An array of music-industry veterans and operators, including the co-founder of online music pioneer Last.fm and the CEO of cloud app hosting startup Vercel, are backing a Swedish AI-generated music platform designed to shake up the staid world of retail background music, which is emerging from stealth today.
Tonada was founded by Juan Manuel Serruya, previously engineering lead at Spotify, and Jonathan Andersson, previously head of sales at Wolt, with a plan to overhaul the world of retail and hospitality background music.
Tonada says that physical spaces still run on intuition when it comes to background music, like a licensed playlist someone picked once, set to shuffle, looped forever, identical to the place down the street.
It points to research showing that the tempo of background music in a physical space can move sales by more than 30 per cent.
Tonada has built a proprietary AI generative-music engine that works with each brand to define its “sonic identity”, which then produces a unique catalogue of original tracks, it says.
Because every track is generated specifically for the customer, the catalogue is fully owned and 100 per cent royalty-free, it says.
Tonada says its tech integrates with the systems that already run in a physical space such as point-of-sale and foot-traffic signals, while also factoring in things like time of day, weather, and local events, so the sound reacts in real time to what is happening in each location.
Serruya, co-founder and CEO of Tonada, said: “For decades, ambience has been the most under-engineered part of the physical world. Brands have a CMS for their website, a POS for their checkout, a CRM for their customers, and nothing for how their spaces actually feel.
“We’re building the infrastructure layer that sits between AI-generated audio and every physical space on earth. Music is the first surface. It is not the last.”
Tonada says it has paying customers across Scandinavia, the DACH region, and Singapore, spanning restaurants, hotels, nightlife and retail.
Investors in the funding round, for an undisclosed amount, include Guillermo Rauch, founder & CEO, Vercel, Last.fm co-founder Michael Breidenbrücker, RTP Global, Karaoke Club, a16z scout Dora Palfi Osika, Norrsken Launcher’s Erik Engellau-Nilsson, and Tony Beltramelli, head of AI product at Miro.
IMAGE: PIXABAY
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source tech.eu ’
