Jeff Blue isn’t your ordinary A&R exec or manager. He’s on a quest to seek out and develop unsung talent--then help these artists make it big. And he’s done it, dozens of times, working with everyone from Linkin Park to Macy Gray.

“I search for talent and potential in songs, for identifiable voices, great writing, artistic integrity, unique sound design, and star quality,” Blue says. “I can tell this by a single song. I can determine if it is worth doing a consultation.”

That’s just the beginning. Blue puts bands through their paces, working on every aspect of their repertoire and performance. “Almost all bands think they are ready to be signed. But it’s really about challenging their artistic vision, experimenting with the sound, style, and concept so we can add to their strengths and subtract from their weaknesses,” reflects Blue. “I always tell bands, even if you’ve already made a full record, be ready to accept that it may not be what we will end up shopping. The bands that succeed embrace the challenge! You can’t always expect things to fall in your lap, and nothing ever goes as planned. That’s what makes this creative business exciting.”

Finding the band or artists who can take this journey can be daunting, in an era when anyone can record and upload their music. The volume is high, the quality varies, and sorting through it all takes time. One vital tool Blue uses to track down artists with real promise: Music Xray, the 21st-century A&R platform that merges human expertise and machine learning.

“I use Music Xray in a very specific way,” explains the veteran music businessman, who has 43 platinum artists to his credit. “I’m not looking for YouTube sensations or Vine or Facebook likes. I want raw talent that I can use my 22 years of experience to develop. Music Xray provides that platform.”

Music Xray helps expert ears like Jeff’s find that needle in the music haystack, that song that speaks loudly of potential. With features that allow professionals to review, sort, and respond to tracks and submissions efficiently, with analytics flagging cool songs that pass muster with other industry pros and match certain sonic patterns, the site points out tracks that might fit a professional user’s needs. Music Xray has over 210,000 artist accounts and has filtered about 1.8 million songs. It has facilitated more than 10,000 songs being selected for opportunities, from ad placement to production deals.

These tools helped Blue find Riot Child, one of his most recent projects. This discovery led to involved relationship that honed the band’s powers. “We wrote and recorded dozens of songs. We changed band members, we changed the name, but we never changed the drive and artistic integrity,” says Blue of the hard-working, all-woman band. “We finally created the sound that was believable, unique and authentic to them. The band then received a residency at Universal Studios Hollywood, red carpet events, radio and magazine interviews, thousand-seat shows, and now major management and labels are asking for showcases.”

Bands that Jeff Blue took from Music Xray to major deals:

Emphatic

Emphatic was discovered on Music Xray after Blue listened to the songs they had submitted on the site. With his help, a few sold out thousand-seaters and three and a half months later, Emphatic had several record deals on the table. They ended up signing with Atlantic Records and Warner Chappell Publishing. The first album was produced with Howard Benson (Kelly Clarkson, My Chemical Romance, Seether, Three Doors Down) and mixed by Chris Lord Alge (multi-Grammy winner). Emphatic is now signed with Sony and has had three Top 10 rock radio hits so far.

WERM

WERM tried unsuccessfully for months to strike a deal with major labels on their own. It wasn’t until Jeff Blue found them on Music Xray that their luck changed. After a few months, WERM secured a deal with Universal Republic and produced with Don Gilmore (Linkin Park, Korn). WERM is on tour now, and has toured with the likes of 30 Seconds to Mars.

The Holding

The Holding was also discovered on Music Xray by Blue. Just three months later the group had offers from Universal Republic and Mercury Island Def Jam. They signed with IDJ. Tim Pagnotta (Neon Trees, Walk the Moon) and Blue produced the album.

About Music Xray

Music Xray is the vision of musician and entrepreneur Mike McCready, the co-founder and CEO of Polyphonic HMI, a company that launched a technology in the mid-2000s called Hit Song Science, profiled by Malcolm Gladwell and a bevy of other media for its innovative approach to song analysis. The company became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, which remains one of the most popular case studies taught at business schools around the world.

For this more recent venture, McCready saw that the industry needed more than one way to find the needles in the growing haystack of recorded music, with 90% accuracy. The platform unites approximately 80,000 music industry professionals (music supervisors, A&R execs, managers), 200,000 artists, and 200,000 fans to identify and connect new music with those who need it, to the benefit of all. Around 1000 songs and performers a month are selected for a wide variety of opportunities via the site.

100 million dollars. That’s the value Music Xray and their investment partner, Digital Daruma, expect to be adding to the recorded music industry in 2018, driven by its new Artist Investment program, currently in limited private beta. In the past few months, Music Xray’s confidence in its ability to predict successful songs has become strong enough, that they are beginning to invest in the careers of artists with high potential songs. It’s the culmination of years of data collection and industry crowd-sourcing within its closed ecosystem, combined with artificial intelligence and music analysis software that picks likely winners and matches song candidates to opportunities.

Prior to submitting their songs to the professionals behind thousands of industry opportunities, artists put their songs through a process Music Xray calls Diagnostics in which five professionals and 20 potential fans evaluate them. The results get plugged into Amazon’s Machine Learning Platform and compared to hundreds of thousands of songs that have gone through the same process over the past several years. Music Xray knows which of those songs ended up receiving offers from the industry on the site, which ones were rejected multiple times, and how potential fans reacted. Once the calculations are made, Music Xray generates a “Selection Prediction Score, ranging from 0% likely to be offered a deal all the way to 99%.

Artists can then make informed decisions about whether or not they should continue to submit to opportunities. Submissions cost $16 on average so in essence, Music Xray is discouraging artists with low-potential songs from continuing to submit while keeping the pipeline to the industry largely unclogged.

Recently, Music Xray has begun offering to cover the cost of 20 submissions for artists with songs likely to succeed. In exchange, Music Xray gets a cut of the deals the artist lands.

“There is no other approach like this anywhere,” states Mike McCready, CEO of Music Xray and seasoned hit song identifier. “This program finds that rare sweet spot where emerging talent can get a boost. Taking the risk on fronting submission fees makes business sense for us because we’re basing the decision to invest on empirical data.”

To identify future winners, Music Xray has created a sophisticated filter that unites human and machine intelligence. On the human side, industry decision makers evaluate thousands of songs and acts each day. Any musician can have their music considered for almost any industry opportunity--from major label deals to placements in TV shows--with the guarantee of being heard and getting a response, something unheard of in the traditional music business. The Selection Prediction Score Music Xray generates on the first transaction assumes the song will be shown to the professionals behind at least 20 opportunities. Music Xray is over 90% confident in their predictions.

And that’s where things get interesting.

“We’ve reached the point where we can make strong, meaningful predictions,” notes McCready. “We have a critical mass of artists and industry professionals interacting to generate enough reliable data to add big computing power and make sense of it. Until we had the site’s 8 or 9 core features, which took years to build, and until that last piece, Selection Prediction, was plugged into Amazon Machine Learning Platform, we couldn’t do this. Once all the elements were in place, we had a sustainable model for growth and for supporting artists who had yet to break into the mainstream.”

The returns on these investments are generating a growing revenue stream for the company, while providing an invaluable service to some of the industry’s largest players of a continuous supply of needles from the haystack of millions of songs and acts.

“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” says Jeff Durand, Music Xray’s CTO and principal tech architect. “We crunch the numbers and if we think a song or band is destined for a deal based on our own math, we might decide to make the investment.” Music Xray aims to invest in a diverse array of sounds and genres, to maximize success.

If tracks don’t fare well in the site’s analysis, Music Xray doesn’t lead artists on; the site purposefully sheds over 80% of the users who join each month. McCready says, “We’re a filter. And that requires that we filter a lot of the music out.” So far, the company has a great win rate: 13 out of the 13 early artists chosen for investment have been selected for deals.

Industry users of Music Xray include players like Atlantic Records, Roc Nation, Epic Records. Supervisors for TV shows like The Voice and Dancing With The Stars have gotten on board.

“It’s the clever application of very diverse technologies that make Music Xray work. It’s rewarding work because we’re solving complex problems and making the industry a better and more transparent place,” concludes Durand.

All hooks and only the hooks, all the time. That’s what the Hookblast Podcast offers: a weekly 10-minute snapshot of the catchiest part of several yet-to-be-discovered songs as determined by one of the music industry’s most savvy combination of fan feedback, professional opinions, and machine-powered discovery.

It’s the latest offering from Music Xray (www.musicxray.com), the platform built to clue A&R and music supervisors into emerging artists with strong hit potential—before these artists ever make their first deal. On Hookblast Podcast, which is available to stream for free on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Podomatic, and on the iPhone Podcast app, this ear candy is easy to savor. In short bursts, listeners can hear the catchiest parts of a dozen up-and-coming tracks that are bubbling up on the platform, which uses the combined power of human review and machine learning to identify promising new songs. Though the service is built for TV and film music supervisors, label A&R executives, and A-level song producers, Hookblast Podcast allows anyone to hear catchy new music before deals are signed.

By sharing the hookiest hooks in a fun format, Music Xray hopes to highlight promising artists who are gaining serious traction on the platform. “We’re a filter. We're the only company able to crowdsource the industry's top ears and to know in real time what's truly next,” notes podcast host and Music Xray CEO Mike McCready. “The songs and acts we feature are chosen only from the top songs bubbling up within the private access data available only to industry professionals with Music Xray accounts. So a peek behind this curtain for everyone else is what makes this podcast compelling.” There are tracks picked by the several thousand industry users who evaluate and selected thousands of artist-submitted tracks a day.

McCready is no stranger to finding novel ways to approach music discovery and evaluation. He was co-founder and CEO of Polyphonic HMI, a company that launched a technology in the mid-2000s called Hit Song Science. Hit Song Science garnered a lot of attention for its purely software-based approach to predicting hit songs. Recently, McCready saw that the industry needed additional tools to find the needles in the growing haystack of recorded music. Music Xray was born, and it has already resulted in thousands of deals for hitherto unknown artists.

Now these artists are gathered in one podcast, available at hookblast.com.

About Music Xray

Music Xray is the vision of musician and entrepreneur Mike McCready, the co-founder and CEO of Polyphonic HMI, a company that launched a technology in the mid-2000s called Hit Song Science, profiled by Malcolm Gladwell and a bevy of other media for its innovative approach to song analysis. The company became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study which remains one of the most popular case studies taught at business schools around the world.

For this more recent venture, McCready saw that the industry needed more than one way to find the needles in the growing haystack of recorded music, with 90% accuracy. The platform unites approximately 80,000 music industry professionals (music supervisors, A&R execs, managers), 200,000 artists, and 200,000 fans to identify and connect new music with those who need it, to the benefit of all. Around 1000 songs and performers a month are selected for a wide variety of opportunities via the site.

Lean startup has built a powerful platform that gives guaranteed feedback, invests directly in artists, and helps pros find that perfect needle.

Once upon a time, there was a regular stream of recorded music, and the flow was controlled for the most part by the label system. Now, after the flood, even seasoned pros who know what they want to hear are drowning in a sea of options. For artists, it can feel impossible to break through and stand out, even when making excellent music.

Music Xray has dived into this perplexing problem, creating a space where artists can get feedback from more than 1,200 pros and 200,000 fans, have their music compared to in-demand sounds and reference tracks, and can turn their music into deals. Pros can have a go-to place to find that elusive perfect soundtrack or that emerging artist with everything in place to make it big.

Music Xray is the vision of musician and entrepreneur Mike McCready. Growing up in a tiny Nebraska town with a population of a few hundred, he dreamed of a life in the music business, but had no easy path to get there.He wound up in Barcelona, Spain and cut his teeth as a business owner. Intrigued by the quirky way people told time in Catalan (the local language), he designed and marketed wristwatches for the Catalan market. They were a hit. Many of the region’s business elite, sports celebrities, and music stars all took note and contributed their own bespoke designs which McCready sold as limited run editions.

The watches also led McCready to his dream of a job in the music business, when he was hired as marketing director at the Barcelona Olympic Stadium and the brand new enclosed arena next door. After the Barcelona Olympics, the city struggled to find sufficient revenue to keep the venues profitable, despite a heavy calendar of concerts, sporting competitions, and corporate events. Revenue increased each of McCready’s five years on the job, in part driven by more music related rentals. “We figured out that if artists started the European leg of their tours in Barcelona, instead of just making it a stop in the middle, we could have the additional rental income from the initial rehearsals,” McCready recalls. “The  first  tour to  take  us up on this was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I was in heaven.”

Meanwhile, McCready built a music career of his own, playing with a local band. They got signed to a label, only to have the group fall apart. “I fulfilled our obligation by recording an album of my own material,” says McCready. “I played pop-Catalan tunes, but with country touches. I wound up with a couple minor hits.”

As he learned the ins-and-outs of the business, McCready got thinking about technology, pop music, and what it would take to identify hits via machine learning. He teamed up with an established group of Barcelona-based programmers and developers, who came up with an algorithm that learned the common parameters of several decades of hits, then compared a new track to test its commercial potential. It proved to have a significant amount of predictive power.

This first project together, Hit Song Science, garnered a lot of major label interest and a flurry of international media attention, including from The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell. Yet the process ultimately proved frustrating: “A&R teams would use our analysis, which was pretty complicated and nuanced, to shore up decisions they’d already made,” McCready notes. “If it contradicted their opinions, they ignored it.” McCready knew more could be done with this approach.

It became an important cornerstone of Music Xray. “It’s easy to get confused about technology’s role in music discovery,” McCready muses. “It’s not a replacement for human ears and minds. It’s an enhancement, a diagnostic tool like an x-ray, that gives a listener more information. That’s the foundational idea behind Music Xray.”

However, McCready had learned that you need more than one way to find the needles in the growing haystack of recorded music out there. And it wasn’t just music professionals—the music supervisors and A&R teams—who needed more tools. It was artists themselves.

The process has several steps, each there for a reason. Though artists can post their music at no cost to the site, to submit a track for one of the numerous opportunities offered by music pros, an artist has to put their work through Diagnostics. The Music Xray algorithm compares the track to other works and gives the artist feedback as to the likelihood it will be accepted by a pro or supported by the site’s fans, listeners who rate tracks alongside pros. The pros on the site are required to give feedback on a handful of criteria—and those who dial it in or don’t listen are banned from the site, which strives to maintain a healthy ecosystem of listeners, creators, and deals.

The combination of computer, professional, and fan feedback creates a robust subset of great music, a stack of needles that emerges from the mess of hay. “Industry pros are rating every song they hear. This means someone else will find it, if it’s a good song,” explains McCready. “If you don’t go into needlestack and do the deal, someone else will. We’re ensuring that the product is being used the way we intended by creating a competitive environment.”  This environment includes big industry players like Atlantic Records, Roc Nation, Epic Records, and supervisors for TV shows like Empire and Dancing With The Stars, who draw on the site’s tools to help them find strong music.

Submitting a track to an opportunity involves a fee, money that many pro users donate to charity or use to support emerging artists’ careers. However, Music Xray is not a questionable pay-to-play marketplace. If a track gets great feedback from listeners and the site’s algorithms, Music Xray has started testing a program whereby they will pay the submission fee on the artist’s behalf, in effect investing in an artist’s career in return for an interest in the deals the artists land on the site. If a music pro uploads a reference track that bears the same acoustical signature as a Music Xray artist’s track, the artist will get a notification, allowing musicians to hear about opportunities they might otherwise miss.“It’s the clever application of very diverse technologies that make Music Xray work. It’s rewarding work because we’re solving complex problems and making the industry a better and more transparent place,” explains Jeff Durand, Music Xray CTO.

The many moving parts make the site an increasingly valuable resource for both artists--who can close deals, communicate with industry professionals interested in their work, and learn more about what kind of track does best in what environment--and for pros, who can find and buy great, little-known music at its source.

“We’ve reviewed over 5,000 tracks on Music Xray, and signed about a third of our acts via Music Xray connections,” states Zack Cataldo, co-owner of Black Cloud Productions, a music publishing company with a placement history that includes major TV channels, airlines, and mobile companies. “The platform is a wonderful outlet for us to find new talent.”

“I’ve discovered so much new music on Music Xray I would never have known was out there,” raves Sony Music’s Jeff James, who has nearly two decades of A&R and licensing experience under his belt. “The ease of the platform really helps me out, and I’m consistently impressed with the talent level.”