Universal Music Group appoints Òscar Celma to lead applied AI
Universal Music Group has created a new senior post for artificial intelligence and hired Òscar Celma to fill it. The company announced from Santa Monica on Sept. 28 that Celma joins as senior vice-president, applied AI and machine learning, effective immediately. The role is a first-of-its-kind position at the company, according to Billboard.
Celma will report to Hannah Poferl, UMG's chief data officer. He will help lead how AI and machine learning are developed and used across the company's global operations. That work covers its labels, divisions and businesses, UMG said in its announcement, published at Universal Music Group.
Machine learning is the technique in which computer systems learn patterns from large sets of data. At a record company, that can include how songs are organised, found and recommended. Celma brings more than two decades of experience in AI, music discovery and personalisation.
He joins UMG from Condé Nast, where he oversaw machine learning and product analytics. Before that, he was director of engineering at Spotify. There he helped develop AI DJ, Jam and Daylist, the company's personalised and group-listening features.
Earlier in his career, Celma spent seven years in senior data science leadership roles at Pandora/SiriusXM. The work focused on machine learning, music discovery and recommendation. He also served as a senior research scientist at Gracenote, which supplies music data to services and car systems.
He was a co-founder of BMAT Music Innovators and served as its chief innovation officer. BMAT works on music identification and rights reporting. Celma holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communication from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
He is the author of Music Recommendation and Discovery, published by Springer. He has also published widely on music information retrieval, the research field concerned with organising and searching music with software.
The appointment follows two recent AI agreements at UMG. In May, the company unveiled a partnership with Spotify, presented at Spotify's Investor's Day conference, allowing AI covers and remixes using material from participating UMG artists and songwriters. On Sept. 10, UMG announced a deal with ElevenLabs allowing remixes and mashups from artists and songwriters who opt in.
That ElevenLabs deal does not include ElevenMusic, the company's app for generating and editing new songs. Both deals use an opt-in model. Only music from artists and songwriters who agree to take part can be used.
What makes this stand out is the breadth of the hire. Few people have worked across Gracenote, Pandora, Spotify and Condé Nast. UMG has now placed that record inside its data team.
