Building Jukedeck
From idea to launch: how we built our music startup
It was an October day in Harvard in 2010. My girlfriend was studying there and I was visiting, having dinner in student halls and accompanying her to the lectures I thought sounded interesting (which was most of them). On this particular morning, the lecture in question was one of the first CS50 lectures of the semester — an introduction to computer science. When I went in, I knew nothing about coding.
An hour later, I was hooked. (Thanks David Malan.)
I was so hooked that I decided to try an idea I’d had a couple of years earlier, but not had a clue where to begin at the time. The idea was this: was it possible to teach a computer to write music? And, if you managed, what were some of the things this would make possible that weren’t possible before?
I bought a notebook (half manuscript paper, half plain) and got to work. I sat working on it in a library in Harvard, then on the plane back to London too. And I’ve been working on it ever since.
I’m a composer — I spent my childhood singing in choirs, playing piano and flute, and writing as much music as I could. So it was a bit of a change to be suddenly getting to grips with inheritance and pointers.
Over the course of a year or so, I built a prototype. The first time I heard its output was after about 9 months of work, when it played a fairly boring hymn tune — but a hymn tune that no one had heard before. For the first time, I became convinced this could work.
I knew a lot more work was needed on the software — but I also knew it was time to start thinking about the areas in which this would be the most useful. So I went and chatted to Patrick, who I’d been at university with and who had since gone to work on striking video partnerships at Google.
We had a series of long chats, and, thanks to his guidance, we realised the biggest need for something like this was in the world of video creation. And Patrick came on board as co-founder.
Creating music for video
A crazy amount of video is being produced at the moment — at the last count, 400 hours is uploaded to YouTube every minute. This is the first time in history that such a huge amount of content has been being made by so many people across the world — and pretty much all this content needs music.
Over the course of a few months, we chatted to as many video creators as we could. And we kept hearing the same things: finding the right track takes ages; the music they want to use is too expensive or has complicated copyright issues; having to edit a stock track to fit your video is a massive pain; and — almost most importantly — everyone ends up using the same few top tracks from the biggest stock audio sites, making their videos less unique.
We realised that our software could solve this. So we raised investment from some great funds in Cambridge, and set about bringing together the right people to crack the problem.
Over the last year, we’ve grown from just two of us to a group of 12 musicians and engineers passionate about making video creators’ lives easier through bringing AI to music composition.
We’ve been in private beta, with a handful of creators testing our site as we’ve built and iterated. We’ve learnt a huge amount from their feedback — which styles of music are the most important to them, what they want to be able to set (with the exact BPM of the music being a big one). And they’ve already done awesome things with our music, like this video from Google Developers:
In fact, over 100 days of music have been created on our site, and our music has been used in videos that have generated over 16 million views on YouTube. We’re really proud of this — and we reckon it shows we’re ready to open the site up to everyone.
So we’re opening up into public beta today!
Introducing Jukedeck
The site we’re releasing today is a place where you can create your own unique, royalty-free tracks in a few seconds, without needing to be a musical expert. We let you set the style, the mood, the speed, and even what instruments are playing. We give you a unique MP3, which you can download and use as the background music for your videos. The reason we can do this is that we’re not just going and fetching you a track from a library — we’re composing a new track, just for you, on the spot. Our artificially intelligent system writes the music from scratch — the tune, the chords, everything — which means the track you get is unique and has never been heard before.
I hope you’ll give it a go the next time you’re making a video!
