A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya Lands $5.5M for Music Creation and Remixing Apps

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya has raised $5.5 million in pre-seed funding as it builds a collection of music apps centered on remixing, experimenting and playing with sound rather than simply generating songs with AI prompts. Founded by former Spotify innovation head Máuhan M Zonoozy, the startup is developing everything from browser tools and music games to bop, an iOS app for creating and sharing remixes.

The round includes Mantis VC, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC and Systemic Ventures. Former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer Dawn Ostroff also invested and has joined the company as an advisor.

Zonoozy left Spotify in 2024 after leading innovation at the streaming company. Before Spotify, he founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup later acquired by Cricket Media.

His new company starts with a simple idea: streaming made music widely accessible, but listening remains a largely passive experience. Zonoozy sees room for tools that give people more ways to manipulate music themselves.

“I think when I looked at emergent behaviors and younger audiences, like everyone’s growing up playing with culture through games, through filters, through creation tools. And I just felt like there was an opportunity to empower people to do something similar with music,” Zonoozy told TechCrunch.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya approaches product development almost like a record release. Its individual experiments are presented as “singles,” with each one exploring a different way for users to interact with music and sound.

Speed Surfer, for example, is a Chrome extension that lets users alter the speed and filtering of audio playing in their browser. Usersound turns a username into audio, assigning a musical note to each letter.

Stacks works more like a compact mixing board. Users can switch musical stems on and off through a 3×3 grid to assemble different combinations. Drops takes a more game-like approach, allowing users to arrange plaques that redirect falling marbles and trigger musical notes.

Another experiment, Sampler, converts YouTube videos into beat-based music samplers.

The startup is putting more weight behind bop, an iOS app built around remixing a base track. Users can place instruments and effects onto a grid, change the tempo and trigger one-off effects to create different versions of a song. Finished mixes can then be exported to TikTok or Instagram.

A multiplayer version is also in development, with the goal of allowing multiple people to remix music together.

Despite arriving during a surge in generative AI music products, A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is deliberately avoiding an AI-first approach to the listening experience. Zonoozy said the company is willing to use AI while developing its products and infrastructure, but does not see automated song generation as the entire future of music.

“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. And I think 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. And we’re just trying to make sure it doesn’t make it even rarer,” he said.

That philosophy puts participation at the center of the company’s products. Instead of asking users to type a prompt and receive a finished song, its apps are designed around choices: changing a sound, rearranging a mix, triggering an effect or turning music into something that can be played with.

The startup plans to expand that idea this year with a “musical sandbox mixer.” The product is intended to give users more ways to experiment with the building blocks of music, including the ability to create instruments.

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This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.

Image courtesy of A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya.

This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.