Music publishers have been spending so much money on buying catalogs and copyrights of famous artists rapidly. Universal Music Publishing group bought Bob Dylan’s entire discography last December which cost them more than $300 million. Stevie Nicks sold 80% percent of her works to Primary Wave Music for almost $100 million. This is what’s happening with the industry’s top stars. The songwriting startup Boomy is bringing this system of music royalties to the common man.
Alex Mitchell, co-founder, and CEO of Boomy told Engadget that they had a chat on equity in the music industry, “how do we fairly remunerate artists, what’s the role of labels,’ there’s just chaos happening in the music industry right now.” He found that one major obstacle on the path of amateur musicians is a technological one. A personal recording studio will be too much to handle in terms of money and also learning how to operate the hyper-granular control schemes of those audio workstations are also very much. It may take years to fully learn the controls. But an AI-based co-writer could bring down this technical obstacle as noted by Mitchell. Boomy was created in order to rectify this technical gap. The creators have to simply “add their own layer of humanity to it”.
Mitchell said that AI has been in use in studios and in the music creation process in general. He gives the example of Ozone auto-mastering that uses artificial intelligence to create mixes, add a final touch to tracks, and things like that. He said that Boomy has taken a lot from those concepts and rewrote them from the ground level. Boomy is essentially “a one-button music studio”. The Create Song option on the homepage will allow the users to compose original songs in a time limit of fewer than 10 minutes. They can work on the compositions until they are fully satisfied with the mix. It will also provide an option to upload the song on almost 40-plus streaming and social platforms where the author can earn royalties.
Boomy has no training on copyrighted works. Mitchell said “If I’m a music publisher and I own the rights to Michael Jackson, I’m going to look at that model I’m gonna say ‘great, you know what, that’s all mine’… if you’re making a copy of somebody else’s work, even if it’s transformed, you’re probably going to owe some publishing on that.’” He told that “We have some really advanced algorithms that are doing automatic mixing, deciding what sound should go together — what are the features of those sounds, how do those fit together, what is the perceived loudness rate of those sounds.”
Boomy will enable creators to register themselves as co-writers along with Boomy on their local publishing rights organization. Since the copyrights laws are different in every country, the platform has another way in which they ensure that the creators will get paid. Mitchell told Engadget that “You can come in and use it for free, make whatever you want, and on your way out, we’re assigning you to our label, and we’re going to give you an 80 percent rev share on everything we collect from what you made in the studio.”
Boomy has helped in creating more than 3 million songs to date. Mitchell has not given a correct figure but told that the platform has paid “tens of thousands” of dollars in royalties to their users. Mitchell also said that Boomy will be updated to feature more control and composition units. It is also looking into new methods to collect royalties for its users.
