Artificial & Repertoire: How Has AI Restructured the A&R Industry?
By Anna Hudson
The topic of artificial intelligence has dominated the music industry in recent years, inciting questions, joys, fears, and most prevalently, change. Will AI change the music-making process, and if so, how? What role will it play? Will it displace jobs, or will it enhance creativity in the industry? While AI’s usage within the generative, creative realms of the music industry (such as beat-making and idea generation) is very well-known and visible, AI is being used everywhere – whether visible or behind the scenes.
The presence of artificial intelligence in the artist and repertoire (A&R) industry is strong, which has grown steadily over the past six years. Nowadays, AI can serve as an analytical tool. It can discover new artists, predict social media trends, organize music libraries, and use algorithms to determine if your song has hit-potential. AI programs in the A&R industry can help meet the high demands caused by streaming platforms and the gargantuan amount of music being uploaded to them daily. There are numerous apps, companies, and programs available to publishing companies, labels, and representatives that can make the extensive search process for the next big artist much less tedious and difficult. This article will introduce three musically-inclined AI companies and explore how each serves the A&R industry.
Instrumental
Instrumental is a data and artist relations company that uses AI to predict, analyze, and sign successful artists. It was founded by Conrad Withey, formerly of Warner Music Group (WMG), and Abi Hanna in 2014.1 Instrumental sifts through data from streaming services and social websites to find, predict, and analyze emerging talent. Its algorithm can flag potential up-and-coming artists based on its massive scale of data analysis. According to its founders, the program is designed to automate the scouting and profiling process traditionally handled by A&R representatives.2 Instrumental can find a budding artist on the internet, analyze their data, decide if the artist will be successful, and then send a quick text to an A&R team to let them know all about it.3
The most notable examples of artists found by Instrumental’s algorithm are Lil Nas X, Tones and I, and Arizona Zervas—each identified months, or even years, before major labels signed them. As co-founder Conrad Withey explained in an interview with Tim Ingham for Music Business Worldwide: “Instrumental’s tools flagged Lil Nas X as ‘hot’ in December 2018, three months before Columbia swooped; Tones and I was flagged in March 2019, two months before Dance Monkey was even officially released as a single in Australia – let alone achieved its world-conquering run; and Arizona Zervas, amazingly, was flagged as ‘hot’ by Instrumental in December 2017, nearly two full years before Columbia snapped up Roxanne.”4 An artist is flagged “hot” by Instrumental’s algorithm if they are experiencing multiple types of success on the internet at once, such as playlisting and various forms of high social media engagement (shares, subscriptions, etc.).5
Instrumental organizes their findings in several different ways that ease the workload of labels and A&Rs. It can find and match artists to micro-genres, matching around 5,000 artists with 4,000+ genres per week. It manages watchlists on behalf of record companies so they can keep an eye on growing artists. Ingham additionally explains: “Watchlists pull in additional social data about each artist, in addition to Instrumental’s own daily ratings – with one based on growth (Gx points) and one based on online engagement/popularity (Ix points). Any spikes in status automatically generate email and/or text alerts that can be sent to label A&R teams.”6 These watchlists are often used by smaller players in the industry, as major labels are well-off with their own data platforms and resources for data analysis. Watchlists can also be tailored to specific genres or countries.7
In 2020, Tencent’s investment in Instrumental led the company to scale back its algorithm licensing business.8 Instead of primarily sharing their technology with bigger companies such as Live Nation and Republic Records, Instrumental launched their own independent “artist services platform” called FRTYFYVE, which is a marketing agency on the surface and a record label at its core. FRTYFVE is currently the largest and most successful venture of Instrumental. Each artist signed to FRTYFYVE was discovered using Instrumental’s algorithm. Each signee must meet specific developmental criteria. They generate up to millions of streams per Spotify track with loyal, strong listeners, yet they don’t ever hit the Billboard charts. They are encouraged to promote market success by releasing large amounts of music (at least 12 pieces of music each year) and their success is built directly around intense data analysis. FRTYFVE encourages their artists to allow their marketing decisions be driven by their fanbase, rather than industry experts. Its guide for signed artists, ‘12 Months To Make It’, is designed to de-clutter the artist promotion experience while obtaining real exponential growth in streaming and promotion.9
Instrumental’s rigorous data analysis algorithm combined with its highly successful artist services venture, FRTYFVE, make it a powerful example of the endless possibilities for AI in the A&R world.
Musiio
Musiio is a Singapore-based music technology startup founded by Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson in 2018.10 It sets itself apart from other musically-inclined AI companies by actually listening to audio files to predict a song’s success, rather than using data analysis. Musiio’s core technology is AI/Machine learning, which processes whole audio files to look for patterns and to extract information, such as tags and features. Its products include a more recently developed Hit Potential Algorithm, along with its readily available AI tagging & searching technologies, and additionally APIs, all of which are currently for sale via their website.11
Each audio file Musiio analyzes is broken down and translated into a mathematical form that a computer can analyze. Then, data from the song can be extracted and organized in a completely customizable structure.12 Musiio’s technology has been thoroughly trained to look for elements in songs that are also found in viral, chart-topping hits, along virtually every thinkable element that makes objectively good music good. Through machine learning, Musiio can now listen to any song and decide if it will be a hit or miss.13
Another advantage to the auditory method of analyzing music is that data and numbers do not matter – meaning any song, no matter how big or small, can be analyzed and categorized as a hit. Musiio can listen to an unreleased song and decide if that song has hit potential simply based on how it sounds. In fact, part of Musiio’s rigorous testing for their Hit Potential Algorithm was testing whether or not it could find a hit in a haystack, so to speak. Hazel Savage, in her interview with Music Business Worldwide, also said: “We took 10 viral hits from YouTube, hid them in a database of 10k tracks from the Free Music Archive (creative commons database of music with varying quality) and asked the AI to find the top 20 hits. It found 9 out of 10 viral hits in the top 20.”14
The greatest appealing quality of this technology is that it can help A&Rs grapple with the influx of new music being released into the world in this digital age. Well over 40,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every single day, leading to an influx of good music usually lost in the flood of new media.15 In fact, according to Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Music Industry Report, out of the 184,000,000 tracks (ISRCs) streamed worldwide last year, 158,600,000–or 86% –of those tracks had 1,000 streams or less.16 Hazel Savage believes that Musiio can act as an assistant to A&R representatives, fielding the tens of thousands of new releases in a day to bring the top 20 hits to their desks. In an interview with Music Business Worldwide, she said: “I think good ears and gut instinct are important; people are important. AI should free them up to do what they do best.”17
Musiio’s website also offers two types of services for purchase: tagging and searching. Its detailed technology is quite skilled at automating the tagging process for up to 10,000 songs per day – a service that could be quite useful for music libraries and the sync industry. Additionally, because of its audio file analysis method, Musiio’s search technology can literally search a song with a song. Both of these services are revolutionizing the efficacy of managing large libraries of music. Musiio’s website specifically markets their services towards the sync industry, music libraries, streaming companies, DJs, and music marketplaces.18
In 2022, Musiio was acquired by SoundCloud, and now officially operates under the name ‘Musiio by SoundCloud’.19 SoundCloud prides itself on being an equally artist and fan-centric business, operating like a streaming service just as much as it does as an artist services platform. SoundCloud is completely free to use as a customer, but also features options for paid subscriptions. Because it does not provide monetary compensation to artists for uploads, and thus does not require all uploaded tracks to follow copyright law, there are on average at 123,000 tracks added to the platform per day as of 2023.20 Musiio was acquired by the company to help them categorize and manage their massive catalog of unbridled creativity. SoundCloud’s founder, Eliah Seton, via an interview with TechCrunch, said: “Acquiring Musiio accelerates our strategy to better understand how that music is moving in a proprietary way, which is critical to our success.”21
Sodatone
Sodatone is a Warner Music Group (WMG) company that uses both public and private data analysis to “understand and visualize artist potential”. Sodatone provides support for artist discovery, evaluation, marketing, insights, and streamlines the A&R workflow, helping the industry adapt to the constant changes of the streaming world.22
Sodatone is another machine learning-based platform that can analyze and assist its artists and their A&R representatives. Part of its goal is to shift the human brain-power of A&R into the artist-development space rather than the artist scouting/profiling space.23 Sodatone has a mobile app available on the App Store, but it is an internal application exclusively available to only labels and affiliates that are a part of Warner Music Group.24 The app features searchable information about both on-roster and off-roster artists – meaning A&R representatives using this app can track their own artists and keep an eye on other, non-WMG artists.25
Sodatone’s website boasts some impressive numbers to back up the success of their technology. Its searchable dataset features over 8 million artists and 250 million respective digital service platform (DSP) song releases. Sodatone artists (those who were discovered through the technology), possess a compiled total of 40 billion streams across streaming platforms according to the site.26
An image of a young PinkPantheress, sitting in her bedroom, is located front and center on the home page of the Sodatone website. PinkPantheress signed to Parlophone Records (A WMG subsidiary) in early 2022, after building up a huge following on TikTok during 2021.27 Nowadays, she’s even more popular than before, and was recently honored as Billboard Women in Music’s Producer of the Year award in 2024, after co-producing every track on her debut album, Heaven Knows. This album came out three years after the release of her breakout mixtape to hell with it in 2021, the original catalyst of her internet success.28
The reason PinkPantheress’s photo is featured on Sodatone’s website is because their technology found her. It was the main reason she was signed to Parlophone. According to Parlophone co-president Nick Burgess, “It was an old-fashioned signing. PinkPantheress was discovered with a data tool that we have, one of our A&R people spotted the numbers really early. She had the energy and the vision and we shared that vision. We signed her really quickly without any competition.”29
In conclusion, it’s quite clear that AI technologies are absolutely revolutionizing the A&R industry, and have been doing so for quite some time now. From using an algorithm to find the next big artists in all corners of the internet, to breaking down an audio file of a song to analyze its potential success, or to running a major label from a smartphone, the possibilities of using AI are quite endless, even in this particular space of the music industry. Scouting, development, and management of artists, both on the independent and major level can now be done with the help of AI, coming in at any or all steps of the process. These three companies are each aimed to uniquely support the A&R industry as it grapples with and transforms into the music industry of the future.
Endnotes
1. “Instrumental.” Music Business Worldwide, January 20, 2021. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/companies/instrumental/.
2. Tim Ingham. “Conrad Withey, Instrumental: ‘This Generation of Artists Are Savvy about Their Own Potential, Rights and Commercial Worth.’” Music Business Worldwide, January 20, 2021. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/this-generation-of-artists-are-savvy-about-their-own-potential-rights-and-commercial-worth/.
3. Tim Ingham. “Conrad Withey, Instrumental:
4. Tim Ingham. “Conrad Withey, Instrumental:”
5. Tim Ingham. “Conrad Withey, Instrumental:”
6. Tim Ingham. “Conrad Withey, Instrumental:”
7. Tim Ingham. “Conrad Withey, Instrumental:”
8. Tim Ingham. “With Awal and Platoon Both Acquired, Tencent-Backed FRTYFVE Is Becoming an Indie Power Player in Artist Services.” Music Business Worldwide, November 18, 2022. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/with-awal-and-platoon-both-acquired-tencent-backed-frtyfve-is-becoming-an-indie-power-player-in-artist-services/.
9. Tim Ingham. “With Awal and Platoon Both Acquired, Tencent-Backed FRTYFVE Is Becoming an Indie Power Player in Artist Services.”
10. “Musiio: Portfolio.” Entrepreneur First, June 18, 2024. https://www.joinef.com/companies/musiio/.
11. Dave Roberts. “Artificial Intelligence A&R Tools Keep Finding New Hit Artists. This One Actually ‘listens’ to Music.” Music Business Worldwide, December 17, 2020. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/artificial-intelligence-ar-tools-keep-finding-new-hit-artists-this-one-actually-listens-to-music/.
12. “Artificial Intelligence for the Music Industry.” Musiio. Accessed October 22, 2024. https://www.musiio.com/.
13. “Artificial Intelligence for the Music Industry.” Musiio. Accessed October 22, 2024. https://www.musiio.com/.
14. Dave Roberts. “Artificial Intelligence A&R Tools Keep Finding New Hit Artists. This One Actually ‘listens’ to Music.” .
15. Glenn Peoples. “The Ledger: Are There Really 100,000 New Songs Uploaded a Day? Maybe More.” Billboard, February 7, 2023. https://www.billboard.com/pro/how-much-music-added-spotify-streaming-services-daily/.
16. “Luminate Releases 2023 Year-End Report.” Luminate, October 22, 2024. https://luminatedata.com/reports/yearend-music-industry-report-2023/?aliId=eyJpIjoiSzZvWStTdG55N0xVUVlTcCIsInQiOiJ3YzFJMThBUEVLc3RsclZvaVBJSFhnPT0ifQ%253D%253D.
17. Dave Roberts. “Artificial Intelligence A&R Tools Keep Finding New Hit Artists.”
18. “Artificial Intelligence for the Music Industry.” Musiio.
19. Murray Stassen. “Soundcloud Acquires AI Music Company Musiio.” Music Business Worldwide, May 3, 2022. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/soundcloud-acquires-ai-music-company-musiio123/.
20. Glenn Peoples. “The Ledger: Are There Really 100,000 New Songs Uploaded a Day?”
21. Murray Stassen. “Soundcloud Acquires AI Music Company Musiio.”
22. “Tomorrow’s Superstars, Discovered Today.” Sodatone. Accessed October 29, 2024. https://www.sodatone.com/.
23. Murray Stassen. “Warner Is Signing Double the Number of Artists via AI-Driven A&R Tool Sodatone than It Did Last Year. Now, It’s Hired a Global Head of Data Science.” Music Business Worldwide, November 24, 2020. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/warner-is-signing-double-the-number-of-artists-via-ai-driven-ar-tool-sodatone-than-it-did-last-year-now-its-hired-a-global-head-of-data-science/.
24. Warner Music Group. “Sodatone.” App Store, October 17, 2023. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sodatone/id6451121618.
25. “Sodatone Mobile App.” Sodatone Mobile App. Accessed October 31, 2024. https://www.sodatone.com/mobile-app.
26. “Tomorrow’s Superstars, Discovered Today.” Sodatone.
27. Paine, Andre. “Inside Pinkpantheress’ Groundbreaking Campaign with Parlophone, Spotify and up Close Management.” Music Week, January 7, 2022. https://www.musicweek.com/talent/read/inside-pinkpantheress-groundbreaking-campaign-with-parlophone-spotify-and-up-close-management/084919.
28. Kyle Denis. “Billboard Explains: Pinkpantheress’ Impressive Chart Record.” Billboard, March 5, 2024. https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/pinkpantheress-chart-record-women-in-music-billboard-explains-1235622792/.
29. Paine, Andre. “Inside Pinkpantheress’ Groundbreaking Campaign.”
