Inaccurate metadata is the scourge of the music industry, certainly in terms of getting the right people paid fairly for their work.
One obvious solution is starting to collect that metadata as early as possible in the music-making process: at the songwriting and recording stage. But as many musicians will tell you, when they’re in their most creative moments, stopping to note down contributors and splits isn’t always a priority.
The winning project at music-tech firm OpenPlay’s recent CoLab hackathon sought to address this. Built by Jake Handy, who placed third in the same event last year, it was called Sesh. Not to be confused with the superfans-focused startup of the same name.
This Sesh is an “AI-powered studio companion” designed to run in the background during songwriting sessions, capturing “contributors, credits, ownership splits, recordings and creative context”. It then turns this into CWR, DDEX and CSV files: the building blocks for accurate metadata.
It reminds us of a startup called Session (originally Auddly) that was acquired by royalty-processing company Salt in 2023, and which still offers its Session Studio app to store audio and organise song credits.
Sesh’s innovation appears to be the ‘running in the background’ element, capturing data so that musicians don’t even need to enter it themselves – although presumably they would need to check that what it’s captured is correct.
Handy was one of 67 people taking part in OpenPlay’s CoLab this year during the Music Biz conference, with partners including DataArt, Cyanite, AWS and Cursor.
APIs and tools were provided by ACRCloud, AudioShake, AWS, Cosynd, Cursor, Cyanite, Harmix, Jambase, Luminate, LyricFind, MusicStory, Musixmatch, Sureel, Vobile and OpenPlay itself.
Metadata was clearly a key theme. Second place in the contest was taken by Tony Brooke, who built an app to help musicians easily deliver their credits and metadata to OpenPlay’s platform.
An honourable mention went to Rachel Amponsah, who created a custom MIDI guitar designed to be accessible to people of all physical abilities – inspired by an injury to her guitar teacher that temporarily left him unable to play.
“That experience made me think more deeply about accessibility in music technology and sparked a desire to create an instrument that could offer high-level expression with reduced physical strain,” she wrote on Github, where she has provided more details of the project – built around an Arduino Micro computer and a custom-designed Flying V-shaped frame.
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