A Recap of Abbey Road Red Turntables Mentoring Sessions from Innovation Manager Karim Fanous

A Recap of Abbey Road Red Turntables Mentoring Sessions from Innovation Manager Karim Fanous

At the start of April, Abbey Road Red launched its 'Turntables' one-to-one remote mentoring sessions, designed to offer expert guidance to music technology start-ups during the global lockdown. From innovative VR performance production and adaptive music, to source separation and live streaming; Red's Innovation Manager Karim Fanous recapped his highlights from the four weeks of mentoring sessions below.
 
Wow, that went by in a flash. We launched our Abbey Road Red Turntables online mentoring sessions on Tuesday 14 April following lockdown and out of a desire to help the music tech community in the best way we could: by sharing knowledge and experience.

We held four Turntable afternoons on Thursdays from 16 April to 15 May. Half hour one-on-one Zoom meetings with each of the 31 applicants we chose were shared between our Managing Director, Isabel Garvey, our Head of Digital, Dom Dronska, and myself. Both Isabel and Dom are Red board members and it was Isabel’s suggestion to launch the sessions.

It was really cool to speak to such a wide variety of final applicants. They were either wanting to learn about a tech sector, launching a start-up, spinning out a new product, facing issues that they wanted advice about, or simply wanted to tell us about their start-up. One particularly charming conversation I had was with someone on a multi-year journey teaching themself as many areas of audiovisual editing, VR and app design as possible. One day they’ll launch something impressive.

There were so many varied ideas and products, from innovative VR performance production to adaptive music; charitable organisations; source separation; live streaming; online collaboration tools and apps; instrument training and education; talent scouting; to networking platforms and more.

I was personally impressed by the wide spread of ideas and problems being tackled; also by the energy of many of the existing and prospective founders we spoke to. They all showed that enduring enthusiasm and passion for the area we are operating in, music. Nobody is in this game to make a quick buck and exit. It’s hard to succeed and people play in this domain because, first and foremost, they absolutely adore music and want to share and empower that energy.

We’re going to keep in touch with many of them and are having serious discussions about collaboration with some of them, while we’re helping others with introductions into our network to help them on their way.

I hope this is something we can do again some day. Next time in better circumstances. I’d also like to say thanks to the whole team for helping us pull this together so quickly and to David for helping us make sense of everything.
 
 

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