YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook\u2019s Instagram have upended the film and TV industries, with a new wave of cinematographers, directors and actors leveraging innovations in technology to create new work and connect directly with billions of consumers to see it. Today, a startup is announcing some funding as it looks to make a similar impact in the world of music.<\/p>\n
Rapchat<\/a>, an app that lets people create music tracks \u2014 raps, as its name suggests, or something else \u2014 using a platform that crowdsources beats and lets people put vocals on top of them, has raised $2.3 million.<\/p>\n Co-led by Sony Music Entertainment and NYC VC firm Adjacent, this is an extension to Rapchat\u2019s seed round of $1.7 million back in 2018<\/a>, and CEO and co-founder Seth Miller tells me it\u2019s coming as the startup is getting ready for a bigger Series A.<\/p>\n With no connection to Snapchat \u2014 not now at least, except that founders Seth Miller and Pat Gibson did think it was a funny pun at the time that they were first conceiving of the company as a side hustle while still in university in 2015 \u2014 Rapchat has already gone quite some way in scaling.<\/p>\n The company today has some 7 million registered users, and at the moment some 250,000 songs are being created around a catalog of about 100,000 beats by 500,000 active users on the platform each month<\/em>. Engagement is hovering right now at 35 minutes per day on average, a mix not just of people making tunes, but through the beginnings of a social graph: people coming onto the app to discover and share those tracks.<\/p>\n Rapchat plans to use the funding to continue expanding the scope of what you can create on its platform, including growing the prize pools for Rapchat\u2019s \u201cChallenges\u201d competition series; expand to have more artists, producers and industry executives on the platform for mentoring; and to extend that platform\u2019s reach to integrate more deeply with the likes of TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify and Apple Music \u2014 platforms where creators are already making a lot of content, and where music is figuring strongly in that effort.<\/p>\n Rapchat\u2019s growth not only speaks to how the startup has pulled off its ambition to make it easier to make music, but it also speaks to an appetite, an itch, in the creator economy: There is a big, wide world of music-making out there, and more want to see if they can strike the right note.<\/p>\n Rapchat is definitely not the only, nor the first, company to think of how to address music creators within the bigger creator economy.<\/p>\n Another app called Voisey<\/a> had conceived of a similar idea but focused primarily on letting people create and record shorter clips rather than full music tracks before sharing them to other platforms. It has not quite become a household name, but it did have some small success in bringing attention to new artists, and interestingly, it was quietly acquired by Snap last year<\/a> (and for now, Snap\u2019s kept Voisey\u2019s app up).<\/p>\n TikTok\u2019s parent ByteDance has also made an acquisition of another music creation app, Jukedeck<\/a>. As with Snap\u2019s acquisition, so far we\u2019re not fully clear on how and where that acquisition is going, but we\u2019ve heard through the grapevine that TikTok is working on a new music service that sounds like it might let more content get plugged into TikTok\u2019s music layer, so perhaps watch this space.<\/p>\n And in perhaps the most trend-endorsing act of all, Rapchat has been cloned \u2014 by Facebook, no less. NPE, the social networking behemoth\u2019s in-house skunkworks team, in February rolled out BARS<\/a> (all caps! stand out!) \u2014 which is, yes \u2014 an app on which you can create your own rap music.<\/p>\n\n