Two New Start-ups Join Abbey Road Red

Two New Start-ups Join Abbey Road Red

23rd September 2019

Announcing MyPart and Audoo

Abbey Road Red, the acclaimed music tech incubator at Abbey Road Studios in London, is proud to announce the next two start-ups joining the six-month incubator, as well as a re-structured programme. The new starters are MyPart from Tel Aviv and Audoo from London – both of whom are exploring technologies that will help artists get paid more and faster and help songwriters get discovered.

Israeli start-up MyPart is an AI powered search and classification platform breaking new ground in the extraction of song qualities, using advanced natural language processing and music signal processing approaches combined with machine learning, which will take sync searches, recommendations and A&R to a new level.

Meanwhile UK start-up Audoo is creating a smart listening device for commercial venues that will help artists get paid quicker and more efficiently with the potential to inform PROs, labels, publishers and managers more accurately and in real-time about where and when their artists’ songs are being played. Both startups share their origins in song-writing and both continue Abbey Road Red’s diversification across the value chain.

MyPart’s co-founders Matan Kollnescher and Ariel Gadilov imagined a platform that would use a new benchmarking system to find hidden song gems based on a set of reference songs. Matan’s expertise in data science and passion for songwriting and words led him to develop automated feature extraction techniques around lyrics, breaking new ground in the music industry, enabling searches and recommendations to be based on the meaning, literary devices, vocabulary and structure of words in songs, in tandem with musical aspects such as harmony, melody and rhythm.
 
 
Audoo’s founder Ryan Edwards channeled his own frustrations as a songwriter in Wolverhampton indie band, The Lines. One day when walking around Selfridges in London, he heard his band’s Top 10 hit Domino Effect playing as background music. His wife asked him if he would get paid for that specific play to which he could only utter a sceptical “I have no idea”.

So he devised a listening device that would identify and report precisely and in realtime when and where songs are being played as background music. That way songwriters could get paid their performance royalties quickly and accurately. Audoo’s miniature device powers a ‘plug-and-forget’ service for small to medium sized commercial venues that matches audio fingerprints of the music they play as background music and automatically sends an instant report to collection agencies.
 
 
Both start-ups have assembled strong teams around their already impressive founders. MyPart’s President is Ronny Vance, former president of Geffen Music and Interscope Music who signed seminal artists including Tupac Shakur and Gwen Stefani, while the team also counts Evan ‘Kidd’ Bogart, who wrote ‘Halo’ for Beyoncé and has penned for Rihanna, Britney Spears and many others, and Howard Appelbaum, former president of Nielsen Entertainment and Billboard.

Audoo’s team counts Nigel Elderton, chairman of UK’s PRS for Music and European President of publisher Peer Music on its board, alongside advisors including ex-BMI VP Rick Riccobono and Chris Herbert who discovered and managed artists including the Spice Girls, Five and Hear’Say.

In its recently re-optimised six month programme, Abbey Road Red will provide each start-up with a completely bespoke incubation shaped to leverage its expertise, assets and network to help solve problems or reach strategic goals - whether that’s helping with a rush to market, exploring platform developments and deployment, business case tweaking, deep tech advice, business development and interfacing with the music industry.

Karim Fanous, Innovation Manager at Abbey Road Red: “We are doing important, exciting work with MyPart and Audoo that that will help songwriters and artists find opportunities and get paid faster and more accurately. We’re operating in the middle of the value chain and that’s new for us. Plus, the technology these teams are developing is flexible beyond primary use cases so we will be working hard to think of new products and possibilities with their founders and teams, who, needless to say we are very big fans of already.”

Isabel Garvey, Managing Director, Abbey Road: “We are now four years in with Abbey Road Red - the first music tech incubator in Europe - and have re-structured our incubation programme, expanded our network of experts and investors and refined our approach to scouting the most talented founders and inventors in music tech. Audoo and MyPart complement the evolution of Abbey Road Red, as they are bringing technology innovation to parts of the value chain that have been under represented to date.”
 
 

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