A couple decades ago, the music industry was fighting emerging technology and tamping down on pirated content to protect its profits. Today, if an artist isn't on a major streaming platform, they're losing out on money.
Audioshake wants to empower artists in the 21st century to go even further.
The San Francisco startup breaks down songs into what are known as stems — the individual components such as the vocals and drums — so they can be remixed, sampled and used in new applications. This includes traditional use cases like karaoke, movies and mashups but also newer use cases such as spatial audio (a modern take on surround sound) and VR.
"We're all musicians but we also came from big tech companies, and being out here in Silicon Valley, it's very clear to us that when we look at what the social experiences look like today around music, a lot of it is largely around manipulating video and manipulating filters and images. But imagine if you could manipulate audio at that level of granularity," co-founder and CEO Jessica Powell said. "It totally expands user creativity in addition to artist creativity."
Powell started the company in 2020 with co-founder and CTO Luke Miner after pondering what it would take to improve the karaoke experience.
Powell previously worked at Google as well as at CISAC, a French organization dedicated to defending the rights of musicians and other creatives. And Miner was previously a data scientist at fintech startup Plaid.
Modern music is already produced with multitracks that are recorded separately and then layered together to create the final products we hear on Spotify or in a movie. But multitracking didn't start to become popular until the late 1960s when artists such as The Beatles began using the process, according to the UK's Museum of Liverpool.
But original tracks can get lost or destroyed. In 2008, a fire at Universal Studios in Southern California destroyed an estimated half million original recordings owned by Universal Music Group, according to the NYT.
The startup also recently won a demixing contest sponsored by Sony where it received the highest marks for signal-to-distortion ratio, or SDR — a measurement of the quality of the sound — beating over 400 participants from six continents.
Audioshake says it can take music from any era and pull out the individual stems.
"We take music and we atomize it," Powell said. "Instead of a song being monetized one way, if you have the parts you can monetize in 10 or 15 ways and that helps artists make more money from their work."
It has partnered with major labels, as well as several music publishers, independent labels and indie artists. For its larger customers like record labels and music publishers, it offers a subscription service that gives them access to on-demand stem creation. And for indie artists and other smaller customers, Audioshake charges per song.
Customers upload digital song files — with or without multitracks — and Audioshake can pull apart six different styles: vocals, drums, bass, guitar, instrumental and "other." Additional styles, including piano, are in the works.
Since launching in July, Audioshake has created over 10,000 stems, and the startup recently raised $2 million in seed funding led by Precursor Ventures.
It currently has five full-time employees and Powell wants to hire a few more engineers over the next year. They are also planning on launching a product tailored for indie artists, as well as an API for music distributors and production companies.
"We wanted to try something that worked with the industry and that thought of artists and how they were gonna make money from the start," Powell said. "Ultimately, it will be a great future when all this work can be pulled apart and remixed and reinvented and artists are making money from it."
