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Job of the Month #20: Entrepreneur music & tech

by IDOL

New episode of our Job of the Month series to discover the many facets of the music industry. This month, Clément Souchier, entrepreneur in music and tech.

Each month, IDOL presents a job in the music industry. Or more than a job, a person! Because behind the same job title, there are significant differences from one structure to another. Each person can define the scope of his or her job according to his or her career path, qualities and skills! Meet Clément Souchier, founder of Bridge.audio, who explains how AI has revolutionized the synchro business.

First of all, can you explain what Bridge.audio is?

Bridge.audio is a music-industry solution designed to simplify workflows and boost catalog discoverability. In concrete terms, the product has two main components: on the one hand, workspaces for organizing, sharing and receiving music (goodbye expired WeTransfer links and other private Soundcloud links…); on the other, a marketplace called Bridge Sync, a synchro DSP.

Bridge Sync enables rights holders to make all or part of their catalog accessible to the entertainment industry: advertising, video games, films, TV series and music supervisors. One of the special features of Bridge Sync is that rightsholders retain 100% of the synchronization revenues, with Bridge acting solely as a technical infrastructure at the service of all.

What makes all this possible is our descriptive and ethical AI. As soon as a track is uploaded to Bridge.audio, our AI analyzes and describes it with unprecedented precision. This opens up immense possibilities. For example, if you manage a large catalog, AI enables you to navigate easily and find the most relevant titles.

For A&Rs and music supervisors, it simplifies the exploration of incoming titles. An A&R may, for example, be looking to identify a female cloud rap artist singing in French.

Finally, within Bridge Sync, this AI enables entertainment professionals to make ultra-precise searches in the catalogs of rights holders. They can, for example, search for an Americana song sung by a woman with a soft, ethereal voice, addressing themes such as family.

Can you tell us about your career path?

I’ve been working in the music industry for almost 25 years, mainly in music supervision and synchronization. I founded Creaminal in 2004, a company specializing in music supervision, which I ran for many years. We have supervised hundreds of projects (films, television series, advertising, video games…). And to achieve this, we created a tool that enabled us to describe with insane precision.

I chose to sell Creaminal at the turn of the 2020s and launch Bridge.audio because I saw in the advances of descriptive AI a unique opportunity to expand the field of possibilities. As long as music description is manual, we quickly come up against a bottleneck: our ability to listen to and explore catalogs. Thanks to the descriptive AI we’ve developed, based on the vast dataset built up over the years at Creaminal, we can now accommodate many more rights holders and buyers.

In a context where synchronization opportunities are exploding with the multiplication of media (digital campaigns, small formats, new media), it was crucial to enable the music industry to capture these additional revenues. In addition to streamlining exchanges, Bridge is a response to this market evolution. And the solution complements, rather than replaces, existing businesses.

Why did you decide to set up your own company?

I’ve always been an entrepreneur. Bridge.audio is the fourth company I’ve set up in the music industry. I started out as an entrepreneur at the age of 21 and, so to speak, I don’t know how to do anything other than be self-employed.

Bridge.audio is in line with the mission I’ve always given myself: to facilitate exchanges between players in the entertainment and music industries, while exploring the possibilities offered by technology. Back in the early 2000s, I created Soundicate, an online radio station and magazine that adapted to our users’ musical tastes. That company no longer exists, because we arrived on the market too early – six years before Deezer or Spotify.

For me, Bridge.audio represents the culmination of these experiences, with a vision adapted to today’s market challenges.

What are the qualities required for your position?

As a CEO, the objective is to embody the vision, the energy and to make the right recruitments within the team.

Having worked extensively in the film industry, I find that the CEO’s job is very similar to that of a film director, in that you have to be able to coordinate with all the professions around you, know how to listen, and in the end be able to make decisions in the interests of the project or film, as the case may be.

I often think of Mickaël Dudok de Wit, the director of The Red Turtle, for which I had the pleasure of producing the score (by my dear friend Laurent Perez Del Mar). I was impressed by his ability to listen deeply to his collaborators and the finesse with which he knew how to make decisions, always in the best interests of the film. This approach, which combines benevolence and informed decision-making, seems to me totally applicable to entrepreneurship.

With my co-founder Louis Tarrisse, we’re looking to set up an organization that combines agile practices, strategic vision, quality recruitment and flexible management.

This is sometimes easier said than done, especially as there are a lot of challenges (and therefore pressure) when developing such an ambitious project (creating an industry standard)… but we’re working relentlessly on it.

What do you like about your job?

What I like most is the variety of subjects I deal with. That said, this diversity can also be a little oppressive. Juggling so many topics in a single day, or even in a single hour, is both stimulating and sometimes exhausting.

What particularly motivates me are the subjects with high added value, such as the discussions around our AI. These discussions are enriching, because they often involve experts who are much more “knowledgeable” than I am. This is also where good recruitment makes all the difference. Right now, I’m most excited about thinking about the next steps in the development of our AI.

UX/UI design is also a subject I really enjoy, because it’s both very creative (inventing new uses) and very pragmatic (making sure we don’t lose our users). But of course, you have to be able to juggle all aspects of the business.

What's your connection with IDOL?

On a professional level, our connection with IDOL is based on the fact that several of our customers are affiliated with it, or use Labelcamp. We regularly work with them to deliver catalogs via Ddex exports.

On a personal level, I’m close to Pascal Bittard, whom I like very much, both amicably and professionally. I’ve also had discussions with several IDOL employees (even before I met Pascal), who I find, like their CEO, always superbly competent and pleasant… and I’m not just saying that to please.

How is your daily work organized?

It’s hard to define a typical day, but there are a few habits that recur. I rely heavily on task managers – right now I’m using Asana – to organize my priorities. My days alternate between periods when I’m working on substantive tasks and well-established rituals, such as go-to-market, product or AI meetings.

The common thread is always the balance between anticipation and adaptability to the diversity of subjects.

I’m still regularly learning to improve my practices thanks to the people around me. Louis, my partner, Laure who manages AI for us, Alexis Monier (ex-CEO of Wagram) who helps me a lot, Franz, our CMO…

What’s the strangest task you’ve done in your career?

There are two possible answers to this question. On the glamorous side, I remember a breakfast I organized with Jacques Audiard, Damon Albarn and my colleague at the time, Stephanie Sfeir, around the Emilia Pérez project (a film ultimately supervised by my dear comrade Pierre-Marie Dru).

At that breakfast, Jacques and Damon immediately hit it off. Everything seemed aligned to bring this complex and fascinating soundtrack collaboration to life. Damon seemed the perfect artist to take on this ambitious challenge.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the day before, after meeting them live, Jacques had received the demos from Clément Ducol and Camille. These very successful demos were to become the basis of the film’s music. This turn of events changed everything: there was no longer any room for a new track. Jacques, true to his integrity, didn’t want to launch Damon into a collaboration he knew he couldn’t pull off.

And therein lies, as mentioned above, the role of a director – or CEO: to make decisions, sometimes heartbreaking, but necessary. So, despite the quality of their exchange and the perspectives it opened up, Jacques asked me to contact Damon a few days later to explain the situation. A far from easy task, but essential if we were to respect each other’s work.

At the opposite extreme from absolute glamour, being CEO also means taking on tasks that you would never entrust to your colleagues, simply out of respect for them. In our old offices, and this is the example I’m sharing here, we had toilets that depended on lift pumps… sometimes capricious. On several occasions, I found myself at the side of the workers, helping them to resolve situations that were, to say the least, complex. I won’t go into the details, but I’ll leave you to imagine the picture.

To sum up, being a CEO means oscillating between the very glamorous and the very, very, very concrete.

Clément's playlist

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