Catalogue size
Approx 400,000 tracks
Products used
Tag API
Music plays a massive role in choreographed sports such as cheerleading, figure skating and gymnastics. It’s a non-negotiable. Teams and performers need to be able to secure licenses to music for their routines, even if they want songs by established artists.
What is ClicknClear?
Chantal Epp, a music licensing expert and former world champion cheerleader, understood the problem: Music licensing was time-consuming and expensive. So, with her domain expertise, she founded ClicknClear, a global online marketplace offering instantly licensable tracks for sports where music is intrinsic to the sporting performance.
The music ClicknClear provides can be used by athletes, teams, or music producers who assist in the music mixing process, and then also further licensed by competition organisers looking to exploit the competition through live streaming and/or video on-demand services.
ClicknClear is now the official music licensing partner for multiple sports, including Cheerleading, Indoor Skydiving, Color Guard, and more, and anticipates catering for over 19,000 high school cheer/dance/gymnastics teams this upcoming season.
The challenge: relevant filters for music searches
For athletes to browse ClicknClear’s enormous catalogue (approx 400,000 tracks cleared and 4 million more tracks in the system ready to be cleared), the ability to filter results to match their preferences is critical, as is using consistent implementations of tags across tracks from over 800 different music rightsholders.
“For example, BPM is incredibly important. For most sports we deal with, there are BPMs that can and cannot be used. For example, in cheerleading, almost all songs get mashed up and are played back at 145 BPM. Slower songs at 100 BPM sound weird when you speed them up, so typically people will be looking at songs at 120 or 130 BPM and faster,” explains Epp. “The same goes for very genre-specific sports like Rock’ n’ Roll dance and Break Dancing. For others, mood is key to match the creative theme of their routine.”
The catalogue had to be tagged, but tedious, manual, inconsistent tagging was not an option.
“One of my first jobs in the music industry was tagging music,” says Epp. “It would take me a week to tag a few thousand tracks.”
“I can’t imagine telling someone to tag all of our catalogue manually,” she says. “We need levels of speed and consistency that humans can’t provide”.
The solution: AI-powered metadata at scale
That’s where Musiio comes in.
To date, ClicknClear has used Musiio’s Tag API to add genre, mood, vocal presence and BPM metadata to over 500,000 tracks. ClicknClear then blends Musiio Tag data with label metadata to enhance the user experience, allowing site visitors to filter vocal and instrumental versions of a track, and navigate via genre and mood links in track descriptions.
“Musiio’s automated tagging has saved ClicknClear a hell of a lot of time,” says Epp.
ClicknClear are so pleased with the results, they’re keen to explore other ways the tech can support them and their customers.
“The Musiio team were extremely flexible. They let us purchase only the tags we needed, with the potential to expand our usage as the business grows. There are a lot of existing Musiio tools that we’d love to implement when the time is right,” says Epp.
“We at ClicknClear are great advocates of leveraging technology to help maximise the opportunities to increase music revenue - so I’m excited to be working with Musiio’s AI to quickly get reliable, consistent tagging of our rapidly growing catalogue. This allows us to deliver a powerful and easy to use search tool that lets our sports teams and athletes quickly find the music thats right for them.”
Chantal Epp, Founder at ClicknClear
To learn more about how AI can help your music business, drop us a message on Twitter, LinkedIn or email sales@musiio.com.
