Spotify Innovation Veteran Bets on Interactive Music, Not Song Generators

Máuhan M. Zonoozy, who stepped down from his executive role at Spotify in 2024, has founded A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya and raised $5.5 million in pre-seed financing. The startup is developing interactive music creation tools intended to move digital music engagement beyond passive streaming consumption and fully automated artificial intelligence song generators.

The financing came from SV Angel, BoxGroup, Mantis VC, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Collaborative Fund, and Systemic Ventures. Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s former chief content and advertising business officer, has joined A Vinyl Bar as an advisor.

Ostroff worked at Spotify from 2018 to early 2023, directing the streaming platform’s multi-billion-dollar expansion into podcasting and global studio partnerships. Before Spotify, she was president of Condé Nast Entertainment and president of entertainment at The CW. Zonoozy previously co-founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remix platform acquired by Cricket Media, before joining Spotify to lead innovation initiatives.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is organizing its product releases like singles on a music album rather than building one application at once. The company is releasing lightweight, focused software experiments based on audio manipulation, including remixing, stem manipulation, and modular sound design.

Its primary mobile application, bop, is an iOS program in which users place instruments and audio effects on a visual grid to remix base tracks. The app lets users change tempo, trigger one-time audio effects, and export creations directly to TikTok and Instagram Reels, where user-altered audio clips frequently drive mainstream streaming trends. A Vinyl Bar recently added prompt-based audio generation to bop and is developing multiplayer functionality for real-time collaborative remixing between multiple users.

The startup’s product experiments also include Speed Surfer, a Google Chrome browser extension that adjusts audio speed and applies sound filters to audio playing in browser tabs. Usersound converts text into musical sequences by assigning distinct musical notes to individual letters and generating audio-based usernames.

Stacks is a stem player built on a 3×3 grid, where users can create custom audio mixes by switching specific stem channels on or off. Drops presents an interactive audio interface in which users position physical-style plaques to deflect falling digital marbles, producing musical notes when the marbles make contact. Sampler analyzes YouTube video links, breaks down video audio by beat markers, and turns online video content into playable music samples.

The startup’s launch comes as investment in generative artificial intelligence expands and legal scrutiny of the technology increases across the music industry. Suno and Udio have raised significant capital to develop full-track text-to-music engines, while major music rights holders have opposed the automated platforms.

In June 2024, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents major labels including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group, filed federal copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Udio. The RIAA alleged that both companies had ingested copyrighted sound recordings without authorization to train their AI models.

A Vinyl Bar is pursuing a different technical direction. It uses AI for backend architecture and recently integrated prompt-based tools that generate modular sound components, but it rejects end-to-end automated song synthesis.

Zonoozy said streaming services had successfully resolved music distribution and access over the past decade, while user interaction with music remained largely limited to passive listening.

“I think when I looked at emergent behaviors and younger audiences, like everyone’s growing up playing with culture through games, through filters, through creation tools. And I just felt like there was an opportunity to empower people to do something similar with music,” Zonoozy said.

He also addressed the growth of synthetic audio engines by emphasizing the importance of human curation and interaction as content becomes more abundant.

“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. “And I think if AI starts to make that content more abundant, it actually makes taste and human perspective and interaction and participation even more important and even more valuable. And we’re just trying to make sure it doesn’t make it even rarer.”

Later this year, A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya plans to launch a comprehensive “musical sandbox mixer.” The forthcoming software will expand user control over sound design elements, including functionality that lets users construct custom digital instruments from scratch.