Base for Music is the only music company in Google's Gemini Startup Forum, and says it can predict a campaign's ROI before launch

Google picked more than 100 AI startups for its next Gemini Startup Forum, and exactly one of them works in music. That’s Base for Music, a French company that says it can predict what a marketing campaign will return before it launches.

Google announced the cohort on October 6, 2026. The founders, from 17 countries and selected out of over 2,000 applications, meet at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in November for 2 days with experts from Google DeepMind and Google Cloud.

Base for Music told Music Business Worldwide it’s the only music tech company in the group. Google’s cohort page lists it alongside startups working on cancer screening and robotics.

What Base for Music’s marketing operating system does

Base for Music 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 place, so a team can see what each euro of marketing actually brought back.

It works mostly through distributors and aggregators, either serving their artists or equipping their in-house marketing teams. Its main partners are Ditto, iMusician, IDOL, TikTok-owned SoundOn and Cinq Music, and it says it supports more than 20,000 artists and labels.

Over the past year it built its own AI, Base Intelligence, inside the Google for Startups program in France. Founder and CEO Maxence Bazin says that’s what lets it move from tracking ROI to predicting it.

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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.

Bazin backed that up with one campaign.

The Tom Ribeira campaign: €1,216 in ads and €1,317 back from Spotify

Base for Music’s case study is Brazilian artist Tom Ribeira, run with his management at Grand Musique Management in France. According to Base, Ribeira went from 0 to over 200,000 monthly Spotify listeners in less than 6 months with his debut EP.

The campaign report focuses on his debut single “Pedaço,” released on June 5, 2025:

• Total ad spend was €1,216 across 3 campaigns between June and August 2025.
• The first one, on Instagram, showed that nearly 90% of the listeners it sent to Spotify were in Brazil, so the other 2 targeted Brazil only.
• Spotify’s algorithm picked the track up, and algorithmic plays now make up close to 62% of its streams.
• By the end of 2025, the track had earned €1,317 in net Spotify revenue, and it kept streaming into 2026 with no new ad spend.

One number doesn’t quite match: Bazin told MBW the full planned budget was €1,000, while the report puts total spend at €1,216. Either way, the point of the case is the same. The ads were a push to get Spotify’s algorithm going, and the algorithm did the rest.

Those are Base for Music’s own figures for the campaign it chose to show, so treat them as a best case.

Why Base for Music’s ROI predictions still use industry averages

Base for Music can see the marketing data, but it can’t see what an artist actually earns from streams.

Every artist and label it works with has their own distributor, and that distributor holds the revenue data. So for now, Bazin says, its ROI predictions use standard benchmarks like the average per-stream revenue for each streaming service.

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The main piece missing today is clear, structured financial data tied to streaming revenues.

He doesn’t expect the industry to hand that data over soon. “Data ownership would simplify the entire process, but we don’t see the market moving in that direction anytime soon,” he said.

That gap matters if you’re judging any tool that promises ROI predictions for music ads, or an AI agent like Chartmetric’s Flow that builds marketing plans. The prediction is only as good as the per-stream number underneath it, and right now that number is an average, not your royalty statement.

What Google’s Gemini Startup Forum 2026 gives Base for Music

Google runs the Gemini Startup Forum with Google DeepMind and Google Cloud. Over the 2 days, founders work on their AI roadmaps with Google specialists, hear from AI leaders, get hands-on help from the engineers behind Google’s newest products and see demos early.

It’s the fourth cohort since the first forum last November. Google also gives eligible AI startups up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits through its Gemini Kit program.

Music startups have had a few of these programs to aim for this year, from Innovate UK’s createch fund to Music Tectonics’ Swimming with Narwhals. Base for Music, which raised €1.5 million in June 2025, is heading to one run by Google itself.

In 5 years, Bazin says, music marketing could be fed by every revenue stream an artist has, from streaming to merch to live. Getting there, he says, takes artist teams and partners willing to pool their data.