We completed our inaugural series of Red Turntables last month. To recap the origin, we wanted to do something that would help the music tech community during lockdown, using our experience of mentoring start-ups over the last five years through the Abbey Road Red programme. Four weeks after launch we had seen 51 applications and booked 31 online meetings with those whom we felt we could help the most.

They varied from first-time founders seeking advice on how to build a business out of an idea, to funded start-ups looking to scale. In the end, it was about more than pure tech as well, as some labels and a charitable organisation made the call as well. We were of course happy to try and help them too.

The sessions were spirited and intense. Split between Isabel (our Managing Director), Dom (our Head of Digital) and me, the Red Turntables series comprised back-to-back half-hours each Thursday afternoon. It was exciting to swap into a new meeting and to hear a new story from a new founder or to reconnect with one we hadn’t spoken to in a while. We enjoyed catching up with Victoria Grace, founder of adaptive music platform, Muvik Labs, who is bringing her patented IP to market to help wellness professionals with adaptive music experiences. We met a fresh audio source separation start-up called Audioshake and its driven co-founder Jessica Powell; found out about how graphics processing units can be used to power plug-ins from Sasha at GPU Audio; and were impressed by a live streaming syndication and distribution idea from Ben Bowler called StreamON which will address a new problem that has come with the burst of live streams during lockdown: how can we make relevant live streams discoverable and accessible rather than leave fans overwhelmed by myriad options every hour every day?

Ben also submitted his other start-up: a pre-release music sharing platform for producers, artists and labels called SendMusic which is also a timely idea considering people need to collaborate online more than they might have been used to.

Away from pure tech chats I also enjoyed talking to talk to Mary Nance and Sam Geive, co-founders of a label and production company called A Common Time production which is highlighting and helping the traditional blues music scene in the North West US. We discussed the precious links between musicians they have worked with and the pioneers of the electric blues music scene in the US. They’re also hoping to launch a drumming academy and with it an app in multiple languages to support the lessons with backing tracks for practice.

Similarly, Olivier Rosset’s Sounds Like Now! is working to bring over Lusophone music and culture from Brazil and other Lusophone countries to Portugal and into Europe. It was interesting that Olivier highlighted collaborative music app Endlesss as one that was causing a buzz around their musician network.

Trends we observed in these sessions included:

· deploying VR and AR tech towards the creation of immersive musical experiences

· bringing live music online through streaming platforms and enabling online music events

· music education and music collaboration

· potentially patentable sound processing and AI-powered platforms.

One of our core functions at Red is to acquire and share knowledge. For me this was a natural way to help our music-tech community during lockdown, who we knew were facing a whole new set of problems. We also sensed a bubble of lockdown enforced creativity from a desire to overcome the constraints of this new situation. We wanted to help and I thought online mentoring sessions would be the best way.

Calling it Turntables was a spin on the idea of a roundtable and doing it online meant that we weren’t restricted by lockdown and could reach founders globally; and we did, between the UK, Europe, Russia and the US.

It was inspiring to see so many businesses hunkering down into lockdown mode and thinking about new experiences and creative tools and we’re looking forward to some of these founders succeeding. We’ve made new friends too!

This first run of Red Turntables was an online lockdown-enforced extension of a core knowledge economy drive at Red, which is to observe what’s going on and learn from it, imagine the future sensibly, predict where the market is going, use that knowledge to make decisions and share it to help others.

There was a strong energy from everyone we talked to. Whether it was a hunger to learn more about their area of interest, to launch a product or service, to help a niche set of artists and music, to overcome business obstacles or to adjust or create from scratch tech that catered to artists and fans in these new conditions.

We’d like to say thank you to all the adventurous founders who reached out with their ideas and companies; adventurous not because they reached out to us, but because they are thinking about how to break the boundaries of what is possible in music and tech. We were encouraged to see many of them adjusting their businesses to a new reality. We hope that we’ve been able to help and that they found the first run of Abbey Road Red Turntables a valuable endeavour.