Artist tracks serviced
6,000 +
Products used
Tag API
What is Thematic?
Thematic is a collaborative platform where video creators can license royalty-free music from their favourite music artists in exchange for promotion.
The company was born out of a problem facing co-founders Marc Schrobilgen, Audrey Marshall and YouTuber Michelle Phan. They were working with emerging artists to connect them with tastemakers and influencers to help them grow their audience. They also identified that online video creators were looking for an affordable and safe way to use trending music in their content, to elevate and amplify their messaging. Thematic was the solution.Â
“Thematic’s catalogue is dynamic,” explains Co-Founder/CEO Marc Schrobilgen. Unlike stock music libraries, Thematic has a rotation of new song releases from emerging artists, just like a radio station. While in rotation, Thematic provides marketing and discovery opportunities through influencers. And the success rate for artists is extraordinary. Over 95 per cent of artists ​​who put a song on the platform get placed with an influencer, and it’s free for artists to upload their music and get promoted.
The creator community that Thematic serves is vast, with over half a million creators signed up.
The challenge: Discovery and onboarding
For Thematic, the main challenge was saving creators as much time as possible in finding the right song for their content. For creators – especially those without a musical background – it was difficult to search for music. A creator might be looking for an uplifting or energetic track. With limited data about each uploaded track, this could be tough because artists often describe their own music inconsistently.
The Thematic team also understood that the “I’ll know it when I hear it” approach wastes valuable hours for video creators, so they set out to provide instant music matches at the time of onboarding.
Discovery: Speaking the language of creators
As online creators are becoming more fluent in video culture, it is increasingly difficult for them to find right-fit music using traditional search terms such as BPM, key, and even genres. The Musiio Tag API directly addresses this problem by automatically tagging uploaded tracks with metadata derived solely from the audio. With Musiio classifiers such as mood, energy, genre, vocal presence and use case, Thematic can feed its recommendation engine and track music trends across specific types of video content.
“Musiio’s keywords unlocked things for us. We take Musiio’s data and restructure it so that creators can search intuitively for the music that best fits their content theme and personal aesthetic,” says Marc. By mapping this keyword data to specific lifestyle niches, such as uplifting music for an epic hiking video, creators are now optimising the performance of their videos by using songs that are resonating within those communities.
“Without Musiio, it would be extremely challenging to structure this data at the scale required to properly serve our user base,” says Marc.
Onboarding: Assessing musical identities
Using a part tech, part human process, Thematic analyses a creator’s past videos, audience and content vertical. Thematic then uses Musiio’s song-specific data points to shape recommendations that give the creator the best chance of finding the right song for their content.
“Musiio does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. While creator tools may not be the most glamorous part of the influencer world, they’re a critical part of the creator ecosystem. If creators are saving time, they’re able to make more content. If they’re creating better, more engaging content, they’re able to build and monetize their audience. The more creators that can make a living doing what they love, the more it inspires others to become creators, perpetuating this virtuous cycle. So I look at companies like Musiio and Thematic as the ones really helping to accelerate the creator economy right now.”
Marc Schrobilgen, Co-Founder/CEO of Thematic
“Integrating Musiio's tagging tech was an extremely straightforward and an easy implementation for our team. We were excited to integrate with Musiio so that we could tag our growing music library effortlessly at scale with reliable metadata that complements our internal curation algorithm. We found the tagging to be spot-on and customizable so that we could make it a great fit with our existing processes.”
Audrey Marshall, Co-Founder/COO of Thematic
Interested in how AI can help your business? Contact sales@musiio.com.
