How We Unlocked Our Vocal Catalogue With AudioShake

When you’re searching for the right track, the words matter as much as the sound. A brief might ask for a song about new beginnings, a lyric that mentions home, or a vocal that won’t clash with a voiceover. Now you can search for them directly.

Working with AI audio company AudioShake, we’ve added time-stamped lyrics to thousands of vocal tracks across our catalogue. Here’s why we did it, how it works, and what it means for you.

Making Every Word Searchable

Since 2001, we’ve worked with more than 1,000 composers, artists and producers to build a catalogue of original, pre-cleared music. Our vocal catalogue spans decades of recordings, and we wanted every one of those tracks to be searchable by its lyrics, not just its sound.

Lyric data makes a difference in three places:

• Search – Searching by theme or phrase means a brief like “songs about starting over” surfaces the right tracks in seconds.
• Delivery – More and more clients need lyric data alongside the track and stems, for clearance checks, captions, localisation or their own internal search.
• Editing and accessibility – Plain text only goes so far. Editors need to know exactly when a line is sung, so they can time captions, cut to a lyric or match a line to a moment on screen.

Doing this across a catalogue of our size called for the right technology partner.

How It Works

We partnered with AudioShake, whose AI technology separates and analyses the different parts of a recording. Their lyric transcription and word alignment API let us process our vocal tracks in batches rather than one at a time.

It happens in three steps:

1. Isolate the vocal – AudioShake’s vocal model first lifts the voice out of the mix, away from drums, guitars and orchestration.
2. Transcribe the stem – The clean vocal is then transcribed, so the words aren’t competing with everything else in the track.
3. Time-stamp every word – Each word is aligned to the moment it’s sung, karaoke-style, so you can see exactly when a line lands.

The result is lyric data that’s searchable, and precise enough to use in an edit.

What It Means for You

• Search by lyric – You can now search our catalogue by what a song says, alongside genre, mood and instrumentation. Briefs can be matched on meaning as well as sound.
• Lyrics delivered with your track – Lyric data now comes with licensed music, ready for clearance review, captioning, localisation and your own metadata.
• More of the catalogue in reach – Every vocal track can now be found through lyric-led briefs, giving you even more choice.

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