Where Are We With Audio Asset Management?

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Cloud storage is getting stuffed full of video but there’s a surprising amount of data related to audio assets, too.

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The reason behind this is the dramatic growth in the audio book and podcasting markets, according to a new report from tech vendor Backlight.

In figures quoted in the report, the audio book market was valued at $4.2 billion in 2021, with an expected revenue of $35 billion in 2030. The global podcast market is also projected to be worth $98.78 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 30.65%.

The report itself is based solely on data from users of Backlight’s media asset management (MAM) system Iconik, but the company believes it reflects the direction of trends in the wider market.

Iconik is a MAM built for the hybrid cloud, meaning it can manage media on both cloud and on-premise storage. Since the pandemic, cloud storage has accounted for nearly 70% of iconik’s data.

As the cost of cloud storage drops, more companies are taking advantage of this to become more agile. This year the hybrid cloud data split is 67% cloud and 33% on-premise — which is consistent with previous years.

Numerous industries are using the cloud to store assets but the largest is Media & Entertainment, which makes up 62.5% of Iconik customers.

Of course, even in M&E there are countless sub-industries which Iconic identifies as, “Companies that engage in producing and selling entertainment products and services, including companies engaged in the production, distribution and screening of movies and television shows, producers and distributors of music, entertainment theaters and sports teams. Also includes companies offering and/or producing entertainment content streamed online.”

Use of AI services for transcribing and auto-tagging media has risen 40%. AI transcriptions are being used to save time on manual work, while adding huge amounts of metadata into assets with entire transcripts being made searchable.

Per the report, AI transcription technology is more affordable than visual AI technology, which makes it a good option for organizations who want to start using AI to enrich their media.

“However, the majority of our users are not using this technology yet. We believe that visual AI needs to improve so that it can be trained to the needs of each organization. Current pricing models are also not ideal for large media archives.”

Because of this, the company says it will invest in more custom AI tools in 2023 so businesses can train AI to fit their tagging needs.

According to figures in the report, the Global MAM Solutions Market is expected to reach $12.2 million by 2027, growing at 23.95% during the forecast period.