A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup from a former Spotify leader for making music apps — SkimNews
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- A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and others, with former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer Dawn Ostroff joining as an advisor.
- Máuhan M Zonoozy, former head of innovation at Spotify who left in 2024, founded the startup after previously building Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing app acquired by Cricket Media.
- The company releases small music apps as "singles" in an album format, including Speed Surfer (a Chrome extension that alters browser audio speed and filter), Usersound (letters-as-notes usernames), Stacks (a 3x3 grid stem player), Drops (marble-deflecting plaques), and Sampler (YouTube-to-music-sampler).
- The flagship product bop is an iOS app that lets users place instruments and effects on a grid to remix a base song, adjust tempo, add one-time effects, and export mixes directly to TikTok or Instagram; a multiplayer version is in development.
- Zonoozy said the company is making an informed choice not to infuse AI into every product, arguing that as AI generation makes content more abundant, "taste and human perspective and interaction and participation" become more important.
- The company recently added a prompt-based feature to its apps, forcing TechCrunch to update its original headline that had emphasized the absence of AI prompting — and Google News coverage still carries the outdated "without any AI prompting" framing.
Why it matters: The $5.5M round backs a contrarian thesis at a moment when AI-generated music tools like Suno are attracting billions: Zonoozy argues that as AI floods music with generated content, human curation and remix participation become scarcer and more commercially valuable. The product strategy — a grid-based iOS remixer with one-tap TikTok/Instagram export — tests whether creator tools can monetize taste and interaction rather than raw generation.
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