AI in the Music Industry – Part 3: The Rise of Music Recognition

Music recognition was one of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence in the music industry. Back in the early 2000s, AI was being used to identify songs and categorise genres. The pioneers in this field were the open-source project MusicBrainz and the companies Gracenote, Shazam and SoundHound. Here is the story of these four pioneers of music recognition, from simple audio fingerprinting to sophisticated AI applications.