User submissions
10,000+
Products used
Tag & Search Dashboard
‍Business Problem
Every year, Vans searches for the best new music artists in South East Asia. Their Musicians Wanted competition is fierce, with thousands of entries from 13 Countries, including China, South Korea, Japan and Australia. For the last several years they have received  >10,000 submissions, which is impossible to listen through manually.
With artist names, titles and basic descriptions submitted in local languages, it is difficult to navigate these submissions and give all tracks the best opportunity to succeed.
The Solution in a Nutshell
Musiio takes two weeks to organise, search, playlist, and find the best submissions. To do this, we Tag submissions with our standard taxonomy and aggregate all of this information into our Search platform to sort and reveal the best musical talent from the region.
How Tagging Works for Vans
Musiio’s AI has been trained on millions of audio files to “listen” to music, analyzing music for features such as genre, mood, BPM, emotion, instrumentation and quality with a 90-99% accuracy. All of this information is generated purely from the audio file, with no additional context.
Here’s an example of the information that can be generated using one of 2019's competition winners - shahrae's Awkward:
The problem that most businesses with a growing music catalogue face in 2021 is Volume and Time. For Vans, this means >10,000 tracks with a two-week turnaround. Throwing heaps of manpower would be costly to do accurately and difficult to manage.
Automatically tagging all competition submissions removes the cumbersome and time-consuming task of organising the songs, allowing Vans to spend more time on the human task of listening to the music.
Additionally, a standard taxonomy enables A&R executives to navigate a catalogue objectively and consistently with fewer subjective disagreements, without prior knowledge of the artists, and regardless of language.
How Search Works for Vans
Vans sends Musiio a representative playlist from each country in the competition. It contains tracks that are resonating in the region. Our Music Team will use these as seed tracks to generate inspiration in searching the submissions.
The Search Dashboard allows our Music team to perform Audio Reference Searches (think reverse image search, but with audio), based purely on the audio of these seed tracks, to find matches in the given catalogue. Results can be filtered further with tags.
Perhaps the team is looking to put together a playlist of high energy punk artists that suits one of these countries’ audio references. With Musiio’s Search Dashboard, they can drop in the audio reference, and then apply high energy and punk tags to further filter the results.Â
Greater than the sum of its parts
It is this combination of technologies that ensures our ability to deliver to a high standard. With a high volume and a short turnaround time, the technology transforms what otherwise would be a messy and difficult task into one which is organised and streamlined, and to ultimately ensure we are able to support Vans in finding the best music for their brand in the region.
"The biggest challenge with AI is people saying, but what if it misses something, to them I say, no system is ever 100%, but with our AI, every track will be processed. I guarantee if you try to listen to 10,000 tracks manually you will only be able to do a few 100, giving so many less artists an opportunity to be heard. AI is the future when it comes to address the amazing volume we now see in the Music Industry, I am proud of VANS and the APAC region for being at the forefront of this approach." Hazel Savage, CEO & Co-Founder at Musiio
“Here at Vans, we love to work with partners who have the same passion for music that we do. This year, working with Musiio as a technical partner will really help us to streamline our processes and maximise the effectiveness of our competition. We have many great partners this year, including Tunecore, Spotify, KRK, Kramer and Musiio. It's an all star line up to support an all star lineup of musicians that we can't wait to discover all over APAC." Vans Team
Interested in how AI can help your business? Contact sales@musiio.com
