As a musician, Seth Radman sympathized with his friends struggling to teach music classes remotely.
Allowing everyone in the class to play their instruments without muting themselves leads to a chaotic and jumbled piece because of the lag on the Internet. Requiring students to play their parts separately then editing them together is time-consuming and cuts out the joy of playing as a group.
When he couldn't find a software solution to those problems, Radman and his friend Sudarshan Muralidhar decided to make one. The two musicians bootstrapped Upbeat Music App, specifically created for musicians to play with each other remotely.
Metro Atlanta schools districts, including DeKalb, Fulton and Cobb, jumped on the software. Johns Creek High School, Radman and Muralidhar’s alma mater, was their first customer.
Now, Radman said Upbeat Music has more than 100,000 users and 60% month-over-month growth.
But scaling a product that has a demand shaped by the ever-changing pandemic is a huge challenge, Radman said.
“One of the disadvantages is that we’re unsure what demand will look like after COVID,” Radman said. “We’ve already seen some people cancel because their schools are going back to in-person.”
When scientists talk about cases spiking, the founders are flooded with new subscriber emails. When talks of a vaccine surface, cancellation emails are through the roof. Radman said the app averages 3,000 new users each day.
“It’s all the ups and downs that you have in a startup except compressed in a very, very small amount of time,” Radman said.
Radman and Muralidhar created the app in the first few months of the pandemic. When schools geared up for the academic year in July, Radman said demand skyrocketed. The founders offered the first couple months free and now charge up to $20 per month for a subscription, with discounts for larger groups or schools.
Upbeat Music App puts all the people in a music class or ensemble in a virtual room together, similar to regular video chatting. When it’s time to play a song, each musician hits the record button and plays his or her part with a backing track. The app has an algorithm that lines all those parts together and plays it back to the group.
“We’re musicians, so we had a really clear understanding of exactly what people needed,” Radman said.
Radman has played saxophone since the fourth grade, performing in the Johns Creek and Georgia Institute of Technology marching band and now playing with friends in a blues rock band.
“When you’re playing a musical instrument, your brain is just fireworks,” Radman said. “When you’re playing with another person, it’s that times 10. It’s the equivalent of having coffee with someone in person, except through music instead of words.”
Radman also founded Crescendo, another music technology app that was acquired by Ultimate Guitar in 2019. He and Muralidhar's experience in app building and software allowed them to create Upbeat Music so quickly, he said. That, and putting in 20-hour days.
The founders have two other employees to help with sales and software. The Upbeat team just rolled out a new feature called Upbeat Perform for remote concerts.
The app generates a link where students can record their part of the song on their own and then submit it to their teacher. The teacher will get all their submissions, and the app will automatically put those parts together.
The Upbeat Perform feature saves time for music teachers, Radman said, who may have been using video editing software like Premiere Pro to manually watch and align all their students’ parts.
Radman said they’re considering raising a seed round, but they want to wait and see what demand will look like after the pandemic when people can once again play music together.
