Music Audience Exchange (MAX), a tech company that straddles the area between branding, marketing and music, has spent the past several years focused on one main problem: how to better connect brands and their customers through the effective use of music. Now, the company is unveiling the tool it has built to address that issue with its MAX Artist Matching Engine, a tool that the company says "uses neural networks to map music tastes onto the demographic, psychographic, geographic and behavioral attributes of music audiences."
Brand speak aside, what MAX has done with its Artist Matching Engine is create a database of information based on the listening and lifestyle habits of fans of more than 1.8 million artists across 900 genres around the globe, largely using the social media efforts of the artists themselves to help distribute a survey to their fans that asks questions like, "What role would you say music plays in your life?" "Why do you listen to music?" "What do you do in your spare time?" and "Are you more practical or more of an idealist?"
Questions like those, as well as demographic information and more detailed queries about music preferences and product usage, help underpin the tool in order to help brands choose artists and music that can more specifically engage the types of customers they're trying to reach.