BIPP stands for the Base de données Interprofessionnelle des Producteurs Phonographiques (lit. Inter-professional Phonographic Producers’ Database). Owned by the SNEP (Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique which represents the major producers) in partnership with the UPFI (Union des Producteurs phonographiques Français Indépendants, gathering independent producers), its management was entrusted to kantar Media in 2008. Its vocation is to reference all active digital and physical catalogues active in the French market. BIPP has currently referenced 2.5 million titles.
Project Description & Goals
The objective of this project that associates kantar Media (under the aegis of the SNEP and the UPFI) with a consortium of academic and private partners is to provide the BIPP database with all the qualities necessary for it to be validated by the music industry:
- Exhaustiveness and homogeneity
- Univocal identification of the contents
- Wealth and automation of indexing
- A variety of search and recommendation methods, with an emphasis on musicological, visual, and semantic criteria in addition to the common contextual criteria
- Simple and in-depth interfaces that enable personalized exploitation of the data by targeted professional users
The only public laboratory associated with the project, IRCAM, is carrying out research in the domain of musical information retrieval, focusing on the automatic extraction of expected characteristics in pieces of music from the analysis of their recordings: selection of a representative excerpt, genre and mood, unique identifiers, etc.
Bee Music has a structuring nature; for the first time, research carried out over the past ten years by consortium members can be scaled up to fit within a truly operational database containing millions of tracks. In addition to the technical aspect, providing a rich musical database for educational purposes is a central idea of this project.
Beyond the target of music industry professionals, the general public can also take advantage of the work carried out during Bee Music thanks to the wealth of information available online by the professionals that will create B2C services using BIPP.
