A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup from a former Spotify leader for making music apps
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A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup whose name resembles an indie band and which focuses on releasing small music apps that let users play with sounds and vocals. It has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round from investors including 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 business officer Dawn Ostroff, who joined as an advisor. The company was founded by Máuhan M. Zonoozy, former Spotify head of innovation and founder of Bubbl, which Cricket Media acquired; he left Spotify in 2024 and wanted to build his own product. Zonoozy said streaming solved access, but most music interaction remains consumption, and he sees an opportunity as younger audiences engage with culture through games, filters and creation tools. Its experiments are released like singles on an album and include Speed Surfer, Usersound, Stacks, Drops and Sampler, each offering a different way to create or modify music. Its more ambitious iOS app, bop, lets users place instruments and effects in a grid to remix a base song, adjust tempo, add one-time effects and export to TikTok or Instagram, with a multiplayer version in development and a recently added prompt-based sound feature. Zonoozy said the startup deliberately does not put AI into every part of its apps, though it is open to using AI for building and infrastructure, and he argued that if AI makes music generation abundant, human taste, perspective, interaction and participation become more valuable. This year the company plans to release a musical sandbox mixer that lets users experiment with music-making elements, including creating instruments; the article also notes the story title was changed because earlier testing found no prompt-based features, which were added more recently.
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