AudioShake Closes $1.4 Million Pre-Seed Round, Partners With ‘Ethical Music AI’ Developer Tuney on ‘Beat Swap’

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Music separation startup AudioShake has announced the formal close of a $1.4 million pre-seed round and officially partnered with Tuney to release a tool, Beat Swap, that creates “copyright-safe beats.”AudioShake reached out to DMN with word of both developments, having unveiled in May of 2023 a multimillion-dollar raise that drew participation from Metallica’s Black Squirrel Partners.

Regarding the newly closed funding round, though, the AI business identified as lead investors beatBread backer Mucker Capital, Warsaw’s bValue Fund, the Chicago Investment Club, and Burlington-headquartered Gaingelsi.

Shifting to the formal start of the companies’ partnership, Tuney’s technology is said to power Bacardi’s Music Liberates Music program as well as purchase options at Songfinch, a custom-song platform that’s drawn investments from the likes of The Weeknd and Doja Cat.

“Tuney’s AI tools let us scale our custom music offering while keeping artists at the center of the process,” Songfinch co-founder and CEO John Williamson noted of the resulting compensation framework. “Their stem-based approach allows us to take artist stems and generate instant custom songs for customers while paying artists a passive royalty for every generated song.”

Beyond its core use as a stem separator, AudioShake, it’s worth noting, can isolate music, dialogue, and effects from videos and transcribe song lyrics “in seconds,” to name just some capabilities.

Now, the entities have jointly developed the initially highlighted Beat Swap, which, as its name suggests, can automatically isolate a work’s vocals (using AudioShake’s technology) and then create a fresh collection of matching instrumentals (with Tuney’s AI). Amid continued criticism about (and calls for regulatory action to curb) the unauthorized use of protected media in the AI sphere, Beat Swap is said to have been trained entirely on licensed music.

Moreover, Beat Swap “assembles instrumentals from this catalog, rather than generates them, making the song both licensable and a higher quality,” AudioShake and Tuney explained of the underlying process, noting also that one can select a preferred genre for the music at hand.

“We founded AudioShake to help artists and labels unlock the potential of their music,” added CEO Jessica Powell. “With Tuney’s Beat Swap, we are excited to make ethical remix and derivative creation easy and affordable for labels and artists, opening up new avenues of creative expression.”

Looking ahead to the remainder of 2024, Beat Swap, currently in beta, is set to roll out “a more robust version” sometime later this year, execs indicated.