audible magic

7 Hard but Very Telling Questions for Your Automatic Content Recognition Vendor (ACR) 

Consider These Issues to Avoid Costly Mistakes 

Whether you are focusing on copyright compliance or licensing content for UGC, the choice of an automatic content recognition vendor may seem ancillary to your platform; the reality is that it is a crucial decision for your business. Choosing the wrong vendor can be costly and limit your ability to grow, significantly degrade your user experience, expose your service to large volumes of takedown notices, or worse.   

Finding the right ACR vendor that will help you meet your compliance and licensing needs involves quite a bit of research. You may have spoken with colleagues, combed through several vendor’s websites, and possibly met with the sales representatives. Before you sign on the dotted line, there are a few key and often over-looked questions that will drive your decision. 

1. Does the ACR vendor have a customer list? Are they the vendor of choice for the top platforms in the world?   

Audible Magic’s customer list is a who’s who of the UGC sites both in social media and music distribution, including such services as Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Vimeo, CD Baby, SoundCloud, The Orchard and Dailymotion, and many, many others.   

Rightsholders recognize this and work with us to manage the appropriate use of their content. The list of rightsholders who proactively register with Audible Magic consists of over 140,000 music labels and over 1000 video suppliers across the globe. Our registry includes content from industry leaders such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Pictures, CBS/Showtime, Disney, NBC Universal, Warner Music Group, FOX, RTL Group, Grupo, and Canal+. 

2. How does your vendor mainly acquire their customers? 

Audible Magic is proud and humbled that we have built a business on unsolicited references from rightsholders and platforms. We continue to earn this praise through continued technical innovation and proven performance over many years. 

3. Are you interested in a transactional relationship, or are you looking for a trusted advisor that is experienced and understands the latest regulatory changes?  

At Audible Magic, we bring 20 years of experience with all types of business models. We have long-term relationships with key players in the industry and understand the challenges of compliance and licensing. We have top players on our team from the industry with extensive knowledge of rights management as well as an understanding of automatic content identification. With each identification, we understand that we are helping you make decisions that will impact your business. 

Although you may think you are only buying a transactional service with Audible Magic, you are gaining access to a team with in-depth industry knowledge that can guide you through issues such as the recent changes in the EU Copyright Directive (aka, Article 17). 

4. Will you have access to a support team or a bot? 

Audible Magic has an experienced team of customer support analysts here to support you via phone or email 24/7 if needed.   

5. Do you want a vendor that has been working to build a trusted bridge between platforms and rightsholders, or do you want a vendor that has been servicing only rightsholders? 

Audible Magic has been building a trusted bridge between the rightsholders and the platforms by providing services that bring clarity to the use of audio and video. Other vendors come from a very combative history in the industry. As a platform, what kind of vendor do you want to hire? At Audible Magic, you are our customer, and because of our position in the industry, we provide a balanced bridge between rightsholders and UGC services. 

6. Does the solution sound too general-purpose or feel too slick? It probably is. 

We deal with many types of platforms with different business models and have found that a one-size-fits-all solution, well, doesn’t get the job done. We work with our customers to provide the best result for their specific needs, resulting in extremely high accuracy rates and at extremely high volumes (hundreds of millions of transactions per day).   

The ability to provide highly accurate identifications allows your business to grow without human intervention, constantly reviewing misidentified files. You’ll want a service that minimizes the impact on user experience.  Imagine telling a user that the file he just uploaded includes unauthorized copyrighted material, and it actually doesn’t. That happens with solutions with other vendors and is extremely rare with Audible Magic’s technology. 

When it comes to licensing, some customers need to administer directly licensed deals, while others need sub-licenses.  Your ACR vendor should be flexible enough to meet your needs for compliance, licensing, and reporting. 

7. New is not necessarily better. Do you want to entrust the future of your business to unproven technology or business acumen? 

Audible Magic has assembled an innovative and experienced team that has kept pace with the latest developments in the industry, whether it is short clip length or creating a solution to identify covers. Our ever-growing list of patents (51 and counting) shows we mean business when it comes to innovation. Twenty years doesn’t mean staid. It means we have successfully, over the last two decades, met the challenges our customers continuously bring us. 

by Andrew DeWitt