Music is an integral part of our life. Music is one of the key differentiators between making a video, audio, or podcast interesting or dud. What is the first thing you notice when watching an online video? Is it visuals, costume colors, and music in the video? How does the introductory music speak to you when listening to podcasts or audio? Does it peak your interest?
There are over 80 million content artists in India alone, and the number is increasing every day. They do it for different reasons, some for notoriety, some out of interest to their topic. Whichever end of the spectrum a creator might be, they all need background music. It is suggested that there are over 500 hours of video content uploaded to YouTube every single minute. This is minus all other social media forums.
Despite the content industry growing by leaps and bounds, the creators’ most difficult challenge is acquiring and licensing music for the videos. Add to this copyright and license issues and one can witness the time wasted within the creative workforce. Loss of time equates to a loss of money, and nobody desires to lose time.
Now, imagine you are a content creator with zero knowledge of music. Yet, in your hand is a tool that helps you make music according to the mood best suited for each video.
Sounds far-fetched? Well, not with Beatoven.ai.
Beatoven.ai: The story of conceptualisation:
Headquartered in Bengaluru, India, Mansoor Rahimat Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj got the inspiration to start Beatoven.ai in 2021. They started India’s first AI-powered music tech start-up bridging the gap between demand for music by creators vs availability of licensed music. The platform solves the music acquisition and licensing problem by doing full buyout deals with artists and producers. Moreover, Beatoven.ai uses algorithms to produce original music using the data of licensed music. This is an empowering step for music composers and content creators as it gives them access to royalty-free, affordable, mood-based, and premium quality music.
Founder and CEO of Beatoven.ai Mansoor Rahimat Khan shares, “Beatoven.ai will change the way music is created making it much easier for content creators to finally be able to compose their own soundtracks rather than relying on a music library for their music needs. They will finally be able to realize their musical vision for their content with the help of Artificial Intelligence.”
The current scenario:
Beatoven.ai is an AI-powered music creator tool for content creators. Using the tool, they can compose original background music for their content even if they don’t know prior music. The technology used in making the music is a mix of artificial intelligence and music theory. Using a combination of the two, Beatoven.ai composes an original soundtrack based on users’ preferences. All that is required of the user is to specify their moods, sections, genres, and instrument preferences, and with 4 easy clicks, a piece of original background music is composed using AI.
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With the intent to monetise the platform within a few months, Beatoven.ai is currently at the pre-revenue stage but already has over 200 active users, with 80% user engagement in India and the rest in the US. The proposed monthly subscription fee is 20$ for individual content creators, 40$ per month for small ad agencies, and 100$ for production houses.
Market insights:
- Over 500 hours of video content is uploaded onto YouTube every single minute.
- In the year 2020, since the pandemic, social media & digital content creators have contributed to the Indian economy in a big way with an influx of INR 6,8000 cr – Oxford Economics study of 2022.
- India alone has close to 80 million content artists.
- More than 50 million podcast episodes have been released globally.
- 12 million professional creators who currently monetise their content as part of the 6-billion-dollar music industry – Tubics.com
- India alone has 150,000 professional content creators who can diligently and effectively monetise their work – Kalaari Capital Report.
All these digitally produced and consumed content needs good music and background scores. Beatoven.ai targets professional YouTubers, small ad agencies, and small production houses to help them compose music best suited for their content. Rather than relying on pre-created tracks, content creators can make one of its kind music for as little as 20 $ per month.
Beatoven.ai is the first AI-powered music tech platform in India. Globally, companies such as Mubert, Amper, AIVA, and Soundraw offer their services to their subscribers. However, they do not allow for granular customisation to the user, so users do not have as much freedom. Beatoven.ai allows its users more control so they can compose a piece of music in their head without getting into the technicalities. AI music start-ups use the MIDI standard for music composition, resulting in poor outputs. Beatoven.ai works primarily with audio data, which makes the result superior in comparison.
Beatoven.ai focuses more on regional music and is limited to the Indian classical music genre rather than western music theory. However, expansion plans will enable the app to incorporate music theory across various genres and geographies into the composition algorithms.
At Beatoven.ai, it is firmly believed that the artists that use their platform are their biggest ambassadors, and therefore, they plan to keep the brands and artists’ identities open for all to see. They believe that the quality of the brands or artists will drive quality, consumer engagement, and growth of the product.
Composing music is now easy with Beatoven.ai:
Beatoven.ai is using advanced music theory to make their music. This means integrating Indian and Western classical music traditions and combining them with Artificial Intelligence to make an intelligent music composition system that can compose like Humans. They use the traditional raga-based composition science for Indian music and western classical music theory for the Western genres. Beatoven.ai has simplified these hard concepts for its user, so that composing music is at their fingertip all the time. As part of the media and entertainment business, Beatoven.ai has helped create over 500 music tracks with 200000 seconds of music data sourced to build this tool.
Details about the music genres and moods on the platform:
These 4 genres and 16 moods are currently available for users to select from.
Genres: Ambient, Indie, Cinematic, and Indian.
Moods: Sad, Calm, Motivational, Happy, Scary, Cheerful, Angry, Triumphant, Relaxing, Depressing, Dreamy, Inspirational, Energetic, Joyful, Tense, and Fearful.
By choosing the genre and mood from this range, creators will be able to compose their music in no time best suited to their needs.
The vision:
Beatoven.ai’s vision is simple: giving creators access to compose music for their videos. Their advantage is that they can make their soundtracks. They no longer have to access a traditional library, search for the right soundtrack and customise it.
Beatoven.ai has raised two rounds of funding to date. A pre-seed round of 55K from Entrepreneur First and a seed round of 1 million dollars from Entrepreneur First and Redstart Labs, a subsidiary of Info Edge. Equipped with data and funding, they are all geared to monetise their platform and revolutionise background music of online content.
