We hosted the 2020 Abbey Road Red Demo Day in Studio Two last week. It’s a wonderful day. A highlight of our calendar and programme. Where else a better place to give our founders the stage than the room in which The Beatles ripped up the rule-book.

Our graduating companies were MyPart and Audoo. We invited LifeScore to come back and present their progress since graduating last year, and Lickd and Humtap were in the room too.

The point is to give these founders a stage to present their pitch and progress, but also a room to mingle with. Our 120 odd guests this year were selected with the purpose of somehow adding value to the founders, whether angel investor or VC, Red board member or mentor, colleague from UMG or another label, academic, researcher, press, brand rep, embassy, governing body, lawyer and more.

This year we also introduced a new format in the introduction. Our vision of a Red-Topia for key tech trends, book-ended by fake utopian and dystopian views to give them context. We’ll put these into another blog post and hopefully they’ll become a regular but shorter fixed feature of every Red Demo Day.

Highlights for us were LifeScore announcing its partnership with Twitch which saw it create adaptive soundtracks for guests entering its building with its patented cellular composition system, as well as a 24-hour online Twitchverse page, which for me is a slightly nostalgic link back to the origins of adaptive music in procedural audio in game engines.

MyPart introduced its new visualisation interface which will hopefully give people the ‘oh my gosh’ moment that we know is already there underneath the surface, by actually seeing the results of lyric and musical analysis in a visual way.

Audoo founder Ryan Edwards seized a theatrical moment by launching its Seedrs crowdfunding campaign, raising $250k and valuing it at $6m, during his presentation, as well as saying it will be launching its meters within the next 12-14 weeks across 250 locations in the UK.

We also enjoyed highlighting progress by Red alums Lickd, which raised £1.7m and launched new content on its platforms from John Newman, Olivia Dean and Noel Gallagher’s back-catalogue; COTODAMA, which created lyric videos for Keane and other artists, launched a partnership with Yves St Laurent and visualised a 2019 bestselling book in Japan; and Broomx who closed a €2 million seed round, saw their tech used in 20 countries and are participating in clinical studies to assess the positive impact of immersive technologies in the treatment of patients with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disease.