Realtime AI News
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya wants you to play with music, not prompt AI for it
TechCrunch reported on September 14 that A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by former Spotify innovation head Máuhan M Zonoozy, is releasing experimental music apps as "singles" that put users inside the act of making sound and vocals, backed by a $5.5 million pre-seed round. The founder says leaving AI out of each app is an informed choice, because he does not believe the future of music is simply generation.
On September 14, TechCrunch reported on a startup called A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, which is releasing a series of small music apps as "singles," letting people take part in shaping sounds and vocals instead of only pressing play.
The company was founded by Máuhan M Zonoozy, who ran innovation at Spotify before leaving in 2024 and who previously founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup later acquired by Cricket Media. He told TechCrunch that streaming solved access, but most interaction with music is still about consumption.
The startup has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC and Systemic Ventures. Dawn Ostroff, former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer, joined the company as an advisor.
The releases are deliberately varied. Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of sound playing in a browser window. Usersound is a website where each letter of your audio username maps to a note. Stacks is a stem player built around a 3x3 grid of bars you switch on and off, Drops has you place plaques that deflect falling marbles into musical notes, and Sampler turns YouTube videos into music samplers based on the beats of different song sections.
The company's most ambitious product is an iOS app called bop, which lets users place musical instruments and effects in a grid to build different mixes of a base song, adjust tempo and add one-time effects, then export the result straight to TikTok or Instagram. A multiplayer version for remixing with others is in the works.
Zonoozy describes the absence of AI as an informed choice. He is open to using AI to build these products and to keep the infrastructure solid, but he does not believe the future of music is simply generation.
His argument is that if AI makes content more abundant, taste, human perspective, interaction and participation become more important and more valuable, and the company wants to make sure they do not become rarer. Later this year it aims to release a musical sandbox mixer that would let users play with the elements of music-making, including creating instruments.
With AI music generators spreading fast, betting on interaction and participation as the differentiator is a test of product retention rather than model capability; bop's multiplayer version and the sandbox mixer are the next checkpoints for whether that route holds.
Why it matters
It is a deliberate counter-bet to prompt-to-song generation, arguing that participation rather than model output is the differentiator, and a sign that investors will still fund music creation tools outside the AI generation wave.
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