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Last July, more than 70 country songwriters and producers filtered into Sony Music Publishing’s Nashville office to hear a presentation from Beatstars, the popular website that allows artists to buy or lease full instrumentals for their own use. Seth Mosley, whose recent co-writes include songs recorded by Tim McGraw and Gabby Barrett, was in attendance that day, and he was compelled by the company’s pitch. He started posting beats on the platform regularly in December, hoping it could provide him with a new income stream — and another source of exposure.
But this way of working is unusual in country music. Beatstars was initially popularized by rappers and singers in R&B and pop, genres where it’s common for vocalists to use a fully-formed track as a jumping-off point. Music-making in Nashville is often more traditional, with ace session musicians recording in revered studios — a world away from the fast-moving online beat economy.
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With time, though, Beatstars’ success stories have become more varied, spreading to realms that were once ruled by bands playing instruments. ThxSoMch and Wisp found post-punk and neo-shoegaze instrumentals, respectively, on the platform, added their own vocals, and scored breakout moments and major-label deals. And country could be the next frontier.
Beatstars is noticing heightened interest in the genre as it surges in the U.S., says Greg Mateo, the platform’s president of music and publishing. In Mosley’s six months on Beatstars, he’s learned that “anything that’s got a Morgan Wallen spin to it is in high demand.”
That demand is growing on other music-making platforms as well. Bandlab, a mobile music creation app that now has more than 100 million users, has also seen excitement for country elevate in the U.S., according to CEO Meng Ru Kuok.
On top of that, statistics from Splice, which provides producers with a massive library of samples, indicate that its 8 million-strong user base is incorporating country flavors with greater frequency this year. User searches for “country” have more than doubled compared to 2023. And their interest in samples of instruments associated with the genre has soared, including banjo (searches are up 75%), mandolin (66%), pedal steel (113%) and fiddle (131%).
Producer BachBeats, who sells country instrumentals online, predicts that this enthusiasm on music creation platforms is only going to increase: The recent release of Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s collaboration “I Had Some Help,” which landed one of the biggest streaming debuts in history, “is going to bring a bunch of people from the hip-hop world into country.”
Beyoncé‘s recent references to the genre helped too, according to Xzaviar, another producer who sells country instrumentals. He says downloads of his productions “ticked up” after she released Cowboy Carter in March.
But importantly, the phenomenon appears larger than any single act or album: Xzaviar has quadrupled his income from beat sales on YouTube and Beatstars since August, with instrumentals in the style of Wallen or Zach Bryan performing especially well. It’s notable that, even though country music is most beloved in America, only 65% of Xzaviar’s sales come from the U.S.
Beatstars is trying to capitalize on this interest — and fan the flames. In June, they launched a new playlist to highlight their top country producers. “They’re really focused on country and getting a lot of country creators on the platform,” says Kenley Flynn, vp of creative for Sony Music Publishing Nashville. (The publisher and Beatstars first formed a partnership in 2020.)
Still, the rise of country in the online music-making economy may not be immediately felt in Nashville. Even though pre-programmed tracks aren’t uncommon in contemporary country, this model of working — buying a beat on a website — flies in the face of the industry’s longtime system for songwriting and producing. “The biggest hurdle for us is just it’s so not how the Nashville creative community operates,” Flynn acknowledges. “These writers are used to creating from 11a.m. till 3 p.m. in a room with two or three others,” often people they know.
And when it comes to producers, artists often find one they like and rely on that person to “cut everything,” Mosley says. In pop or hip-hop, every song on an album might be overseen by someone different, and each track could contain elements from a beat-maker that neither the artist nor the producer has met in person. That grab-bag approach remains rare in country music.
Norms are shifting in the genre, though — adaptations that are increasingly necessary since a country hit can now come from anywhere. More coastal record companies are signing country artists directly instead of relying on their Nashville office, for example. And country labels are increasingly taking part in the signing conversations around artists who go viral.
In other genres, the hits that explode on social media platforms are often cobbled together with help from places like Beatstars or Bandlab. It’s not a stretch to imagine the next Priscilla Block or Tucker Wetmore buying a “Morgan Wallen type beat” on YouTube before embarking on a savvy social media campaign that sparks a viral trend. As a “new generation of artists and songwriters comes in [to the music industry] they’re going to use the modern tools,” says Corey McAfee, who serves as director of global copyright for Sony Music Publishing Nashville.
The economics of these music creation platforms also position them to help would-be country stars. “If you’re bartending to make money and work on your music part-time, it can be very expensive to get in a room with a full band,” says David Morris, a Nashville-based rapper and singer who works with BachBeats and other country producers on Beatstars. “You need to be able to explore your sound or write to music, and you can lease some of these beats for less than $100.” (A lease comes with only limited rights, so if a song becomes a hit an artist has to make a new deal with the producer; acts also have the option to buy out beats from the start, though that is slightly more expensive.)
Band members might be able to benefit from offering their work online as well. “It’s not just so-called beat-makers on these platforms,” McAfee notes. “Maybe you’re an amazing guitar player, which we know this city is full of, and you’re making guitar loops” that can be used by vocalists around the world.
For Flynn, the math is simple. “Big songs have come from Beatstars, and there are producers on the platform that are earning tons of money by just selling their beats,” he says. For country artists and producers, “there’s a huge opportunity.”
Don Passman had been teaching a course on music law at USC for several years when he realized his class notes were the outline of a book. “Because musicians are oriented to their ears,” he says, there was an opportunity to write “an easy-to-read overview of the business for people who don’t like to read.” Think “big print, lots of pictures, analogies, simple language.” When the first edition of All You Need to Know About the Music Business came out in 1991 — the 11th edition arrived this past October — “there was only one book on the music business at the time that was of any consequence,” Passman recalls. “And it was a bit difficult to read.”
Recently, however, music business education appears to be an increasingly hot topic. Thanks to technological advances, the number of aspiring artists releasing songs with little-to-no understanding of the music industry has ballooned. Many of these acts start releasing tracks in their early teens, long before they might get the chance to take a college-level course on the music business, much less master the nuances of copyright law. And they often hire a similarly-inexperienced friend to serve as a “manager,” ensuring that even their closest advisors lack experience in navigating the industry.
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As a result, there is a dire need for quality, accessible music business education. Many of the platforms that allow artists to create, listen to, or distribute music today see educational initiatives as a way to foster loyalty and community — which will in turn help them stand out in the neverending battle for users and attention — and possibly as an additional revenue stream as well.
Some of these educational efforts are in their early stages: Spotify started testing video learning courses in the U.K. in March, for example, while TIDAL has said education will be a cornerstone of its new era as it works to build financial tools for artists. (It was acquired by Block in 2021.)
The company Creative Intell is further along — it has raised money from around the music business and created an animated series to teach young artists the inner workings of the industry, from record deals to publishing. And the platform Bandlab, which allows its 100-million-plus users to create songs on their phones, has been releasing a steady stream of free tutorials and blog posts.
Helping aspiring artists grasp the intricacies of the music industry is “something that we’re investing a lot in,” says Krevin Breuner, Bandlab’s head of artist development and education. “The industry is more complex than ever, and understanding the business from day one is not just an advantage; it’s essential. Bandlab has such a young audience, it’s growing, and we want those artists to feel like they have a partner — somebody they can trust.”
Austen Smart agrees: The DJ, who co-founded the U.K. music-education company PLAYvirtuoso in 2020 with his brother, sees “huge potential in this space.” “I look at it like, there will be one in eight people, at least, learning at home,” he says, and a portion of those will be interested in the music industry.
Creative Intell co-founder Steven Ship divides the music education field into three buckets — how to create music, how to market music and the business of music. While YouTube alone is littered with free videos on the first two topics — not to mention all the Reddit threads, blog posts and TikTok tutorials — finding reliable and accessible information on the third is more challenging. “The business of music is probably the most important; it has to be the most accurate, and it’s often ignored,” Ship says.
If an aspiring artist produces a track poorly or markets it clumsily, that song probably won’t do well — a temporary setback. In contrast, if they don’t understand how the industry works, the consequences can be far more damaging: They could sign a contract with a manager, label, or publisher that cedes control of their output for decades. “Artists were horribly taken advantage of in the early days of the music business, because they just didn’t know what they were doing,” Passman says. And today, “the industry is changing so fast,” Breuner adds, making it even harder to “know what’s important and what’s not.”
When Smart signed a major label deal with his brother — just “two hungry young artists living in London” — he admits the pair “didn’t have the knowledge and the understanding of what we were ultimately signing.” An attorney would have helped, but they didn’t have the cash “to engage with lawyers who could help us interpret it.”
Contracts are often “murky and complicated,” Smart continues. “You get offered a relatively big advance; it’s quite a big number when you’re 25 and 22. What does it actually mean? What does it mean ten years later?”
If he could rewind the clock, he imagines going through the process again — but this time, “we’ve got that course on understanding label deals” available. And if necessary, he could “book a one-on-one session with someone for 30 pounds” to help provide extra context. This is part of the reason that one of PLAYvirtuoso’s “three pillars” of educational material centers on understanding the music industry.
PLAYvirtuoso is one of four companies that partnered with Spotify initially to provide courses on a variety of topics. The streaming service’s decision to test new education materials came about because it saw data indicating that some users were eager to acquire more knowledge.
“If I take you 10 years back, most of the people that came to Spotify came with a single intent: listening to music,” says Mohit Jitani, a product director at Spotify. “But in the last few years, as we brought on podcasts and audiobooks, people started to come to Spotify to listen to an interview or learn leadership and finance.”
Currently Spotify’s courses are offered via a freemium model: Users are able to access the first few lessons for free, but they must pay to complete a full course.
While Spotify’s exploratory foray into education stemmed from the fact that “people started coming to [us] for casual learning,” as Jitani puts it — and it potentially offers the platform another new revenue stream — TIDAL’s recent drive to help artists raise their business IQ is driven in part by its new owner, the payments company Block.
“Building tools and services for business owners, we saw that the moment that you get a little traction outside of your friends and family, the world becomes a lot more complicated,” says Agustina Sacerdote, the TIDAL’s global head of product. “You have to start to understand your numbers to understand where the next big opportunity is going to come from.”
The same principle applies to artists. Understandably, they tend to focus on the art. But as Ship notes, “The moment you release a song, you’re in business” — whether you like it or not. So TIDAL has started offering webinars and rolled out a new product called Circles, which Sacerdote likens to “a very curated version of Reddit, where we have the topics that we believe most artists have questions about,” including touring and merchandise.
For now, TIDAL’s products are free. “Once an artist does get a really good piece of advice that they would have never gotten [elsewhere] on Circles, then we’ll start to think about, how do we monetize?” Sacerdote says.
Creative Intell’s materials on the music business are currently far more comprehensive than TIDAL’s or Spotify’s: The company has created 18 animated courses to help aspiring artists — the vast majority of whom don’t have a manager or lawyer — “understand what they’re signing, learn how to monetize themselves better and learn how to protect themselves,” Ship says.
Creative Intell releases some materials for free and charges for access to everything ($29.99 a month). It’s also aiming to work with distributors like Vydia as marketing partners. Vydia is not the only company looking to provide this type of resource — Songtrust, for example, has built out its own materials to help songwriters understand how to collect their money from around the world.
“Other industries have all kinds of corporate resources for training and the music industry is lacking those,” Ship says. “We’re trying to fill that void.”
BandLab, the free social music creation platform, now reaches 100 million users.
There’s not trumpet-blowing for the mobile app’s major milestone. The news is shared by way of a report written by Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman, who caught up with BandLab’s Singapore-based CEO Meng Ru Kuok for a chat on growth and its future.
The U.S. accounts for around 30% of BandLab’s users, he said, and is its largest market.
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“It’s funny when you get to these large milestones, especially something like 100 million, which is slightly hard to fathom in terms of the scale of the number,” he tells the news title. “It was also something that really felt like nothing really special. It sort of crossed, and I think we all realized, like, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ But I think that’s just the result of how fast things have grown.”
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Just last year, the platform boasted over 60 million-plus registered users, nearly 40% of whom were women, up from 50 million-plus in 2022.
BandLab’s music-making software includes an arsenal of virtual instruments, as well as the ability to automatically generate multipart vocal harmonies, record, sample and manipulate sound in myriad ways. The service can also distribute music to streaming services, and it incorporates components of a social network: Musicians can create individual profiles, chat with one another, comment on their peers’ releases, solicit advice or break up a song into its component pieces and share those to crowdsource remixes.
A major commercial breakthrough was delivered with d4vd’s “Romantic Homicide,” which the then 17-year-old Houston native created in July 2022 using BandLab. The brooding, guitar-hooked track caught fire on TikTok, d4vd (pronounced “David”) signed to Interscope, the song peaked at No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100, and he landed on the bill for Coachella 2023.
“Seeing artists go on to major labels and independent labels is a great, great joy and success for us,” Meng continues. “Our relationship with an artist doesn’t end when they progress in the industry.”
BandLab was founded in 2015, and doesn’t receive royalties from music made on its platform. Instead, the company makes money on artist services (which include distribution, livestreaming and BandLab Boost) that allow acts to turn their profiles or postings into ads on the platform to better reach users.
SINGAPORE — BandLab Technologies has pledged to engage responsibly and ethically with AI, part of a “strategic collaboration” with Universal Music Group.
Announced today (Oct. 18), Singapore-based BandLab becomes the first music creation platform to throw its support behind the Human Artistry Campaign (HAC), a global coalition devoted to ensuring fair and safe play with AI technologies.
“As the digital landscape of music continues to evolve,” reads a joint statement, “this collaboration is designed to be a beacon of innovation and ethical practice in the industry and heralds a new era where artists are supported and celebrated at every stage of their creative journey.”
Led by CEO Meng Ru Kuok, BandLab Technologies operates the largest social music creation platform, BandLab. Among the service’s breakouts is Houston artist d4vd (pronounced “David”), who, in July 2022 as a 17-year-old, released “Romantic Homicide,” a track he had made using BandLab. After going viral on TikTok, the song entered the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking at No. 45) as d4vd signed to Darkroom/Interscope. He’s one of a growing number of BandLab users who’ve developed deeper ties with UMG.
“We welcome BandLab’s commitment to an ethical approach to AI through their accessible technology, tools and platform,” comments Lucian Grainge, chairman & CEO, Universal Music Group, in a statement. “We are excited to add BandLab Technologies to a growing list of UMG partners whose responsible and innovative AI will benefit the creative community.”
Further to Grainge’s comments, Michael Nash, executive VP and chief digital officer at UMG, points to an expanding relationship with BandLab, noting “they are an excellent partner that is compelling for us on multiple fronts.”
BandLab Technologies’ assets are grouped under the holding company of Caldecott Music Group, for which Meng serves as CEO and founder. ““BandLab Technologies and our wider Caldecott Music Group network is steadfast in its respect for artists’ rights,” he comments in a statement, “and the infinite potential of AI in music creation and we believe our millions of users around the world share in this commitment and excitement.”
Meng showed his support in August at Ai4, an AI conference in Las Vegas, by way of the presentation “Augmenting the Artist: How AI is Redefining Music Creation and Innovation.” During that session, he discussed the importance of ethical AI training and development and showcased the company’s AI music idea generator tool SongStarter.
New technologies promise “unbelievable possibilities to break down more barriers for creators,” he notes, but “it’s essential that artists’ and songwriters’ rights be fully respected and protected to give these future generations a chance of success.”
The Human Artistry Campaign was announced during South by Southwest in March along with a series of seven key principles for protecting artists in the age of AI. More than 150 industry organizations and businesses have signed up.
UMG’s AI collaboration with BandLab follows separate arrangements forged with Endel and YouTube.
This “first of its kind” strategic partnership with BandLab Technologies, say reps for UMG, align the “two organizations to promote responsible AI practices and pro-creator standards, as well as enabling new opportunities for artists.”
Diego Gonzalez started making his own music in 2020, inspired in part by some of the tracks he loved from The Kid LAROI’s first album. “I was using GarageBand on my phone at the time,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what else to use.”
While killing time on TikTok, he came across posts from other artists praising BandLab, another free app that aims to make it easy for aspiring creators to create instrumental tracks and record vocals with a mobile phone. Gonzalez took to it quickly, especially the presets that add clarity and heft to a vocal. “You don’t need 1,000 buttons on there to make something sound good,” he says. With BandLab, he recorded his breakout hit, a mournful 6/8 ballad titled “You & I” that has more than 50 million Spotify streams.
For now, many of BandLab’s most successful users look outside the platform for beats. thekid.ACE, Luh Tyler and Gonzalez say they usually start by finding premade instrumentals on YouTube. “I’ll look up ‘indie-pop type beat’ or ‘R&B Daniel Caesar type beat,’ ” Gonzalez says. Then it’s a matter of seconds to download the right instrumental, open it in BandLab and “start thinking of random melodies,” explains thekid.ACE. He has made a pair of viral songs with BandLab, “Imperfect Girl” (7.3 million Spotify streams) and “Fun and Forget” (8.6 million).
Pop stars pay good money to vocal producers to adjust their pitch and stitch together the best parts of multiple takes. But BandLab lets users replicate a similar process with a few clicks, adding echo, toning down the “s” sounds and upping distortion. Built-in vocal preset options run from very specific — “Punchy Rap,” “Hype Vox” — to “let’s see what this does”: “70s Ballad,” “Sky Sound.” On top of that, “it’s insanely simple to make your own presets and adjust the reverb or the compressor,” thekid.ACE says. “Auto-Tune is super easy to do.”
SSJ Twiin, who has also enjoyed some viral success with BandLab tracks, recently started experimenting with a new panning feature that automatically throws his vocal from left to right. He’s also a fan of the harmony function that “takes your original vocal and layers it with that exact same vocal plus two semitones, another one plus four, another plus six and so on,” he says.
BandLab’s interface looks like a more cheery, streamlined version of a program like Pro Tools — each vocal or instrument track separated into a bright, clickable sound wave. “People will say BandLab is not a real [digital audio workstation],” SSJ Twiin notes. “But it’s getting to the point where there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do.”
Jacob Byrnes, director of creator relations and content strategy for the music strategy and tactics team at Universal Music Group, spends a good chunk of his day scrolling through TikTok. Last fall, he noticed a marked shift in the type of videos appearing on his For You page: “It all turned into screen captures of people playing productions they made on BandLab,” he says.
BandLab provides its 60 million-plus registered users, 40% of whom are women, with music-making software that includes an arsenal of virtual instruments, as well as the ability to automatically generate multipart vocal harmonies, record, sample and manipulate sound in myriad ways. It’s a toolbox that allows them to create professional-sounding recordings on their phones with surprising ease, transforming every civilian into a potential hit-maker. BandLab can also distribute music to streaming services, and it incorporates components of a social network: Musicians can create individual profiles, chat with one another, comment on their peers’ releases, solicit advice or break up a song into its component pieces and share those to crowdsource remixes.
The free app launched in 2016, but it has become almost inescapable over the last 12 months: 200 million videos tagged with #bandlab appeared on TikTok in April. The music industry has taken note of the ease with which users can make songs — “Labels love BandLab because it allows artists to create music for very cheap,” says one music attorney — and the velocity that some songs have picked up on streaming platforms. “There are random kids on there generating streams like crazy,” says Nima Nasseri, vp of A&R strategy at UMG. “Their monthly listeners are going from zero into the millions, and they’re doing it all from the palm of their hand.”
“It’s like other segments of the [music] internet that explode — one artist [broke] and now you’re seeing a ton of them go,” adds Jordan Weller, head of artist and investor relations at indify, a platform that helps independent acts find investors. “That’s what makes it attractive for the community. Now all of these other kids recognize that they can build careers off of BandLab — that it’s a potential pathway.”
The artists wielding BandLab are not stuck in one mode — Diego Gonzalez and d4vd enjoyed success with lovelorn ballads; Luh Tyler makes slippery, bass-heavy hip-hop; thekid.ACE favors breezy guitars; ThxSoMch trafficks in shades of post-punk. Several have landed record deals — Gonzalez with Island, d4vd with Darkroom/Interscope, Tyler with Motion Music/Atlantic, ThxSoMch with Elektra and thekid.ACE with APG — while d4vd and ThxSoMch have also landed on Billboard’s charts. (All are teenagers except ThxSoMch, an elder statesman of sorts at 21.) Other acts like SSJ Twiin and kurffew have picked up more than 15 million Spotify plays apiece while remaining independent.
Even BandLab’s CEO is surprised by this wave of breakthroughs. Meng Ru Kuok says he always hoped to have an artist chart with a song made on his platform, but “the fact that it already happened last year with d4vd” — whose “Romantic Homicide” peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 — “was ahead of schedule.”
When Meng co-founded BandLab, he wanted to capitalize on the technological shift “from a desktop ecosystem to a mobile one”; phones represented “a musical instrument in everybody’s pocket.” He also aimed to open up audio tools to the large swath of the global population that couldn’t afford iPhones, which came with another digital audio workstation, GarageBand. BandLab makes money by taking a cut for artist services like distribution and promotion.
Artists who favor BandLab say it is remarkably frictionless to cut a vocal and smear it with effects or whip up a loop. It also has an artificial intelligence-powered SongStarter function that can automatically generate musical ideas based on a few inputs, though none of the artists who spoke for this story use it. BandLab “is easier than GarageBand; everything is in front of your face,” says keltiey, whose racing, helium-addled “Need” has over 14 million streams on Spotify.
“The more convenient you make something, the more it is going to be adapted,” says Mike Caren, founder of the publisher and independent label APG and a producer. “I used to buy full recording studios for people — Pro Tools, interfaces, [$20,000] packages of equipment.” In contrast, BandLab is free and portable. “I encourage my artists to use the platform as a way to get down spontaneous vocal ideas,” Caren says. He thinks most artists still don’t fully understand how many different tools are available within BandLab’s suite of tech; Meng says that over 40% of users work with more than two “core creation features,” but he hopes to boost that number to 99%.
When he’s not playing Fortnite with more than a dozen fellow BandLab users, thekid.ACE generally records on his bed. The same goes for Tyler, who says the ability to cut vocals in solitude was part of BandLab’s initial attraction: “I used to be nervous to rap in front of people; I just wanted to be by myself.” ThxSoMch recorded the vocals for “Spit in My Face!” in his bathroom, according to a video he posted on TikTok, while keltiey prefers to use the closet. “Her clothes would be all around,” says Velencia Wallace, keltiey’s mother and manager. “She almost had a fort.”
Young artists who get used to working quickly on BandLab in the comfort of their homes may find it hard to kick the habit, even once they have access to professional recording studios. “As the artists become more prominent, the labels want to wean them off BandLab — they want them to actually go into the studio and work with legitimate producers,” the music attorney says. “But the kids don’t want to; they want to stick to BandLab. I’ve seen situations where kids turn down big session opportunities with prominent writers and producers in favor of just doing their thing on BandLab.”
Tyler uses a studio, but says that “if I haven’t been there in a minute, I’ll just record a song on BandLab. I don’t like writing, so I’ll just do it on there and rerecord it.”
Not everyone in the music industry is sold on BandLab. One senior executive, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, was impressed with the tech. “Kids have never sounded this good at home,” he says. But so far, he continues, artists using BandLab haven’t become recognizable stars. While some of the songs stream, he notes, the acts behind them remain “faceless.” (This criticism is common in the streaming era.) In addition, the executive points out that posting BandLab sessions on TikTok has become so common that it might reach a point of oversaturation and lose steam, like previous trends before it.
Meng acknowledges there are doubters who think “this a fad.” But he’s quick to offer a rebuttal. “There are billions of people around the world who don’t have access to music-making on their mobile devices,” he says, warming to his theme. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface. There’s a lot more to come.”
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance launched its own music creation tool called Ripple on Friday (June 30th) for a small group of beta testers in the U.S.
Ripple offers audio recording and editing capabilities as well as a “melody to song” function, which allows users to hum a melody and spits out an instrumental version of it in an assortment of genres. TikTokers could use it to create sounds for their videos.
The beta launch of Ripple makes sense at a time when the music industry is increasingly cognizant of the fact that young listeners are no longer content to sit back and just listen to someone else’s song — they want to add their own twist, or even make one themselves. Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music, told a conference earlier this year that listeners “want to put their fingerprints on the song.”
This is becoming a common sentiment: Surveys show “how much Gen Z wants to actively participate in music,” Tatiana Cirisano, music industry analyst and consultant at Midia Research, told Billboard last year. In March, John Fleckenstein, COO of RCA Records, told Billboard that “Gen Z has an expectation, because they’ve grown up as digital natives, that if you do something, they can iterate or comment on it. That doesn’t end in the comments section of a social media post: It’s now bleeding into the art itself.”
One of the companies that has had a lot of success by making it easy for the masses to make music music is BandLab, a free app which had more than 60 million registered creators pumping out more than 16 million songs a month at the start of the year. Meng Ru Kuok, the company’s CEO, is fond of saying “we think everyone is a creator, including fans.”
Right now, millions of aspiring creators use BandLab or GarageBand or another program to make or manipulate audio, which they might then upload to TikTok as an original sound. But if Ripple becomes popular, TikTok’s massive user-base could produce soundtracks for their videos without ever leaving a ByteDance app.
And ByteDance has already launched another popular app that meshes well with TikTok: CapCut. CapCut “makes it a lot easier for your everyday user to be able to create more polished videos,” Jen Darmafall, director of marketing at ATG Group, told Billboard earlier this year. “You don’t have to have a particular skill set when it comes to editing — there are templates on the platform for you to go and plug in what you want, whether it’s photos or videos or text overlays or transitions. That’s helped it skyrocket.”
One of the most prominent developers of do-it-yourself music creation platforms, BandLab Technologies, raised $25 million in Series B1 financing at a valuation of $425 million, the company announced Tuesday (May 23).
The round was led by existing investor Cercano Management – formerly Vulcan Capital, the venture capital arm of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. Holding company – with participation from Prosus Ventures, a giant technology investor with a portfolio that includes e-commerce, delivery, fintech and education platforms.
The new funding will allow BandLab to augment its work force, offer more emerging creator campaigns, boost its support services – such as BandLab for Education – the company stated in a press release. Last year, the company raised $65 million in a Series B round that valued BandLab at $315 million – $110 million less than the latest valuation – and was led by Vulcan Capital with participation from Caldecott Music Group and K3 Ventures.
BandLabs Technologies is best known for its namesake platform, BandLab, a mobile-first digital audio workstation with over 60 million registered users. The company also owns the long-running digital audio workstation Cakewalk, which it acquired in 2018; ReverbNation, a 16-year-old independent artist services provider acquired in 2021; and Airbit, a beats marketplace acquired in February.
It competes in a growing category of cloud-based music creation tools that offer a far more simplified user experience than common studio platforms like ProTools. Like BandLab, Soundtrap, acquired by Spotify in 2017, makes creating songs an easy and collaborative process. RapChat boasts more than 10 million music creators on its feature-rich mobile app.
“BandLab serves a vital role in today’s music creation ecosystem, enabling more artists to break through at previously unfathomable levels,” Meng Ru Kuok, BandLab CEO and co-founder, said in a statement to Billboard.” This additional investment amplifies our position in today’s environment to accelerate our vision and deepen meaningful collaborations, bridging the gap between emerging talent and established industry players. We’re ready to double down on our mission, empowering artists at scale.”
Over the last two decades, independent musicians have been given digital tools that markedly lowered the barriers to entry. Digital audio workstations like Apple’s GarageBand gave anybody with an Apple computer the ability to easily record and edit audio files. Digital distribution services such as TuneCore allowed anybody to sell their music online. Now, tools to create music have been simplified to mobile phone apps and artificial intelligence-powered products – such as BandLab’s SongStarter – give the average internet user the ability to make music.
Sometimes, BandLab users have found legitimate chart success using the app’s entry-level toolkit. Last year, “Romantic Homocide,” created on BandLab by 17-year-old Houston artist d4vd, reached No. 45 on Billboard’s Hot 100 after another of his songs “Here With Me” got him signed to Darkroom/Interscrope Records. Also last year, BandLab teamed with Billboard to launch the Bringing BandLab to Billboard portal to help expose its creators to a global audience. Two artists were featured at Billboard.com as a result: The Moon City Masters and Hitha.
Generative artificial intelligence is currently one of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley, and its impact is already being felt in the music industry. BandLab — the music-creation app that has become popular on TikTok — relies on AI as the engine for its tool SongStarter. Users can lean on it to generate beats or melodies at random, or prompt it to spit something out based on specific lyrics and emojis; BandLab’s 60 million registered creators are churning out more than 17 million songs each month, including breakout hits for dv4d and ThxSoMch.
The tracks that emerge from BandLab depend on the interaction of human creators and AI. That holds true for some of the companies focusing on functional audio as well. LifeScore, which uses AI to “create unique, real-time soundtracks for every journey,” relies on “Lego blocks of sound all made in a studio by real musicians playing real instruments through lovely microphones,” says co-founder/CEO Philip Sheppard. Even the sound of a stream trickling through a forest comes from “someone going out with a rig and standing in that stream and recording it.”
The AI kicks in when it comes to assembling that sonic Lego. “The AI is saying, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be delightful if these could arrange themselves in this different way?’” Sheppard explains. “’How about if we could turn that into eight hours that felt like it was original every time you listened to it?’”
All results of these processes may not work. “Unsuccessful soundscapes are generated all the time,” says Oleg Stavitsky, co-founder/CEO of Endel, which offers an app that generates music designed to help users focus, relax or sleep. “Each soundscape goes through a multi-step testing process: from automated testing, detecting sound artifacts and bad sound combinations to in-house testing to our community testing.” That community includes some 4,000 people who provide feedback through Endel’s Discord channel.
“We put human eyes on everything before it goes out,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a company that offers aspiring musicians the chance to make songs in seconds with help from AI tools. Since 2019, Boomy users have created over 12 million songs. “We have a generic content policy that basically means if all you’re doing is pressing buttons and we detect that, then your release probably won’t be eligible for distribution,” says Mitchell. “We reject way more releases than what gets submitted. That way we’re not flooding the [digital service providers] with a bunch of nonsense.”
How will Boomy scale this approach as it attracts even more users and generates even more millions of songs? “We’re hiring,” Mitchell says.
Primary Wave Music struck a multimillion-dollar deal with Stevie Van Zandt through which Primary Wave will manage Van Zandt’s music publishing and recorded music catalogs, as well as a portion of his name and likeness rights. The agreement includes a stake in producer royalties from Van Zandt’s work with Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes as well as band member and producer royalties from his longtime collaboration with Bruce Springsteen. Encompassed by the deal are some of Van Zandt’s biggest songs, including Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes’ “I Don’t Want To Go Home” and “This Time It’s For Real”; his protest anthem “I Am A Patriot” (covered by artists including Jackson Browne and Pearl Jam); the theme song for his Netflix series, Lilyhammer; and Darlene Love’s “All Alone On Christmas.” Van Zandt will have access to Primary Wave’s marketing team and publishing infrastructure, including digital strategy, licensing, synch opportunities and film & TV production.
BandLab Technologies — parent company of social music creation platform BandLab, digital audio workstation Cakewalk and artist services platform ReverbNation — acquired beat marketplace Airbit. The acquisition expands BandLab’s creator toolset, which also includes DAW and AI musical idea generator SongStarter. According to a release, artists have earned over $50 million on Airbit, with more than 2 million beats sold. Airbit CEO Wasim Khamlichi will step down from the role after a transition period, though all current Airbit employees will be retained under the deal.
Utopia Music is selling ROSTR, a free-to-use music industry directory and data platform, back to ROSTR founders Mark Williamson and Adam Watson. Utopia purchased the company in December 2021 with the intention of strengthening its direct offerings for creators, but, following a recent strategic reorganization, it has since refocused its efforts on serving creators through third parties via its B2B offerings, according to a press release. “Utopia and ROSTR came together with a shared mission of making a better world for music, although we’ll be pursuing this mission on separate paths, we know ROSTR is an invaluable resource for the music industry and we wish Mark, Adam, and the whole ROSTR team the best of luck,” said Utopia Music executive chairman and founder Mattias Hjelmstedt in a statement.
Codiciado signed an exclusive distribution deal with Virgin Music U.S. Latin via Golden Ink Entertainment. The signing comes shortly after the trap corridos singer, born Erick Aragon, launched his solo career independent from his longtime band Grupo Codiciado. As a soloist, he’s released a handful of singles, including “La Que Se Fue” and “Ando Enfocado.” About the deal, Frank Medina, executive producer and chairman at Golden Ink, said, “We are very excited for everything that is coming with Codiciado, Golden Ink and Virgin Music. We remain focused on producing quality music for our audience and carrying the Mexican flag high.” – Griselda Flores
Web3 record label and in-house entertainment studio Hume signed with CAA. The agency will help the company “identify and create opportunities across a variety of areas, including licensing and merchandising, brand partnerships, live events, film, and television and more,” according to a press release. “Working with CAA presents an opportunity to bridge the gap between traditional media and Web3 to bring metastars into the mainstream,” added Hume chief artist officer and co-founder Jay Stolar in a statement. Hume “metastars” include Angelbaby and the recently-launched Clio.
Warner Music India acquired a majority stake in Divo, a digital media and music company in India with a presence across all four South Indian language music markets. Divo works with labels, artists and musicians to help distribute and monetize their content across digital platforms, radio and TV stations. It released more than 30,000 songs last year in the Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telegu music industries. “This move will strengthen our presence in the south of the country, enabling us to have a truly strong Pan-India presence,” said Warner Music India managing director Jay Mehta in a statement.
“Astronaut in the Ocean” rapper Masked Wolf reunited with Australian indie label Teamwrk under a new global distribution partnership with Ingrooves Music Group, which will now distribute releases for all Teamwrk artists. Masked Wolf’s first single under the partnership, “Never the Same,” drops on Friday (Feb. 10).
Warner Music Central Europe and Stefan Dabruck Management (SDM) extended and expanded their partnership. Under the new deal, the two companies “will build on their joint success and focus on taking European Dance music to a new global audience by marrying up Warner Recorded Music’s powerful global network and SDM’s second-to-none creative talent,” according to a press release. The new chapter of the partnership will kick off with a series of songwriting camps and releases in 2023.
Secretly Distribution reached a strategic partnership with independent royalty accounting platform Infinite Catalog. According to a press release, the partnership will make it easier for Secretly labels including Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, Saddest Factory Records and Secretly Canadian to pay their artists “more often.” Infinite Catalog is already in use by more than 20 Secretly Distribution labels. “Like us, Infinite Catalog is committed to bringing scale advantage to small and medium-sized labels, so that at a relatively low cost they can have the same caliber of royalty processing capabilities as the biggest music companies,” said Secretly Distribution co-CEO Darius Van Arman in a statement.
Electro-pop trio ARIZONA signed with Fueled By Ramen and will release a forthcoming project on the label. Their new single, “Moving On,” is the band’s first new music release in four years.
Singer-songwriter Dylan Marlowe signed with Sony Music Nashville in conjunction with Play It Again Entertainment, with whom Marlowe signed a publishing and artist development deal in 2020. He recently released the track “Record High” and was named one of Spotify’s 2023 country artists to watch.
SoundCloud and Pandora renewed their advertising sales agreement. Pandora parent company SiriusXM’s combined sales group, SXM Media, will continue to serve as the exclusive ad representative for SoundCloud into 2024. SoundCloud’s ad inventory will now be available through AudioGO, the new self-serve advertising platform owned by SiriusXM subsidiary AdsWizz.
Decca Classics signed composer and conductor Tan Dan, who in 2000 won an Oscar for his score to the blockbuster action film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The label will release several Dun projects this year, including Five Souls (Mar. 3), Buddha Passion (Apr. 7) and The Tears of Nature (September). It will also release five of his previously unavailable catalog albums.
Warner Music Asia signed Singaporean singer-songwriter Gentle Bones. The label will work to grow his fan base in key markets outside Singapore. Gentle Bones’ debut release on Warner Music Asia, “The Right Words,” is slated for release on Friday (Feb. 10) as the first single from his forthcoming EP.
ASM Global has assumed the management and operation of Wake Forest University‘s Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, N.C. The company’s purview will include facility operations, staffing, event-booking and production services for Truist Field, LJVM Coliseum and David F. Couch Ballpark. ASM Global’s Wake Forest team is led by GM Brandon Berry, who assumed the role in September; a total of seven ASM Global employees work at the venue, with two additional full-time positions due to be added this year. Wake Forest will sunset its formal booking collaboration with Greensboro Coliseum, which has been in place since 2013.
SaveLive announced two new venue partners: Eagles Entertainment, which boasts a network that includes Eagles Ballroom, Rave and the Rave II in Milwaukee; and The Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
The Red Clay Strays signed with WME for global representation in all areas. The group will be represented by Jay Williams, co-head of WME’s Nashville office, as well as Aaron Tannenbaum, Alex Collignon and Kanan Vitolo. They’re slated to play 28 dates opening for Elle King this spring, as well as four dates opening for Eric Church this summer, in addition to various festival dates. The group, which released their debut album, Moment of Truth, last year, is managed by Cody Payne of Conway Entertainment Group.
Nettwerk signed Florida band The Haunt and alt-pop artist Kevitch. The first Haunt release by the label is the group’s new single, “Shake.” Nettwerk will also release Kevitch’s single, “Secrets,” on Friday (Feb. 10).
Country singer Aaron Watson signed with Roundhouse Entertainment for management. On Feb. 2, Watson embarked on a headlining tour, Roughstock Road Show, to support his current album, Unwanted Man.