Inaccurate metadata is the scourge of the music industry, certainly in terms of getting the right people paid fairly for their work.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re in their most creative moments, stopping to note down contributors and splits isn\u2019t always a priority.<\/p>\n
The winning project at music-tech firm OpenPlay\u2019s recent CoLab hackathon sought to address this. Built by Jake Handy, who placed third in the same event last year<\/a>, it was called Sesh. Not to be confused with the superfans-focused startup of the same name<\/a>.<\/p>\n This Sesh is an \u201cAI-powered studio companion\u201d designed to run in the background during songwriting sessions, capturing \u201ccontributors, credits, ownership splits, recordings and creative context\u201d. It then turns this into CWR, DDEX and CSV files: the building blocks for accurate metadata.<\/p>\n It reminds us of a startup called Session (originally Auddly) that was acquired by royalty-processing company Salt in 2023<\/a>, and which still offers its Session Studio<\/a> app to store audio and organise song credits.<\/p>\n Sesh\u2019s innovation appears to be the \u2018running in the background\u2019 element, capturing data so that musicians don\u2019t even need to enter it themselves \u2013\u00a0although presumably they would need to check that what it\u2019s captured is correct.<\/p>\n Handy was one of 67 people taking part in OpenPlay\u2019s CoLab this year during the Music Biz conference, with partners including DataArt, Cyanite, AWS and Cursor.<\/p>\n APIs and tools were provided by ACRCloud, AudioShake, AWS, Cosynd, Cursor, Cyanite, Harmix, Jambase, Luminate, LyricFind, MusicStory, Musixmatch, Sureel, Vobile and OpenPlay itself.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s platform.<\/p>\n An honourable mention went to Rachel Amponsah, who created a custom MIDI guitar designed to be accessible to people of all physical abilities \u2013\u00a0inspired by an injury to her guitar teacher that temporarily left him unable to play.<\/p>\n