- Source: Jukedeck
Jukedeck was a British technology company founded in 2012. It built a website that let users create royalty-free music using artificial intelligence.
History
Ed Newton-Rex started building the first version of Jukedeck’s algorithmic composition system in 2010, and founded the company in 2012. In 2014, Patrick Stobbs left Google to join as co-founder. Stobbs and Newton-Rex had met at the age of eight when they were both choristers in King's College Choir, and they had later been at Cambridge University together.
In 2015, Jukedeck launched a website that let people generate original, royalty-free music for use in videos. Users could set parameters including genre, instruments and duration, and specific climactic moments in the music; they could then generate a song in around 20 seconds that they could download for non-commercial or commercial use, with prices ranging from free for personal projects to $199 per song to purchase the copyright.
Newton-Rex’s original algorithmic composition program was a rule-based system in which note and chord probabilities were hard-coded. By 2017, this had been replaced with a two-tiered approach, in which artificial neural networks generated musical compositions which were converted to audio using an automated music production program. Music could be generated in a number of genres, from folk to electronica.
The website was used to create over 1 million pieces of music, and brands that used it included Coca-Cola, Google, UKTV, and the Natural History Museum, London. In 2018, Jukedeck’s technology was used to compose the music for K-pop girl group Spica for a performance at a concert at the Blue Square Concert Hall in Seoul. Singer Taryn Southern also used Jukedeck to create backing tracks for her songs.
Jukedeck grew to a team of 20 people and raised £2.5M in funding. In 2019, it was acquired by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, for an undisclosed sum.
Awards
Winner of Vator Splash London in 2013.
Winner of the LeWeb startup competition in 2014.
Winner of Pitch@Palace in 2015.
Winner of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015.
Winner of an Innovation Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2016.
Winner of Hottest Media/Entertainment Startup at The Europas in 2017.
Winner of Startup of the Year at the BIMA Awards in 2017.
