself and now with AIMS it can take me closer 20 minutes. AIMS helps narrow down the search and it brings up artists that make perfect sense though I haven’t thought of them. It helps my brain that way!
With AIMS I can answer more briefs in the same period of time and I can send bigger playlists because it’s helpful in expanding the playlists I’m sending. I’ll read a brief, listen to tracks, go through what I know in my head, then use AIMS as my backup tool. It’s always interesting to see the overlap between what I’m thinking and what AIMS delivers, and also to see AIMS deliver very different results I’ve never thought of.
Well, thanks again for your time. One last question: if you were to recommend AIMS to others, what would you say?
As a one-person sync department, AIMS has been a huge help and timesaver. AIMS is intuitive and time efficient, basically an extra set of ears!