AlphaTheta, the company behind Pioneer DJ’s CDJs and rekordbox, announced that its music recognition platform KUVO is partnering with the International Nightlife Association (INA). The INA is a global nightclub trade body whose member associations represent more than 15,000 venues. It will connect KUVO with clubs across that network. KUVO identifies the tracks played in a room and turns that data into reports for the organizations that collect and pay out music royalties.
The problem it’s built to fix is an old one. Clubs pay licensing fees to play music, but that money rarely reaches the artists, and most DJs don’t submit tracklists. Enter KUVO, which bills itself as a system that runs in the background at a venue, recognizes what’s playing, and reports it automatically. AlphaTheta says it has a recognition rate above 92 percent and a reference library of more than 200 million tracks. In May, AlphaTheta acquired the technology of DJ Monitor, a Dutch company that has been identifying tracks in DJ sets since 2005. KUVO now runs in more than 160 venue rooms across the U.K., Ibiza, the Netherlands, and Australia at venues like Ministry of Sound, The Warehouse Project, Paradiso, Hï Ibiza, and Pacha Ibiza.
“This collaboration will help further support the adoption of reliable music recognition and reporting solutions across our international network,” INA president Joaquim Boadas de Quintana said in a press release about their partnership with AlphaTheta and KUVO.
KUVO general manager Nygel Hiralall said the goal is for the technology to become “a standard part of the infrastructure of clubs and DJ events worldwide.”