In early 2015, recording artist and music executive, Lanre Dabiri, popularly known as eLDee wrote on his blog that he was quitting the music industry as a performing artist. In that article, he subtly introduced readers to his new venture called PlayData.
As both an artist and an investor in other artists, eLDee was in the perfect situation to understand the damage which lack of data collection was doing to the Nigerian music industry – specifically airplay. There was no way to track which songs were getting played, which songs were number 1 on radio or anything else concerning radio. PlayData aims to solve that.
According to information gathered from the website of the yet-to-be-launched service, PlayData will monitor broadcasters to provide information to artists, record labels, advertisers, promoters and royalty collecting societies what songs (or jingles) are being played. But how exactly will it do that?
Speaking with eLDee, the Chief Executive Officer of the venture via email, he reveals that PlayData has a fully automated process for monitoring broadcasters. When users sign up to have their content monitored, PlayData encodes the audio in question and then uses unique acoustic fingerprinting methods to identify audio files within audio streams.
eLDee said the fingerprint algorithm that PlayData uses, takes into account the perceptual characteristics of the audio file. Listening, matching, and reporting is done in multiple ways, either by listening in to the broadcast via online streams or with physical listening stations within the region of the broadcasts.
Though he did not delve more into these ‘acoustic fingerprinting methods’, it seems to be a new type as PlayData claims to have global patents filed for those methods. Another thing is that PlayData has promised that its service will be much more affordable than conventional tracking methods, which has been one of the major reasons why conventional tracking has not been going on in Nigeria.
The service will begin public beta testing begins in a few weeks, and we look forward to seeing how this recent innovation will play in the hands of the music industry.
