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
The Choir of King's College, Cambridge is an English Anglican choir. It is considered one of today's most accomplished and renowned representatives of the great English choral tradition. It was created by King Henry VI, who founded King's Coll ...
, 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
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
generated
musical compositions
Musical composition can refer to an original piece or work of music, either vocal or instrumental, the structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new piece of music. People who create new compositions are called c ...
which were converted to audio using an automated
music production
A record producer is a recording project's creative and technical leader, commanding studio time and coaching artists, and in popular genres typically creates the song's very sound and structure.Virgil Moorefield"Introduction" ''The Producer as ...
program. Music could be generated in a number of genres, from
folk to
electronica
Electronica is both a broad group of electronic-based music styles intended for listening rather than strictly for dancing and a music scene that started in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the term is mostly used to r ...
.
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
K-pop (), short for Korean popular music, is a form of popular music originating in South Korea as part of South Korean culture. It includes styles and genres from around the world, such as pop, hip hop, R&B, experimental, rock, jazz, gos ...
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.
References
{{reflist
British companies established in 2012
Companies based in London