Google picks Base for Music for its Gemini Startup Forum – as $1.7M

Google for Startups will host its Gemini Startup Forum at Google‘s Mountain View headquarters in California next month.

The two-day event brings founders of startups at the Seed to Series A funding stages together with Google’s AI experts.

The forum is run with Google DeepMind and Google Cloud. Google says it explores “how AI will redefine your industry, transform your company, and unlock unprecedented growth.”

Google notes that the more than 100 startups taking part, from 17 countries, were selected from over 2,000 applications.

One of them is French music marketing company Base for Music, which tells us it’s the only music tech company in the cohort.

The company sells what it calls a marketing operating system to producers, labels, and music companies. It pulls ad spend, audience, CRM, and streaming data into one environment, which Base for Music says lets it track the return on each marketing investment.

It raised EUR €1.5 million (USD $1.73m) in a June 2025 funding round backed by Belgian music tech investor LeanSquare, French investors from Super Capital and One Green, and angel investors specializing in the marketing tech sector.

Base for Music was founded in 2021 and reports it now supports more than 20,000 artists and labels worldwide.

The company works with distributors and aggregators, servicing their clients or equipping their in-house marketing teams. It tells MBW its main partners include Ditto, iMusician, IDOL, and, more recently, TikTok-owned SoundOn, and Cinq Music.

Base for Music explains that its technology helps artist teams decide which releases to promote, when, and how much to spend.

The company claims that marketing ROI has long been “a black box for the industry,” and that its tech can now predict that return before a campaign launches.

“The main piece missing today [for us] is clear, structured financial data tied to streaming revenues.”

Asked what challenges the company set out to solve, Maxence Bazin, Base for Music’s CEO and founder, said: “Mastering effective music marketing today requires a combination of media buying expertise, data analysis, and AI – there’s no way around it.

“The core challenge we set out to solve was building a technical infrastructure capable of aggregating these fragmented marketing data sources and correlating them to surface key growth signals.

“The alternatives out there each offer centralization tools focused on one specific aspect of marketing. This forces teams to navigate between disconnected solutions, and more importantly, risks overwhelming them with information at the very moment they need clarity to make the best strategic decisions.

“We spent nearly five years developing our own marketing operating system: a platform that centralizes all of these marketing data sources and correlates them to enable data-driven strategic decisions. With the rise of AI, we’re now able to apply this approach at a much greater scale, and more importantly, begin predicting the outcomes we can expect from a campaign before it even launches.”

Base for Music points out that the music industry mostly links AI with creation, but Bazin argues that “AI, data and media buying are opening a new chapter for music marketing: turning fragmented data into fully controlled ROI.”

Bazin added: “Our conviction is that a technical infrastructure built specifically for music marketing has never made more sense. Combined with the power of AI, this technology lets us follow remarkable growth among the artists we support, day after day.”

The company built its own AI, Base Intelligence, over the past year as part of the Google for Startups program in France.

It turns each artist’s data into recommendations, delivered in the company’s Artist Dashboard or as reports for account managers.

Bazin cites a campaign for Brazilian artist Tom Ribeira as a case study. The campaign was run in partnership with Ribeira‘s management team at Grand Musique Management, a prominent artist management firm based in France.

Grand Musique Management has been a Base for Music partner “since its earliest days and now applies the platform’s data-driven approach across its entire roster,” according to the startup.

Base for Music reports that Ribeira went from zero to over 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify in less than six months with his debut EP, “on a €1,000 investment that became profitable within three months.”

Asked about the Ribeira campaign, Bazin told MBW: “Based on the signals we detected across platforms, we used our Marketing OS to manage the total planned marketing budget of €1,000 for the release of his debut EP.

“This was the full campaign spend, allocated across different platforms to reach specific audiences and generate as many engaged listeners as possible. This approach allowed us to stimulate the algorithmic recommendation of the EP’s lead track on Spotify, using media buying as an acceleration lever that triggers growth across other channels.”

A report outlining the campaign highlights the performance of Pedaço, which it describes as Ribeira‘s debut single. The single, released on June 5, 2025, shares its name with Ribeira‘s debut EP, which came out in March 2026.

The report puts total ad spend at €1,216 across three campaigns run between June and August 2025.

The first, on Instagram, found that nearly 90% of the listeners it sent to Spotify were in Brazil, so the other two targeted Brazil only.

The report credits the campaigns with getting the track picked up by Spotify‘s algorithm, which now accounts for close to 62% of its streams.

By the end of 2025, the track had earned €1,317 in net Spotify revenue, the report claims, and its algorithmic streams have continued into 2026 without further ad spend.

“Data ownership would simplify the entire process, but we don’t see the market moving in that direction anytime soon.”

For now, Base for Music‘s ROI predictions rely on industry averages, Bazin says.

Asked what is still missing in music marketing, Bazin said: “The main piece missing today [for us] is clear, structured financial data tied to streaming revenues. Combined with marketing data, this would allow music marketing to precisely measure the return on investment of streaming campaigns.

“Every artist and label we work with has their own distribution partner, which currently limits our access to this type of data. This is why our current ROI prediction models rely on standard financial benchmarks, such as average per-stream revenue by DSP.

“Direct access to this data would allow us to correlate the territories and audiences targeted by marketing activity with the streaming revenues they actually generate. Once that bridge is built, it becomes possible to drive an artist’s growth with a precise, real-time understanding of profitability.”

Commenting on whether data ownership has to change, Bazin said: “Data ownership would simplify the entire process, but we don’t see the market moving in that direction anytime soon. In the meantime, the only path forward is to adapt, which means building powerful technology capable of operating across external platforms.

“This is precisely why we founded Base for Music, and the development of AI represents a real opportunity for us to deploy that vision at scale.”

Asked what an artist team might be able to do in marketing five years from now, Bazin said: “In five years, music marketing could be continuously fed by all of an artist’s revenue streams, whether that’s streaming, merch or live, giving teams complete visibility over every investment made across an artist’s career.

“Each area of activity and the data it generates would become a source of insight that can be correlated with the others. That correlation would allow each revenue stream to act as a lever for the rest, unlocking full control over an artist’s overall growth.

“Getting there requires a powerful marketing operating system capable of processing and correlating ever-growing volumes of data through AI, as well as artist teams and partners willing to pool their actions and expertise.”Music Business Worldwide