A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya Bets on Human-Powered Music Creation

NEW YORK — A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya has raised $5.5 million in pre-seed funding to move digital music beyond passive listening and toward interactive, gamified creation. The music technology startup was founded by Máuhan M. Zonoozy, a former Spotify innovation executive who served as Spotify’s head of innovation until 2024.

The round included Mantis VC, founded by electronic music duo The Chainsmokers, and SV Angel, an early-stage venture firm based in San Francisco. BoxGroup, Quiet Capital, the New York-based accelerator Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA), Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, and Systemic Ventures also participated. Liquid 2 Ventures was co-founded by Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe Montana.

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Zonoozy previously founded the video-remixing startup Bubbl, which was acquired by education media company Cricket Media in 2016. The startup is also advised by Dawn Ostroff, the former chief content and advertising business officer at Spotify. Ostroff previously led Condé Nast Entertainment and served as president of the CW Network before joining A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya after leaving Spotify in early 2023.

The company is launching as the music industry contends with text-to-music AI models such as Suno and Udio, which generate entire songs from simple user prompts. A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is taking a different approach, choosing not to integrate AI into the consumer-facing interface of every product. Zonoozy said the company plans to use the technology primarily for backend development and infrastructure support.

“AI is obviously extraordinarily powerful, but I think we just don’t necessarily believe that the future of music is simply generation, like song generation via AI,” Zonoozy said. He added that as AI-generated music becomes more prevalent, “taste and human perspective and interaction and participation” will become increasingly valuable.

Instead of creating one monolithic streaming platform, the startup is releasing a series of standalone, lightweight applications. Each project is treated as a “single” within a cohesive product “album” centered on sound manipulation and digital play.

One of the experiments, Speed Surfer, is a Google Chrome browser extension that lets users change the speed of any web-based sound source and apply audio filters. Usersound converts typed text strings, including usernames, into custom melodic sequences by mapping letters to specific musical notes.

Stacks uses a 3×3 grid as a digital stem-player interface, allowing users to toggle individual audio tracks on and off to create custom mixes. Drops is a physics-themed puzzle game in which circular objects redirect falling marbles, triggering distinct musical notes as the spheres bounce.

Sampler processes YouTube videos by dividing them into tempo-aligned audio samples that can be played as rhythmic instruments. The web-based experiments are designed to lower the barrier to music creation.

The company’s primary mobile offering is bop, an iOS application that lets users arrange digital instruments and audio effects on a grid to remix a base track. It includes tempo controls and triggerable one-time effects, and users can export finished mixes directly to video-sharing platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is developing a multiplayer update for bop that will support collaborative, real-time music remixing. Later this year, the company plans to release an interactive “musical sandbox mixer” that expands on its existing tools and lets users assemble and customize their own virtual instruments.

Zonoozy said younger audiences raised on interactive platforms such as Roblox and social media filters expect more creative agency than traditional media consumption provides. “Streaming solved the access problem, but most of the interaction with music was still around consumption,” Zonoozy said, adding that the startup aims to give users tools to play with musical culture in a similar way.