A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup offering fun music apps without any AI prompting
techcrunch ·
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup, described as sounding like an indie band name, that is building small music apps and has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round from investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Systemic Ventures, and former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer Dawn Ostroff, who joined as an advisor. The company is founded by Máuhan M Zonoozy, former head of innovation at Spotify who left in 2024 and previously founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup acquired by Cricket Media. Zonoozy said he wanted to build something of his own and believed streaming solved access but most music interaction remained consumption. The startup releases apps like singles that are part of an album, with a common theme of interacting with elements to create or modify music; examples include Speed Surfer, Usersound, Stacks, Drops, and Sampler. Its more ambitious product is an iOS app called bop, which lets users place instruments and effects in a grid to make mixes of a base song, adjust tempo, add one-time effects, and export to TikTok or Instagram, with a multiplayer remix version in development. Zonoozy said the company makes an informed choice not to infuse AI into every part of these apps, though it is open to using AI for building products and infrastructure. He argued that AI is powerful but the future of music is not simply AI generation, and that if AI makes content more abundant, taste, human perspective, interaction, and participation become more important and valuable. This year the company aims to release a musical sandbox mixer where users can play with different elements of music-making, including creating instruments.
techcrunch