Good music deserves to be found: Hamburg’s musicube secures $560,000

Based on the simple premise that good music deserves to be found, Hamburg-based music discovery service musicube has secured $560,000 in a seed funding round. Harnessing the power of neural networks and a whole lotta musicology background, musicube offers up a semantic search service that provides listeners with the ability to discover more relevant music more easily. The funding is expected to propel the startups’ US market expansion as well as up the scalable solution catalogue for the growing music streaming market.

Founded in 2019 by Agnes Chung and David Hoga, musicube employs AI technologies and currently has 47 million songs amongst its database. The software arrives via widgets and an API that brings top metadata to music labels, publishers, streaming services, and broadcasters, and ultimately, the end listener.

The musicube playlist generator provides users with the ability to generate deep researched playlists that can then be delivered via Spotify, and according to the company, “soon, on other services.” The startup counts Sony Music, Budde Music Publishing, Music Promotion Network (MPN), and PHONONET amongst it’s customer base.

“Today’s music listeners are stuck in filter bubbles, and nearly 90% of music is almost never heard as a result,” says Hoga. “The musicube mission is to enable music discovery and listening time for all music genres. We can help companies sort through complex data to make better decisions and create richer services and increase listening time.”

While not a single one of us could have predicted the timing of the global pandemic we’d been warned about for years, Chung and Hoga seemed to have landed at just the right moment. With The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reporting that global music industry revenues grew by 7.4 percent in 2020, with more than 100 million people subscribing to services, creating a global subscriber base of 443 million and The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announcing earlier this year that the U.S. recorded music revenues grew 9.2% in 2020, up to $12.2 billion, obviously the timing for a service such as musicube is spot on.

Musicube’s seed funding arrives via angel investors including Holger Hübner, co-founder of the Wacken Open Air.