New startups are emerging that allow people to make music through generative AI prompts, mimicking the style of any artist they choose, as artificial intelligence continues its rapid expansion. One such company, A Vinly Bar in Shibuya—whose name sounds more like an indie band than a tech venture—is dedicated to launching a collection of small apps designed for experimenting with sounds and vocals.

The company has secured a $5.5 million pre-seed funding round from a group of investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Systemic Ventures, and Dawn Ostroff, the former chief content and advertising business officer at Spotify, who has also come aboard as an advisor.

The startup was founded by Máuhan M Zonoozy, who previously served as head of innovation at Spotify. Before that role, he established Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup that was later acquired by Cricket Media. Zonoozy, who departed Spotify in 2024, explained that he had always harbored a desire to return to building something of his own. He observed that while streaming had resolved the issue of access, the majority of music interaction remained centered on consumption.

"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."

The startup rolls out these experiments in the form of "singles" that collectively make up an album. What ties all these apps and websites together is the core idea of engaging with various elements to produce music or alter sound. Speed Surfer, for example, is a Chrome extension that modifies the speed and filtering of audio playing in your browser.

Usersound is a website that lets you build an "audio" username where each letter corresponds to a musical note. Stacks functions as a stem player, allowing you to craft mixes by toggling bars on or off within a 3×3 grid. Drops involves positioning plaques in a pattern to redirect falling marbles, generating musical notes in the process. Sampler is a website that transforms YouTube videos into music samplers by drawing on beats from various sections of songs.

The company's most ambitious offering is an iOS app called bop. This tool enables you to arrange musical instruments and effects in a grid to produce different mixes of a base track. You can also tweak the tempo and introduce one-time effects. After creating these mixes, you can effortlessly export them to TikTok or Instagram. A Vinly Bar in Shibuya is additionally developing a multiplayer version that would allow users to remix songs alongside others.

Zonoozy stated that the company is deliberately choosing not to incorporate AI into every aspect of these apps. However, he remains open to using AI for building the products and ensuring robust infrastructure.

"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. 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," he said.

This year, the company intends to launch a "musical sandbox mixer" product that would enable users to experiment with various components of music-making, including the ability to create instruments.