Aux, RealCount win Music Tectonics 2023 music tech startup competition
Two promising music tech startups were named the winners of the 2023 Swimming with Narwhals Startup Pitch Competition at the recent Music Tectonics Conference.
AI-powered music samples creator Aux is the jury choice winner, and ticket sales tracking and analytics platform RealCount was named the audience choice winner.
The audience voted on their favorite pitch, while the jury evaluated startups on originality, likeliness to succeed, and product-market fit.
Other finalists included Přemysl Koudela of Get Moments, Stefan Heinrich of Covers.AI by MAYK, and Artur Muehle of Offstage.
Real Count
Founded by Diana Gremore and JC Liang, RealCount is a B2B analytics platform streamlining live music’s key performance metric: tickets sold. Its automation pre-sale tool saves time for support staff and decision-makers. Its pre-show act tool monitors and benchmarks sales. Its post-tour analysis tool leverages past data for future tours.
Aux
Founded by Ben Bowler, Aux is a generative AI model that takes a text prompt (eg. “808 kick”) and generates infinite audio samples for music producers to use in their songs. The model uses a diffusion method with pre and post-processing models. The set is trained on a combination of traditional sample packs and files users upload to the Aux platform. To date, the Aux platform boasts over 50K users.
This year, a record-breaking number of startups applied for the competition.
“Our judges commented that this year’s competitors were more diverse in terms of business model and further along than you’d expect at this stage.” says Dmitri Vietze, director of Music Tectonics. “Once again what impressed me most is how supportive competitors and startups in attendance are to each other. It’s a community.”
2023 marked the Music Tectonics Conference‘s 5th year. It included a startup demo day at the Santa Monica Pier Carousel, networking, panels with music tech investors, and a Startup Bootcamp presented by Universal Music Group’s Digital Innovation team at one of UMG’s studios.
Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.
