The Hit in the Haystack: Using the Trifecta of Pro Ears, Algorithms, and Crowdsourcing to Connect Artists, Industry, and Fans on Music Xray

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.”