nowon AG was honored to be invited to speak at InnoDay in Zug and present our work on the recognition of live performed music. The event provided a valuable platform to discuss innovation, technology and the future of data-driven solutions across industries.
For nowon, the focus was clear: how can music performed live be recognized accurately, efficiently and at scale?
Live music remains one of the most important and culturally valuable parts of the music ecosystem. It creates direct connections between artists and audiences, generates royalties and forms a key part of how music is experienced. At the same time, live music also creates one of the most complex challenges in music rights management.
Unlike studio recordings, live performances are rarely identical to the original version of a song. Artists change arrangements, extend sections, perform acoustic versions, play covers, mix songs together or adjust the tempo during a performance. In addition, live recordings often include crowd noise, room acoustics, microphone limitations and other real-world conditions that make recognition significantly harder.
This is where many traditional recognition systems reach their limits. Systems that work well for clean, studio-based or near-identical recordings may struggle when the music changes in performance. But for collecting societies and rights organizations, these live moments still need to be documented accurately so that royalties can be distributed fairly.
At InnoDay Zug, nowon presented how its live music recognition technology addresses this challenge. Our approach is designed to understand musical identity across versions and real-world recording conditions. The goal is to support collecting societies and music rights organizations in moving from manual reporting towards automated, structured and scalable music usage data.
The discussion also touched on broader questions around the future of music recognition. As live music, digital reporting and AI-generated music continue to evolve, the need for reliable attribution and transparent rights data will become even more important. Innovation in this field is not only about saving time. It is about creating better infrastructure for fair compensation, accurate documentation and more efficient rights management.
We were grateful for the strong interest, thoughtful questions and open conversations throughout the day. Events like InnoDay are valuable because they bring together people from different sectors who are thinking about how technology can solve real problems.
A big thank you to the organizers and everyone involved for the invitation and for the inspiring exchange in Zug.
For nowon, the event was another opportunity to show why live music recognition matters and how technology can help build a more accurate, scalable and fair music rights ecosystem.
