Music tech startup sees vast potential in South-east Asia

Singapore

THE absence of a thriving music technology ecosystem in the region inspired founders of Musiio, Hazel Savage and Aron Pettersson, to combine their music and artificial intelligence (AI) backgrounds respectively to form the music tech startup in January 2018.

Both co-founders met at the Entrepreneur First (EF) Singapore incubator program, which lasted from January to July 2018. The firm is now under the Google Cloud for Startups program since May 2019.

"Europe is more developed in this technology, but the opportunity is that Asia isn't. Not only do we get to be the first, we also get to build the ecosystem here," Ms Savage said.

Musiio offers three products - Musiio Tag, Musiio Search and Musiio Playlist - to music industry professionals, including streaming platforms and record labels. Their technology listens to tracks and sorts music more accurately than the current method which relies on humans to do the sorting manually.

Automating this process through machine learning achieves more accuracy and efficiency, especially on a large scale. Musiio's technology is able to analyse audio tracks and accurately assign tags to the file with suitable labels and visualisation tools.

During its early stages, Mr Pettersson, who is chief technology officer, built the system single-handedly for six months. Musiio now has a music development team that effectively manages the technology.

"Pretty much half of the year it was just me. I got everything working, of course not in a scalable way but we got it working. It was just us, before we raised anything," said Mr Pettersson.

The startup has raised S$1.2 million in seed funding from local venture firm Wavemaker Partners, and is looking to raise a Series A funding in January next year.

Singapore's strong and reliable infrastructure supports Musiio's aim to enter Asian markets.

"We have been speaking to customers and they ask if it (Musiio) can handle Chinese music, Thai music and even Japanese or Korean," Ms Savage mentioned.

"Whereas if we were based in London or New York, we would not even have thought of it. Being here gives us the exposure to different markets," she added.

However, the size of Asian music markets is a challenge for Musiio, where being scalable and cost-effective is a constant demand that the firm seeks to fulfil. Here, the next funding will aid future plans to gain a stronger footing in the region.

Both Ms Savage and Mr Pettersson view this as a good challenge. Being a unique company in this part of the world to use machine learning for music, the startup aims to spearhead the building of a vibrant music technology ecosystem by drawing in as much talent as they can.

"The market is also more early-stage and younger, so there is more opportunity and more change happening faster," said Mr Pettersson.

Currently, Musiio serves business-to-business (B2B), where it leverages on immediate opportunities in creating large-scale efficiencies. Business-to-consumer (B2C) is still on their cards as a possibility to explore.

"There is potential, it could work, but obviously as only a year-old company, we decided to focus on B2B because we know that there is a market there and we know this is a challenge," Ms Savage said.

"But when it comes to six to 12 months and we start thinking, that's a great product, and the B2B market is loving it, do we want to try something more user-facing? Then we might want to expand into that region," she added.

Musiio currently has 16 people, including both founders. A new round of funding is expected to help the company grow its operations.