Music Tech Pitch 4.5, hardware, apps, and Brexit too

Although it was a few weeks ago I wanted to post about this Music Tech Pitch 4.5 event. I’ve been chairing and moderating the panel of judges for Music for about 3 years now and it’s been a huge amount of fun to do it. Each time it’s different and I’m constantly interested and amazed by some of the start ups that pitch.

This time was no different, except perhaps that some of these start ups really caught my eye. I’ll tell you about them.

First up we had Air-Craft, the maker of the quite amazing AC Sabre, which I mentioned last week. Hari, the creator of the app gave us a demo using the Sabre and then talked us through the business. It was a very impressive start to the evening.

Next we had Blitzer API. Blitzer is basically a one stop shop platform specialising in processing, enrichment and harmonisation of music metadata. Whilst this might not be really amazing for me personally I do understand how important this kind of technology is and it was a good pitch.

After that we had Concert Flow, a platform that matches listings of concerts to video footage of the artist playing live. Whilst I’ve seen this kind of thing before this was a really good take on the idea and I think it could really work for some artists. Also it had a really good team behind it which makes it even more appealing.

Decave was our next pitch. Decave is a service where musicians from different genres, get matched up, and after a day in the studio, play and jam together, in front of a crowd. I really liked this idea it seemed to be really worth pursuing. I think that Decave could produce some excellent results. Not just for audiences, but for the artists themselves. I’ll certainly be watching to see how it develops.

Ingenious Audio was next and was of particular interest as it’s a solution that works with iOS devices. It’s a new way to stream audio over WiFi called Fi-Live and a hardware device to make existing wired products WiFi compatible. I really liked this hardware, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen it on Kickstarter when it first arrived, or at least I can’t remember it anyway. I think we’ll be hearing a lot about Ingenious Audio in the future. Their product is pretty amazing.

Next up was JuiceVCR, an alternative promotional platform for independent artists to reach new audiences. This was pretty impressive as the platform has been run completely by one person so far and totally bootstrapped. I liked the product and I might go take a look at it for my own stuff soon. I think it’s worth taking a look at.

Last and by no means least was Trackd, the world’s first 8 Track ideas studio in your pocket, or at least that’s how they describe their app. To say it’s an 8 track doesn’t really do it justice as it’s more like a collaboration platform all in one place and that place is in your iPhone. I think I need to take a bit more time to look at Trackd, it has a lot of potential and I think it could become a really useful tool for mobile musicians. If you want to check out their app, you can get it on the AppStore here. It’s free with a single IAP.

It was an interesting evening, but I’ve missed out one part. Whilst we normally start Music Tech Pitch with a keynote speech, this time we did something different, we took the timely opportunity to have a brief debate about Brexit, which, as you can imagine, is a topic on most people’s minds in the UK right now. But I’m going to cover Brexit in a separate post as an issue as big as that deserves some dedicated time.

For me this was one of the best Music Tech Pitch events we’ve done so far, with perhaps the most diverse collection of start ups. In the end Ingenious Audio won the evening, and it was very well deserved. But it was a close run thing. The quality of pitches, ideas and companies were very high indeed.