AI-fuelled music composition platform AIVA says it is approaching profitability. Co-founder Pierre Barreau spoke to Silicon Luxembourg about expanding to new audiences and team expansion.
Founded in 2016, the local startup spent the first years in R&D before offering the technology capabilities as a service. It first focused on classical soundtrack music but has since expanded the range to include jazz, electric, and hip hop, among others. In June, AIVA upgraded its services with an interface enabling end users with little to no tech knowledge to create their own styles.
CEO Pierre Barreau said: “Instead of just having the user select some very broad style category that we trained our system on, now the user has full control to define those stylistic categories and really be part of the full process to make it more creatively enjoyable.”
These new features were largely funded by a €1.5m fundraising round with China’s second-biggest music streaming provider NetEase. Barreau said that the firm is currently experimenting with the Chinese market.
Barreau says the purpose of AIVA is not to replace the composer, rather to provide a little push for composers suffering writer’s block using AI. He says: “Composers give us a few ideas that they want to generate music with. So for example, a certain style of music, a certain mood that they want to replicate, and then AIVA generates an idea for them that they can then modify further in their own software or directly into AIVA and create a full song.”
AIVA’s main customer focus is amateur composers, who create music as a hobby, but the technology is also used by any creators that may have a small music budget, be they professional composers or video game developers, for instance.
Looking to the future, Barreau’s team of 15 is working on other features to make the product easier to use. This also includes improving the quality of compositions.
“At this stage it is a little bit like an arms race, where we can never really win. It’s just a constant work of improving our systems to create better music,” he says.
And they want to expand their reach beyond amateur composers, serving a new vertical of personalised life soundtracks based on an individual’s musical preferences. “That’s been an idea that’s been resonating with us and is part of our company mission,” he says.
To reach that goal, Barreau does not rule out further fundraising rounds. In the short-term, AIVA is hiring three profiles: user interface designers and developers, researchers with a background in music information retrieval and music composers to help evaluate the system and build machine learning datasets.
In terms of market control, the CEO says that the music AI market is still in the demand creation stage. Tech giants like Sony and Facebook have invested in research but are yet to deploy a product with an accessible end user experience.
Barreau and his team are keenly watching to see what will happen after Bytedance acquired UK AI music firm Jukedeck and Shutterstock bought Amper in the US.
“I think the interesting thing for the next few years will be to see how players that acquired those products will use this technology or whether they will decide to just shelve it. If they shelve it, that’s pretty much a big opportunity for us,” he says, adding: “Because there are a few smaller companies here and there, but to my knowledge, they’re not as well funded and their business doesn’t seem to be as mature as ours. So we’re in a pretty good situation right now.”
