Ex-Spotify innovation chief's startup A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raises $5.5M for playful music apps
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by former Spotify head of innovation Máuhan M Zonoozy, raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round to build small apps that let users play with sound and vocals, led by the iOS mixing tool bop.
The round, reported by TechCrunch on Sept. 14, includes Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Collaborative Fund and Systemic Ventures. Dawn Ostroff, Spotify's former chief content and advertising business officer, also invested and joined the company as an adviser.
Zonoozy left Spotify in 2024 and said he wanted to build something of his own again. Streaming had solved the problem of access to music, he said, but most interaction with music is still built around consumption.
"When I looked at emergent behaviors and younger audiences, like everyone's growing up playing with culture through games, through filters, through creation tools, I just felt like there was an opportunity to empower people to do something similar with music," he told TechCrunch. Before Spotify, he founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup acquired by Cricket Media.
The company releases its experiments like "singles" that belong to an album. Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of sound playing in a browser window. Usersound lets a visitor build an "audio" username in which each letter stands for a note. Stacks is a stem player that builds mixes by switching bars on and off in a 3x3 grid. Drops has users place plaques in a pattern to deflect falling marbles, producing musical notes. Sampler turns YouTube videos into music samplers based on the beats of different parts of a song.
Its most ambitious product is an iOS app called bop, which lets users place instruments and effects in a grid to make different mixes of a base song, adjust tempo and add one-time effects, then export the result to TikTok or Instagram. A multiplayer version that would let users remix songs with others is in the works, and the company recently added a prompt-based feature for creating a sound.
Zonoozy said the decision not to put AI into every part of the apps is deliberate, though the company is open to using AI to build products and to shore up its infrastructure. "AI is obviously extraordinarily powerful, but I think we just don't necessarily believe that the future of music is simply generation, like song generation via AI," he said. "If AI starts to make that content more abundant, it actually makes taste and human perspective and interaction and participation even more important and even more valuable."
This year the company aims to release a "musical sandbox mixer" that would let users work with different elements of music-making, including creating instruments.