The Helios music discovery engine is a powerful B2B technology to allow searching of large commercial music libraries by using music itself as the search key. Here are a few of the many possible uses for Helios:

You have a streaming music service. The listener asked to skip the current track, but they also never want to hear anything similar again.

Your business receives a new supply of music each month from artists. You need to be able to predict which new music is more likely to generate revenue based on how existing music in your catalogue already performed.

You have a digital jukebox in bars, restaurants, and pubs. You want venue patrons to be able to play more music like the music they just paid to hear.

You have a music catalogue management platform that publishers and labels use to track their digital assets. Your customers want to be able to search within their own catalogue using your slick platform.

An online digital music store needs to make intelligent recommendations to shoppers based on songs already in their cart before check out.

You have a streaming music service for different venues or channels. You have in-house DJs that custom curate the playlists. You want to reduce their work as they create new ones.

You have a commercial music library of any size. Your clients want sync licenses fast for music for their film, TV, documentary, commercials, or video game.

You market software for film studios, such as plugins for major multimedia applications like Adobe Premier. Use the Helios API to augment its capabilities.

Nearly always clients approach you with samples already in hand, possibly from your own catalogue. “Hey, do you have anything else like this?” This could be an MP3 or a YouTube video URL. Use the customer’s samples directly with Helios to help them find what they’re looking for.
Traditionally, in the absence of such technology, the way this has been done for decades may surprise many. It is both costly and involves many hours or even days of manual human labour which delays the business process. The business must manually search, usually using textual tags, and listen to a great deal of irrelevant music in the hopes of finding the one the client is actually willing to spend money on.

How does it work?

Helios works by analyzing the actual sound of each audio track it’s provided. This is called sub-symbolic analysis. It does this by performing a complex digital signal processing analysis on both time and spectral domains. It actually listens to your music rather than just guessing what you want based on what it thinks someone like you listened to before. The scientific research Helios was based on is extensive and draws upon topics in physics, mathematics, and computing science.