Abbey Road Red recently announced the two exciting new start-ups (MyPart & Audoo) joining our Music Tech Incubator Programme. To provide a chance for readers to learn more about MyPart, we caught up with Founders Matan Kollnescher & Ariel Toli Gadilov, to ask some questions around the company's vision and the fantastic team they have assembled - read on to find out more.

What is MyPart?

MyPart is a music tech company with a game-changing AI powered platform that transforms any music catalogue into a 'song mine'.

We’re working on the next-generation of song search and classification, using multiple 'song mining' techniques to dig out songs that are most relevant to day to day needs. Our latest product - 'Songmine' - leapfrogs song discovery for Record Labels, Music Publishers and Music Supervisors in synch, A&R and other song-search purposes, offering true visibility into any potential pool of songs so that you won’t miss out on your valuable hidden gems.


What are you developing?

We’ve developed proprietary algorithms that conduct deep and granular analysis of lyrical and musical relevance based on advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) feature extraction methods and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. These capabilities fuel our unique approach of combining two core competencies:

1) The ability to search for songs with a set of reference songs - Our song fingerprinting technique abstracts the DNA of any song in a way that enables searching for songs with common musical, lyrical and structural features to a set of reference songs (i.e. benchmark playlist). We can literally understand the underlying aesthetics and semantics of any song, capturing the essence of what you’re currently looking for and prioritizing all potential songs by their musical and lyrical relevance to it

2) A unique and distinct focus on lyrics - Lyrics matter. At the heart of our approach is a special focus on automatically analyzing lyrics and song titles.


What was the motivation / trigger?

Four years into my studies of song writing and music theory, and soon after winning one of Israel’s written poetry awards, I (Matan, MyPart’s co-founder and CEO) had a light-bulb moment.
I realized an inherent paradox that Ariel (my co-founder and COO) later confirmed in market research: the more amazing content created, the less likely it reaches the right executive’s ears.

The internet age has given the lone creator a bit of a platform, but it also created a glut in the marketplace: 97% of all songwriters go undiscovered and 99% of songs are untapped. Tens of thousands of songs are released daily to various music platforms, but the only way for them to stand out is the for the right performer to break through commercially with them. And that just felt wrong. Why should so many inspiring songs remain buried in drawers?

At some point, we realized that music executives face a similar challenge. There’s an ever-growing avalanche of new material coming in, and massive, valuable catalogues accrued through the years, but the song discovery process remains heavily based on listening to hundreds of irrelevant songs. Seasoned executives might try to query their song library with metadata tags such as ‘genre’, ‘year of release’, ‘energy level’ etc., but those simply don’t capture the essence of what you’re really looking for.

As an experienced computer scientist and electrical engineer, I started applying my understanding of Data Mining, Digital Signal Processing and AI to the realms of Music and Lyrics, to tackle these challenges head on.

Tell us more about the team you have assembled to tackle this issue

To mold this vision into a viable business, we had to get intimate with the music industry. Since MyPart’s inception, we were able to harness a group of exceptional music industry leaders:

Ronny Vance became President of MyPart. Ronny is the former president of Geffen and Interscope Music, responsible for signings of artists with sales of over 200 million records, including Tupac, Gwen Stefani, New Edition and more.

Evan Bogart became MyPart’s Head Coach. Evan is a Grammy-winning songwriter who wrote Beyoncé's Halo, Rihanna's SOS and tens of other chart-leading songs for Britney Spears, Hot Chelle Rae, MKTO and more.

Ivri Lider, an acclaimed Israeli performing artist, songwriter, X-factor and The Voice judge, became a partner in MyPart soon after.

Howard Appelbaum, former President of Nielsen Entertainment and Billboard and Charles Salice, a successful producer responsible for music videos for Taylor Swift, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Shakira etc. joined MyPart’s advisory board.

A parallel task was to build an R&D team that could support such an ambitious endeavour. We built a very strong team of ex intelligence corps graduates with data science, machine learning and engineering expertise, as well as experienced music and lyric scholars.

Supported by early believers on the funding front, such as TheTime and FirstTime VCs and several acclaimed angel entrepreneurs, this incredible team boosted our efforts and built a product with which we won Gold at the 2018 Mass Challenge Cohort and second place in the DLD Innovation Competition.


Why Abbey Road Red?

There’s an extraordinary alignment of core values between Abbey Road and MyPart. Abbey Road is celebrating its inspiring heritage while leading music innovation, and enabling new generations of musicians - MyPart aims to do just that!

MyPart respects musical heritage by enabling far better utilization of historical assets from Music Publishing Catalogues, while boosting new incoming material pipelines and making them more efficient. Its AI powered platform supports the discovery of both solicited and unsolicited, newly created or long forgotten songs. For the first time, all songs can get a real chance at reaching the right relevant ear, whether that of a recording-artist, Record Label, Music Publisher or Music Supervisor.


What are your long-term goals?

We aim to break the conventional barriers that prevent amazing songs from reaching the right ears and liberate songs and songwriters by match-making the right content with the right industry people.


Where can we find out more about MyPart?

Keep up to date through our website at www.mypart.com


More about the Founders...

Matan Kollenscher (CEO) - A hands-on leader in Music and Tech innovations. Award winning songwriter, published poet, musician and acclaimed Engineer and Software Development Manager. Machine Learning and Digital Signal Processing expert.

Ariel Toli Gadilov (COO) - An experienced entrepreneur with in-depth financial and legal know-how, including six years at Intel corporation treasury department. A Jazz enthusiast and trumpet player.