The wonderful sounds that fill your senses when you watch a movie, scroll through your social feeds, or binge-watch your favorite television show don’t come easily to content creators and producers. It can be a laborious task to find the right songs and sounds to fill these spaces. Likewise, the composers and musicians who are tasked with creating songs and sounds that evoke the right emotions, stimulate your senses, and create anticipation are equally laborious and require great talent. Yet, historically, those artists have been short-changed and forced into a paradigm where they aren’t sure when they will get paid and how much.
SphereTrax, founded by Sefi Carmel, emerged from these decades-long frustrations he and his colleagues faced in the music industry. With over 35 years of experience creating soundtracks and sound designs for commercials, movies, gaming, and immersive media, Carmel faced recurring challenges in finding the right music for his projects.
He explains, “This problem dates back to the 1990s when searching for music involved sifting through rooms filled with stack after stack of CDs.” Even with the advent of online platforms in the early 2000s, the process has remained inefficient and often leads to producers and content creators settling for less-than-ideal tracks due to time constraints. “It was like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Carmel also experienced and observed significant pain points from the composer’s end, including a lack of respect for industry professionals, along with inadequate compensation and a lack of income visibility. Those experiences inspired him to create a new dynamic ecosystem, SphereTrax, that champions composers, streamlines the music selection process for content creators and simplifies and speeds up the complex licensing system.
Carmel and SphereTrax are also committed to authenticity. “Instead of using generic, culturally imitative music, we are ensuring that tracks are composed by artists from the relevant cultural backgrounds. If you’re working on a project and you need Middle Eastern music, you will find authentic music from that region available in our catalog, or we can connect you with a composer from Lebanon, Egypt, or Iraq.”
Essentially, Carmel has uniquely positioned SphereTrax. Unlike major record labels like Universal, Warner, and Sony at the top of the royalty-free music libraries like AudioJungle and Epidemic Sound at the bottom (which offer harsh buyout deals with no residuals for composers), SphereTrax operates as a sync-focused label.
“Typical production music libraries often lack authenticity as well and rely on media composers to produce generic tracks,” Carmel notes. “We have a lot of singer-songwriters on the platform that are writing this music because that’s their artistic expression. So you have more authenticity, more people who are genuinely putting that music out there, and we’re taking that music and helping them find placements for it in film, TV, and advertising. This has become increasingly relevant in recent years due to the notoriously low rates paid to artists by streaming services like Spotify. Making a living off of streaming is only possible once you’re hitting millions of streams consistently monthly. For the majority of artists out there, this is simply not viable.”
SphereTrax has attracted over 400 composers to the platform and is growing fast. To date, they have curated a catalog of 10,000 high-quality tracks from over 60,000 submissions, cementing a reputation for accepting only the highest quality, most authentic music out there.
On the user end, SphereTrax innovates further. Their catalog is presented to customers unlike any other, and SphereTrax boasts a truly novel approach to searching for music. By giving users access to over 150 “Faders” (like those you find on a mixing desk), users can search for music with unprecedented accuracy by choosing different values they want from the music they are looking for. Where competitors often tag their music binarily by genre and a few rudimentary qualities, SphereTrax allows users to dial up how much of each genre they want thanks to the non-binary, gradient tagging that they have done behind the scenes.
Furthermore, the faders go far beyond just genre. Users can select how much of a specific instrumentation they would like (e.g., a hint of piano or a LOT of synthesizers) and even how much of a specific culture their search results will include (e.g., a house track with a Brazilian flavor). Last but not least, users can dial up (or down) different emotional factors, allowing them to find music that is slightly “romantic,” “whimsical,” or “victorious.” This next-level tagging permits granular music search like never before, and customers have been pleasantly surprised to very quickly find tracks that fit exactly the mood and tone they seek.
The expertise of the SphereTrax team is instrumental in its success thus far. Helen Wiltshire was recently hired away from Warner Chappell, and she brings with her 12 years of music business knowledge, particularly in publishing and licensing. Wiltshire’s impressive track record includes negotiating and securing high-profile deals, enhancing music catalogs, and building strong relationships within the industry. Since joining SphereTrax, she has already secured significant wins, including a blanket agreement with the BBC, allowing them to use SphereTrax’s entire catalog across all their broadcasting from television to radio. Wiltshire was also instrumental in orchestrating an impressive deal with TikTok and is actively pursuing similar opportunities to enrich the lives of SphereTrax’s musicians.
Another key figure to SphereTrax is Jay Mistry, who is an industry veteran known by anyone who is “in the know.” Acting as a strategic consultant for SphereTrax, he brings with him a wealth of experience from his time at PRS and BMG and his role in setting up Discovery TV’s music department. Known for his deep connections within the London music scene and the broader industry, his extensive network and industry knowledge has facilitated key deals, including transforming SphereTrax into a label that allows artists to distribute their music on major platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, and Tidal. Mistry’s ability to broker significant deals and provide strategic guidance has been invaluable to the company’s growth and success.
Notably, SphereTrax has also secured high-profile placements in feature films, such as the animated movie “Rebellious” releasing worldwide this fall, cinema ads for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, commercials for Bacardi, and a 52-part animated series. Another strategic partnership with audio giant Dolby highlights SphereTrax’s industry credibility and potential for significant revenue generation. Thanks to SphereTrax’s coveted partnership with Dolby, it is the only music licensing platform offering music mixed in Dolby Atmos, the prevalent gold standard for audio quality and audience immersion. It’s also worth noting that SphereTrax recently collaborated with The Cannes Film Festival and provided their music for the inaugural Cannes Gala.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that SphereTrax is revolutionizing the music licensing industry and addressing long-standing challenges faced by composers and content creators alike. With a mission centered on fair compensation, authenticity, and diverse music selection, Carmel is transforming the market and turning heads among key industry players.
