With AI all the rage, new startups are developing tools that allow people to create music in the style of their desired artists using generated AI prompts. Shibuya’s A Vinyl Bar, a startup that sounds more like the name of an indie band, is focused on releasing a series of small apps that let you play around with sounds and vocals.
The company raised a pre-seed round of $5.5 million from Mantis VC, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Collaborative Fund, Systemic Ventures, and former Spotify Chief Content and Advertising Officer Dawn Ostroff, who joined the company as an advisor.
The startup was founded by Mauhan M. Zonuj, former head of innovation at Spotify. Previously, he founded a video clipping and remixing startup called Bubbl, which was acquired by Cricket Media.
Zonoozy, who left Spotify in 2024, said he always wanted to get back to building something of his own. He believed that although streaming had solved the access problem, most interactions with music still revolved around consumption.
“What I think about with new behaviors and younger audiences is that everyone has grown up playing with culture through games and filters and creative tools, and we felt there was an opportunity to enable people to do the same with music,” he told TechCrunch.
The startup releases these experiments as “singles,” which are part of an album. The common theme across all these apps and websites is manipulating different elements to create music and change sounds. For example, Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of sounds played in your browser window.
Usersound is a website where you can create an “audio” username, where each letter represents a musical note. Stacks is a stem player that lets you create mixes by turning on and off bars in a 3×3 grid. Drops creates musical notes by placing plaques in a pattern to deflect falling marbles. Sampler is a website that converts YouTube videos into music samplers based on the beats of different parts of the song.
The company’s more ambitious product is an iOS app called bop. This allows you to arrange instruments and effects in a grid to create different mixes of your bass song. You can also adjust the tempo and add one-time effects. Once you create these mixes, you can easily export them to TikTok or Instagram. Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is also working on a multiplayer version that will allow users to remix songs with others. The company recently added prompt-based functionality for creating sounds.
Zonoozy said it is making an informed choice not to introduce AI into any part of these apps. However, he is open to using AI to build these products and solidify the infrastructure.
“AI is obviously extraordinarily powerful, but I don’t think we necessarily believe that the future of music is just going to be generated, like AI-generated songs. And I think that as AI starts to make that content richer, I think that actually taste and human perspective and interaction and participation will become even more important and even more valuable. And we’re just trying to make sure that it doesn’t become even rarer,” he said.
This year, the company aims to release a “Music Sandbox Mixer” product that allows users to play with various elements of music production, such as creating instruments.
As of last month’s testing, the startup’s app lacked prompt-based functionality, which is why the article title was changed. The company recently added prompt-based functionality to its app.
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