Catalogue size
200,000 tracks
Products used
Search API
Background music can have an enormous influence on human behaviour. In fact, research suggests that having the right music in retail and hospitality can increase staff productivity by almost 80% and improve the mood of customers.
What is BeatMix?
BeatMix understands this power and serves tailored background music to businesses and brands. It provides an easy and consistent way to have background music that fits with a location, brand identity or target demographic. And they’re trusted by bars, gyms, restaurants and big retail brands such as Diesel.
How does it work?
Beatmix’s curators collate tracks to build tailored music channels that are appropriate for specific types of business and target audiences. They also consult with businesses to understand their customers and can create bespoke channels for a client.
This music is served via a BeatMix player – a dedicated tablet running an app which can connect to a selection of bespoke or shared music channels. Because BeatMix manages the music on these channels, there’s no risk of music being played in a high-value location that’s not a good brand fit. This is a key difference from other services, creating more consistent customer experiences.
The challenge: scaling music curation servicesÂ
However, BeatMix’s had a fully manual curation process, which CTO Conor O’Dwyer realised would not scale.
“We're still a reasonably small business, servicing about 200 locations. We wanted to see a pathway to get to 1000 venues, and then 10,000,” he explains.
The two main issues were tagging consistency and the time it was taking the curation team to manually tag and then fit tracks to appropriate channels.
The solution: an AI-powered curation app
The obvious choice for O’Dwyer to reach his scaling goal was AI tagging. But even though he had developed all the other tools for BeatMix up to this point, he understood that AI is another skill set entirely.
“The idea of trying to research and develop machine learning processes ourselves compared to where Musiio were at – it was a no-brainer. We didn’t have to do anything, we could just integrate the technology immediately.”
The time savings for BeatMix were enormous, and the consistency problem was solved overnight.
The result is an in-house tool called BeatMix Curate, which does away with manual tagging entirely. By using Musiio’s tagging tech, BeatMix can automatically generate genres, BPM, mood and vocal presence metadata. Curators can use this to quickly find tracks with the tags that are appropriate for a specific channel or new client, safe in the knowledge that the tags are consistently applied.
Making playlists in minutes, not hours
BeatMix has also integrated Musiio’s audio reference search to speed up curation even further.
“If a new customer wants a new playlist or channel, our curators do a search with an existing track. It comes back with recommendations that form a new playlist. We remove any tracks that don’t fit, then publish it, and the customer has updated music within a couple of minutes. Before Musiio, that would have taken hours.”
These tracks can then be curated further, which is a much better use of time than tagging or manually finding music. For example, after performing an audio reference search, the curator might want to filter only tracks without a vocal – ideal for certain times of the day. This is achieved with a click in the Beatmix Curate app.Â
“Musiio has given us the confidence that we can scale a really high-quality service to thousands of locations,” says O'Dwyer
The future
In the near future, O’Dwyer is looking to automate more processes. For example, when new music is added to the catalogue, tracks that match a seed track closely are automatically published to a channel.Â
“There’s a possibility we could have some self-updating music channels, alongside our human-curated playlists powered by AI,” says O’Dwyer.
“There were two things that made integrating the API painless: The speed of response from the tech team at Musiio and the excellent developer tools on the website.”
Conor O'Dwyer, CTO at BeatMix on integrating Musiio’s Search API
“The BeatMix team have come up with a truly creative and impressive application for their business problem. We love that they’re using the AI to do what it’s great at – automating tagging and delivering search results at scale – while freeing up their expert human curators to be more creative. With their curation tool, powered by Musiio, they avoid wasting time listening to music they’ll never use.”
Mack Hampson, Commercial Director at Musiio
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