How Beatoven.ai Is Disrupting The Music Industry With AI & Exclusive Artist Collaborations

Today, there is hardly any area dominated by human intelligence that GenAI has yet to take under its ambit. From transforming simple sketches to creating sophisticated websites and generating intricate musical compositions, AI has seamlessly seeped into the universe of creativity and talent. 

Even musicians have now embraced AI for various use cases, ranging from songwriting to music creation and production. 

Anticipating that a day would come when artists would leverage AI capabilities to transform the music industry, Mansoor Rahimat Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj incorporated Beatoven.ai in 2021. 

Mansoor Rahimat Khan, founder and CEO of Beatoven.ai, comes from a long lineage of musicians and boasts 20 years of sitar-playing experience. He has done his BTech in electronics and communication from NIT Goa and holds a master’s in music technology from Georgia Tech.

Similarly, Bhardwaj holds a bachelor’s from IIIT Allahabad and a master’s in sound and music computing from UPF Barcelona. He has worked extensively in the area of audio technology. Before cofounding Beatoven.ai, Bhardwaj has worked with Samsung Research and several startups.

Beatoven.ai utilises advanced AI music generation techniques to create background music for video, podcast, and game creators. The AI platform helps musicians create royalty-free, affordable, easy-to-licence music and is on a mission to imbibe various musical cultures of the world into one system, allowing content creators to get easy access to royalty-free music for their content, per its website.

Behind The Genesis Of Beatoven.ai 

The genesis of Beatoven.ai stemmed from the founders’ recognition of a vast demand for original, royalty-free music suitable for commercial use — a market segment they had long desired to address. 

However, what changed everything was a revelation that only two entities, Epidemic Sound from Sweden and Artlist from Israel, were effectively meeting the demand for original royalty-free music among production houses and content creators

Observing their substantial revenues, nearing $150 Bn collectively, the founders identified a significant opportunity in the market, particularly given the dominance of Western-centric music genres. This gap spurred them to venture into the space, ultimately leading to the genesis of Beatoven.ai.  

“We believed that addressing the background music challenge required a scalable solution where individuals could effortlessly create their own music. Recognising the complexity inherent in music creation, we aimed to streamline the process. Thorough exploration instilled in us the confidence that a viable market existed for such a solution, motivating us to proceed with the development of the platform,” Khan shared with Inc42.

Currently, Beatoven is offering original soundtracks in multiple genres for content across segments. The startup is using open-source LLMs to augment music data by extracting key components like genre, mode and duration. Beatoven’s proprietary text-to-audio model uses these key components to compose the final audio track. 

Beatoven’s Target Market 

Beatoven’s primary target market encompasses the professional content creation segment, particularly individual creators such as YouTube content creators focussing on travel videos, often working in small teams of one or two individuals. Termed the “prosumer” market, this segment is pivotal for Beatoven’s initial strategy.

Presently, the startup boasts close to 1 Mn registered users worldwide, with 70% located outside of India. The US leads as the largest market, followed by Europe (including Germany and Turkey) and Southeast Asia.

Recently, Beatoven introduced soft monetisation through a new feature, charging users $3 per minute for downloads. Alternatively, users can opt for a $6 monthly subscription, entitling them to download up to 15 minutes of content per month. The startup also incentivises users to opt for subscriptions.

To date, the startup has acquired 4.2K customers for its product and aims to achieve $500K in annual average revenue by the end of the next financial year.

Exclusive Artist Collaborations

Beatoven’s primary target market, which consists of professional content creators, requires high-quality, original music compositions for their videos. However, acquiring music data is challenging due to stringent copyright enforcement in the music industry. Moreover, there are no readily available open-source projects in the music domain that can be leveraged commercially, primarily due to copyright enforcement.

To overcome this challenge, Beatoven leverages personal connections within the music industry to source a vast amount of data within a short timeframe. 

“Our approach involves entering into contractual agreements with artists, wherein they produce a specified number of samples exclusively for our company, typically ranging from 200 to 400 samples per artist. Subsequently, we acquire full copyrights for these samples through legal agreements, ensuring complete ownership by the company. All models developed at Beatoven are trained solely on this proprietary data, totalling close to 1 Lakh samples accumulated over the past three years,” Khan explained.

The startup uses probabilistic models to ensure that users receive unique soundtracks without facing copyright infringements, as the rights are managed by the company rather than individual users,” Khan added.

What’s Ahead For Beatoven.ai? 

The projected growth of the global background music market presents a significant opportunity for Beatoven and other music tech startups. 

With the market expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.97% from 2022 to 2028, reaching a value of $2.9 Bn, there’s a growing demand for innovative solutions in the background music industry.

While behemoths like Google and Meta are delving into text-to-music generation, Beatoven.ai distinguishes itself through its distinctive approach and inherent advantages in the domain.

While the quality of generated tracks from these major tech companies’ models may be improving, concerns persist regarding the training data they utilise.

As of now, deep-rooted connections of Beatoven.ai’s founders within the music industry have facilitated the procurement of high-quality music samples, ensuring originality and authenticity in its compositions. Furthermore, the dearth of Indian startups offering Indian music for background purposes presents the startup with a distinct opportunity to cater to a niche market segment like background music.