AIMS is not “just another AI-powered music search” for two distinct reasons:
The guys who built AIMS in 2019 had been hustling in the music industry for over a decade. One of them since childhood.
AIMS technology was made to benefit not just production music but the broader music industry, and it’s already getting the job done for commercial music worldwide.
Reading about a struggle doesn’t make you feel the weight of it. Only experience does that. AIMS was born out of the personal necessity of its founders, who had the same need as AIMS users: making search as easy as possible — for a variety of use cases.
They spent years perusing music libraries, draining their energy before getting to the creative stage. The inefficiency cost them time and artistic expression. This led to joining forces with an AI mastermind specializing in audio (who happened to be an actual music producer) and setting out to solve their own problem with what would become AIMS.
Since then, AIMS has grown into a solution for the ones who love a lively allegro, and those who have no idea what that means but know they need “an uplifting track for a romantic scene.”
At a time when the wider music industry is adopting production music techniques, AIMS continues proving its worth. Record labels, music publishers, distributors, streaming platforms, and music-tech startups are now exploring ways to improve how they approach music search and discovery — and AIMS is right there to make that transformation accessible.
But back to the history. Let’s talk the team behind AIMS, some frustrations you might recognize, and how it all led to a milestone achievement that was impossible just a few years ago.
“Everyone deserves to be given the chance to express their creativity, but searching for music didn’t use to be a creative process. Hours of it were menial work. We wanted to get to creativity much faster.”
Music industry insiders that walk the walk
Martin Nedved is the Co-founder and CEO. He used to be a little kid running around his family’s business, Studio Fontana — now the leading production music library in CEE. In 2009, it began its transformation into a tech music company, which isn’t the norm these days and certainly wasn’t back then.
Family business or not, Martin put in his due diligence and took on roles ranging from tech support to international partnerships. He eventually became the Managing Director and realized that the company’s hundreds of thousands of tracks called for a solid dose of advanced tech. All available solutions fell (very) short, which sparked an idea. Step one: gathering the right people…
Viktor Parma is the Co-founder and Head of Research. He started making music as a teen, releasing several original tracks and remixes — including some that found their way to the radio. Later on, that love for expression translated into coding; he found parallels between the two worlds through creativity and aesthetics.
Viktor’s career in AI reflects a continuous blend of audio and tech, from working at a recording studio (recording, mixing, producing, etc.) to building an audience monitoring solution and founding his first tech company, Tone Technology.
Einar Helde is the Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer. He spent more than a decade in the production music industry. Apart from leading his own company, APL Publishing, Einar’s experience includes music supervision and supplying music for an Oscar-nominated film, TV shows like Shameless, and ad campaigns for Apple.
Together with Martin, they were two youngsters in an industry with huge potential to evolve. The duo clicked when meeting at conferences, bonding over novel tools while sharing distribution and search pains that they felt had to be solvable with the right AI prowess.
Jan Novotny is the Co-founder and CTO. He built his rich development career on multimedia know-how, gained experience with a copyright collective society along the way, and created the perfect foundation for helping three gentlemen build a new product called AIMS.
“We've done the searches, the tagging, the licensing. We know what it takes to be a publisher and a sub-publisher. We know what we can solve, and how AI can solve it for us.”
Turning frustration into a catalyst for change
Keyword-based music search is a headache. Browsing libraries means dealing with different taxonomies, which requires learning each catalog’s approach. Some use musical terms, others lean on rudimentary emotions or feelings… the list goes on. The only way to save time is via shortcuts like turning to favorite albums or labels, which inadvertently leads to bias.
And finding something incredibly specific? That’s hours of searching, then anxiously hoping the client likes it. The amount of time and effort poured into this loop can’t be understood by anyone other than those who’ve spent thousands of hours scrolling, clicking, searching.
So, with a surplus of frustrations hindering his business and creativity, Martin set out to build AIMS. It was complicated, to say the least. For instance, he learned he’d need to partner with an expert in music information retrieval — which was nice, except he first had to figure out what that meant. What kept him going was the promise of a keyword-free tomorrow.
“We literally built AIMS for ourselves. We knew what it's supposed to do, how to recognize that it's working, and how helpful it would be.”
Fixing what you may not know is broken
Superior AI is the result of two things: knowing exactly what you need AI to do in every situation, and finding progressive ways for AI to achieve those actions.
AIMS was dreamt up to solve highly specific issues. It was then built by an excellent engineer who can’t help but raise the bar. Case in point: Most solutions are first released as an unrefined MVP with limited functionality that matures gradually, but Viktor kept pushing it further until more than a year had passed. Instead of shipping a humble first iteration of a new product, the team released a full-blown beast: AIMS Similarity Search.
As the co-founders put it, Viktor’s standards are far beyond the industry’s expectations. Clients looking for one thing to improve a little bit? Viktor refines the whole process. As a result, companies have used AIMS’s multipurpose capabilities as efficiency hacks to cut search time in half, create playlists for frequent requests and a lot more — just see our case studies and blogs.
Doubling as advisors is part of the job
After embarking on the AIMS journey, the team recognized that the value of their unique position surpassed simply offering a solution. It naturally stemmed into the role of advisors who help companies set up best practices.
Clients are busy running their businesses, as they should be. So whenever there’s interest, Martin and Einar recommend niche ways of applying AIMS — pulling from their understanding of the issues clients face and their own experiences as business-savvy music professionals.
In practice, that means pinpointing your distinct roadblocks or room for improvement and getting tailored suggestions for how AIMS helps that exact use case. It removes the learning curve that comes with any new solution, and you’re all set from the get-go.
“We treat clients as partners and share a lot of knowledge with them. We want them to succeed. And it’s impossible to help people do that if you haven't done the work.”
“Prompt Search” breaks industry barriers
Cut to today. With its biggest achievement to date, AIMS has pushed its goal of democratizing search tools to a level that was unattainable a few years ago via Prompt Search. Explain what you’re looking for (in human terms) and get spot-on results.
As content multiplies and diversifies, millions of people need quality music but few have a musical background. They just want to describe what they want or the scene they’re working with. Prompt Search swings the door wide open for anyone to do just that. It’s a search engine for music with the potential to be applied in all corners of the industry.
Production music used to feel detached from the rest of the industry. Not the case anymore. Commercial music is finding massive value in adopting production music practices as it strives to make music search and discovery as effortless as possible, minimize licensing roadblocks, and streamline operations overall. The results range from new business opportunities to creativity without the clutter.
There’s no doubt that things will keep evolving. All of us in the music industry will find ways to learn from each other. And AIMS will remain on the frontlines of it all — because you’ll be hard-pressed to find a team more in tune with what’s possible, and what’s next.