France. A little less than four years after the investigation of Arts Journal on Ircam Amplify, the situation of Ircam’s commercial subsidiary still seems fragile while in the meantime artificial intelligence has disrupted the music market by offering opportunities, but also new obstacles.
Created in 2019 under the status of a simplified joint stock company (SAS) to market Ircam’s innovations in the field of audio, Ircam Amplify quickly developed its turnover to reach €2,298,000 in 2023, but recorded a drop of 7% in 2024. Among the reasons given by the SAS, led by Nathalie Birocheau, to explain this drop: the locking of the spatial sound market by Apple which promotes Dolby Atmos technology. IRCAM has in fact developed innovations in the field of immersive sound – one of the company’s first markets – which Apple’s obstacles prevent from being commercially exploited.
But if this market seems to be shrinking, SAS can still position itself in the management of catalogs of music platforms, immersive sound in video games or sound design (the audio signature of brands). Generally speaking, the historic development of remote and immersive technology opens up a considerable market for Ircam Amplify, which can rely on the recognized know-how of Ircam.
Not the critical size
“The small structure of ten people can certainly rely on a laboratory of a hundred researchers, but what weight does this group have compared to Gafam? »we wrote in 2022. Four years later, the Court of Auditors draws a similar observation in its recent report on IRCAM: “If the goal is to sell products to as many people as possible, then the size of the company must grow and not settle for niche positioning, as is de facto the case currently. »
The SAS does not publish its accounts (which does not seem to bother the Court of Auditors which does not indicate any figures in its report), but it is probable that the operating result is low, in any case too low to finance commercial development. In 2023, it had to call on the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations and the private company Believe (a major player in music distribution worth nearly 1 billion turnover) to recapitalize, narrowly leaving (51%) control of the SAS to Ircam. This is not without worrying the magistrates who warn: it should not be “that the fruit of decades of publicly funded research is not purely and simply privatized”.
