Who are Beatoven.ai? Meet India’s first and only AI-backed music tech start-up

The question of the day is- ‘on average, how many hours do you spend watching YouTube’? 

“A lot” may be the simplest answer.

The content ecosystem is booming at its all-time pace. The growing percentage of internet user base and data consumption is well documented by the widely expanding user-generated content marketing ecosystem. 

As per the report by Oxford Economics, YouTube’s creator ecosystem generated considerable economic value and contributed an estimated ₹6,800 crore to the Indian economy and supported 683,900 “full-time equivalent" jobs in India in 2020.

Aspiring for a 5-trillion economy, India is viewing this creator economy as an emerging market cum soft power impacting economic growth, job creation, and even cultural influence. Tools and software that aid these creator economy is also witnessing huge growth potential in the coming years.

Beatoven.ai is one such tool that content creators and marketers are looking for all these years! Your original content needs free background music without any copyright issues, but often the trouble of finding the right music without any copyright infringement will get you dismayed. 

Glad, Mansoor Rahimat Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj founded a Bengaluru based start-up in 2021 that has thought about something amazing to solve this music acquisition and licensing problem that continues to be a major hindrance for the sector at large.

Beatoven.ai was launched to revolutionize the sector by making access to music easy and affordable for millions of creators whilst keeping it royalty-free, and easily customizable as per their requirements.

What is Beatoven.ai and why it is a game-changer?

Beatoven.ai is India’s first and only AI-backed, new age, web-based disruptive music tech start-up that provides a platform for music composers and content creators to help them create royalty-free, affordable, easy to license, exclusive music.

Works at the intersection of technology and music, the platform is extremely user-friendly, and individuals with little or no knowledge of music, can also easily create original soundtracks for their content with the help of AI. 

“What makes this AI-backed music tech startup different is its vision to build an inclusive environment for musicians to co-exist with AI. The platform is backed by musicians who play an integral role in supplying music to the product” says Mansoor Rahimat Khan, the Co-Founder and CEO, of Beatoven.ai in an interview given to Hindustan Times.

“We own all the rights to our music and content creators can use our music in their work without paying any royalties headache free” he added.

Moreover, the brand has built its own algorithms for region-specific music composition spanning across geographies within India. The brand intends to expand its music library by including ethnic music from other geographies as well such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Latin American music, amongst several others. 

The idea of beatoven.ai

Musicians themselves Mansoor Rahimat Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj had spent a major part of their life interacting with the creative community of content creators and were quite aware of the music production market. 

“Today, India is flooded with millions of talented content creators and independent artists who spend hours creating content, but a major problem that these creators experience frequently is the lack of access to royalty-free music for their content. These creators often fall prey to copyright issues while using free background music for their content. They struggle for hours to search and find suitable music for their content which also leads to a huge waste of time, energy, resources and money. Beatoven.ai was developed to solve this music acquisition and licensing problem that continues to be a major hindrance for the sector at large.” Says Mansoor.

Having close to 500 conversations with various kinds of video and podcast creators helped the founders build a strong conviction for the need for a product like Beatoven.ai in this market and continue to validate their theses till this date by doing iterations of testing of their product with their early adopters.

Initial struggles 

From funding to acceptance beatoven has left no stone unturned to stay afloat. Since the space that they were building is new in the Indian market considering all the traditional players are from the west. It was difficult to make various stakeholders understand the size of this opportunity and now is the right time to build a product like this for the creator community.

“Our product has a completely different experience in comparison to traditional libraries given that we let content creators make their own soundtracks vs searching through pre-created tracks on libraries. This unique selling point was difficult initially to pitch to and convince our investors. For customers, it was difficult to convince them that they can compose their own original soundtracks without any knowledge of music” says Mansoor recalling the initial struggles.

Evolution and revenue model

For Beatoven, the target consumers are high-frequency video and podcast content creators such as YouTubers, advertising agencies and wedding film production houses. 

The platform has to this date completed the two rounds of funding (a pre-seed round of 55K USD from Entrepreneur First and a seed round of 1 million USD from Entrepreneur First and Redstart Labs, a subsidiary of Info Edge). Aiming to hit an ARR of USD 1 million by the beginning of 2023, the company will be focusing on partnerships, product development and onboarding musicians who will be continuing to supply music samples for the platform. 

Beatoven.ai is a subscription-based program with three different subscription plans, USD 20/ month, USD 40/ month, and USD 100/month, catering to individual content creators, agencies, and production houses respectively.

Prospects

Beatoven can be a game-changer for independent artists since it has created a monetisation channel for music creators and has already disbursed 20,000$ to 100 artists as part of its music data acquisition.

“We are looking at associations with renowned independent artists from the music fraternity. Beatoven.ai also plans to onboard 10,000 new users by the end of the year 2022. The company will also focus thoroughly on product development this year and we aim to make music creation easier and accessible to our users," says Mansoor.