Earlier this year before lockdown we hosted the annual Abbey Road Red demo day in Abbey Road’s iconic Studio Two. It’s one of the highlights of our year and something special we can do for our founders. We give them the stage in a room which has been the site of so much music history and innovation to pitch their start-ups and network with a gathering of more than a hundred individually chosen guests.

These guests are a wide selection of professionals in the music labels, publishers, media, tech, investment, legal and wider business sectors. Artists and creatives too, of course. We choose people who we think will be interested in what our founders are doing, up for using their tech and willing to help them in business development or by opening their networks to them.

This year we invited our graduating start-ups MyPart and Audoo to present and recent graduate LifeScore to update us on its progress since last year’s Demo Day. We also invited Broomx back to demo its latest MKPlayer360 content in one of the booths. Today we’re pleased to present our video summary of the event.

In it, Isabel Garvey, our Managing Director at Abbey Road, summarises the three key trends we’ve been focussed on over the last two years. Let’s take a look at these quickly and how some of the presenting start-ups are already operating in these areas of focus. After that we’d like to invite you to watch the video and hear from our start-ups themselves.

This is an area we’re continually thinking about at Red because it will influence the way we listen to music in the future. As our device world becomes more smart and connected a huge amount of contextual data is being generated that describes our movements, activities, health, mood, content choices and more.

If these devices are allowed to share this data with each other or one central digital assistant like Alexa or Siri then they will be able to provide us with super-contextualised music recommendations or experiences.

Our returning alumnus LifeScore is exploring this world with its adaptive music platform which uses music written, performed and produced by humans as the foundation for its evolving soundtracks, which is a first in the industry. These soundtracks respond to contextual data and evolve. It could mean a variation while making a turn while driving or providing a music experience that will reduce our anxiety levels before a meeting or after a stressful day.

Alongside this connectivity trend, the way we interact with digital assistants is increasingly conversational. A voice-connected ‘zero interface’ digital world is where we are heading. Current search data is shaped towards a ‘type-y’ text-based world. This means that new data will be required to drive our voice activated music requests which relates to a more conversational and sometimes very abstracted emotional style of search, for example ‘Alexa give me a playlist with all the feels!’.

Graduating start-up MyPart is doing important work here in track classification which will result in smarter personalised music recommendations. It’s breaking ground by using algorithms and machine learning to understand the meaning of lyrics as well as music, which hasn’t been done before in the music industry.

Creativity is the beating heart of Abbey Road and we are completely committed to exploring how advances in music technology can enhance creativity in a beautiful, additive way that breaks new ground. We think we’re approaching a threshold where advances in music technology, particularly around automation and collaborative machine learning and AI tools, will open up huge amounts of creativity in the next few years in the same way it has in the past with developments like the synthesiser.

Examples of our alums working in this space include Vochlea, who’s smart mic software uses machine learning to get better at recognising a user’s voice and the sounds they’re making to translate them into soft-synth outputs in realtime; Humtap, which uses neural networks amongst other processes to generate music in realtime with simple humming and tapping inputs as a source; and CloudBounce which offers a mastering platform that uses algorithms to suggest mastering styles and presets.

LifeScore is also innovating in this area with its adaptive music platform that will enable artists to create evolving music experiences, apps or albums based on their original compositions and studio performances.

In a world of on demand digital music, reporting, whether revenue, marketing reach or fan interaction can be more transparent than it ever has been before and provided in realtime. This means more data is being created than ever before and that will only increase.

We can see already that innovation is starting to play a huge role here helping artists, labels, publishers, performing rights organisations and other related parties organise, analyse and keep track of key project data points like streams, ticket sales, promotional reach or public plays in realtime. In turn, that means that artists will have smarter marketing approaches and, importantly, get paid more efficiently and quickly. But it’s a big challenge because the data pools are huge and getting bigger and the ecosystems and tags extremely complex.

Here our graduating start-up Audoo is starting its own little revolution by offering a humble smart meter that sits in a plug socket in commercial establishments of all sizes, listens to the music played and reports these plays with artist, label, writer, performer and other associated data in real-time to performance rights organisations and other partners who need this data.

These are huge themes and multi-faceted trends. We’ll be back with a more in-depth look at each one in the near future.

In the meantime we hope you enjoy the video and we’d like to say a huge congratulations to MyPart, Audoo and LifeScore. We are proud of our time together and excited for what you will achieve. We’d also like to thank Philip Sheppard, founder of LifeScore, for writing and providing the lovely original score to this video.