BPI’s Music & Tech Springboard programme acts as tech A&R for our music industry members. Here, BPI’s Innovation Manager Amalie Briden highlights ‘5 to watch’ from our growing community of tech startups:
The record industry is built on innovation and technology. So it’s a no-brainer that the BPI runs a free membership programme for tech startups all over the world who we feel have something to offer our members here in the UK. We run initiatives and presentations all year round, so if you’re looking for a startup for a particular project, or you just want to dip in and see what’s happening in the music-tech space, this feature is for you. Stay tuned for exciting announcements to come!
Please contact [email protected] for any information about the startups we work with.
Chordal
Imagine a DSP platform created for the visual content industry — a personalized discovery experience built solely from the perspective of music for media, with all of the tools needed for project management in the modern content workflow. This is the ultimate vision behind Chordal, a collaborative music marketplace with the goal of increasing sync opportunities for artists. Chordal provides a central resource for global content professionals to access approved file downloads, rights, and direct conversations with the people who represent different copyrights. Rather than submitting music to an opaque sync library that functions as a middleman, rights holders are empowered to manage Chordal themselves. This is enabled by Chordal’s unique “connected file” approach. In a nutshell, only one version of a recording can be uploaded – if it already exists on the platform, additional rights holders have to add themselves to the original master copy. This collaborative rights system not only creates a streamlined approach for seeking sync deals for content providers, but enables it to be the most scaleable (and affordable) library management platform for rights holders. This combined with their suite of proprietary AI tools makes Chordal one of the most advanced sync technology platforms on the market.
Levellr
Positioning themselves as a CAAS platform (Community as a Service), Levellr empowers creators to nurture their communities, get to know them, and build strong connections – which many see as a key part of future creative marketing. Levellr helps artists and labels build out their fan communities on online spaces such as Discord and Telegram. With a series of features and dashboard functionalities gathering data on fan communities – such as locations, engagement, most active fans – marketing teams have access to information which would once have involved an exhausting marketing crusade – but is now handily sorted in a few clicks and some light scheduling.
Levellr have already run successful campaigns with Atlantic Records (e.g. Fred Again, who used the platform’s tools and community specialists to identify fans willing to host listening parties for the Actual Life 3 album launch), as well as Warner Records, 300, Island, Geffen and Interscope. Having just closed a funding round with Crush Ventures, Levellr is rapidly expanding as well as working on feature and product updates for the year ahead.
Tickets For Good
Founded in Sheffield in 2019, Tickets For Good is a social enterprise startup that partners with major venues and promoters to bring live experiences to NHS and charity workers for a very affordable cost, whilst helping the live events industry to develop audiences, and support sustainable revenues across live and night-time economies. With ticket prices becoming more expensive every year, Tickets for Good break down barriers by giving free and heavily discounted tickets away to their platform users. Their mission is to increase event attendance for all, across many different sectors with music just the start. Tickets for Good recently won the Wallifornia Pitch Startup Competition, where BPI’s Amalie Briden was on the judging panel.
Unhurd
Unhurd Founder, Alex Brees, has created a slick, easy to use, data-driven self-service tool for marketing artists and labels. Having already worked with over 30,000 artists, Unhurd helped generate over 10 million streams for artists in 2022. Their mission, to empower artists around the world, has captured the imagination of a huge raft of investors and supporters, including Hazel Savage, Kobalt founder Willard Ahdritz and not just one, but two Dragons Den dragons.
Viberate
Viberate’s mission statement is to provide industry quality data analytics and tools at affordable prices for the music industry. They work with labels and larger companies on talent discovery, artist monitoring, campaign planning and reporting - and with DIY artists on personal analytics, free websites, playlist and festival pitching. All for $19.90/month. Whilst they’re not the only similar product on the market, their affordability price-point has resonated with many across the industry.