Collaboration has been at the heart of music creation. Thanks to a new generation of collaborative music apps, musicians can continue to create music together, even when a global pandemic has separated them.
One example is endless. Launched at the start of the lockdown last year, the platform combines software recreations of drum boxes, samplers, synthesizers and effects, with a “tap to loop” workflow. It also accepts audio for use with guitars, pickups and other external instruments.
Endlesss has allowed other people around the world to separate from a distance. This year, the band The Veltrons releases their album moment, having met on the app in 2020. Members of the organization have not yet met in person. Drew, the frontman of Broken Social Scene, wrote an entire album on the app, which was released in July.
CEO and founder Tim Exile believes that music is all about functionality and that in the long run media will be conversational interactions rather than passive consumption. His own musical adventure began at the age of five when he learned to play the violin. Friend lent him a contraband rave tape and replaced everything.
He says, “I knew this was the global sound I was looking to be in, so I learned to be a DJ and then to produce, and I started betting on radio and releasing records. I completely lost touch with what I had before. it motivated me to get into music, so I started getting interested in programming.
As his confidence as a programmer grew, he was in a position to create a tool that would allow him to play electronic music as he had played the violin. This tool became the “flow machine” and in 2010 Exile gave up its recording. career to devote himself to improvised live acting in a natural way.
“The feeling of connecting live with an audience in the room is so exciting,” he says. “I knew I would never look back, but I also knew that the biggest prospect here is not my career as an artist, it’s the generation I had built that had to be put in the hands of other people. “
From there, he began to create products, first by teaming up with big brands like Native Instruments and then diversifying, yet he knew the only way to satisfy his project was to start anything from scratch. The result was endless.
Previously, it focused only on generating a live improvisation instrument from one end to the other, however, it soon became transparent that building it in a web-connected way was the most productive way forward. “The way we created Endlesss was very productive they have support for live remote collaboration and the potential network effects it can bring were exciting,” he says.
The company launched, first from cash generated through Exile’s other software products, as well as some government grants, before raising the budget from friends, family and angels.
Exile has also been fortunate to have a strong network of contacts from his past career in music and technology, which gave him early investors, adding Tim Clark, founder of IE: Music, and artists such as Imogen Heap, BT and Flux Pavilion.
He says: “We also won strongly from our network which helped us run the biggest software crusade ever done on Kickstarter, and the most recently when we raised £400,000 in a fair fundraising crusade. Our overall start-up prices to date are around £”1 million. “
In what is the biggest economic replacement in centuries, Exile believes that the ability to create immutable virtual goods that are verified through decentralized networks is as massive a replacement as when industrialists began incorporating legal entities to centralize production at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
He says: “Over the next decade, this will disrupt the extractive practices of social media platforms and the attention economy. We are at the beginning of a cultural renaissance that is likely to result in the length of the cultural industries market exceeding the “real world economy. “
Endlesss has largely followed those advancements while being involved in several NFT projects where Endlesss artists like Imogen Heap have achieved and sold riffs created on the platform as NFT.
“The price of NFTs is explicitly decided through how the communities around them interact and coordinate,” says Exile. “Right now, the global NFT is very focused on what happens after typing and sales, but we believe there is a great opportunity to integrate the artistic procedure itself into NFT platforms. “
It’s still early days for Endlesss, which has more than 100,000 users on the platform, with 3,000 of its most sensitive creators creating more than 10 riffs in the past 30 days.
“So far, with the aim of creating exceptional artistic delight and the platforms where the ultimate music creators are located,” says Exile. “We have big supporters of the app, like Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene, comedian and beatmaker Hannibal Buress, and our investor artists. “
It is also positive about the long term of artists and musicians. As the industry moves away from the era of production and consumption, artists and fans, to a global of artistic communities, Exile believes that the price that arises from their interactions remains between members of the network.
“The old structures of the music industry that rely on centralized ownership and distribution struggle to compete or transition into this world,” he says, “but it will be desirable to see how it goes. “
I am a freelance journalist, founder of Coleman Media, for more than 20 years I have covered business stories for national and foreign publications and in print,
I am a freelance journalist, founder of Coleman Media. For over 20 years I have covered business stories for domestic and foreign online and print publications, with a specific interest in marketers and their startups. Outside of business, I’m a complete black: “Pure Dynamite – The Autobiography of the Dynamite Kid” a satisfying journalistic diversion. Follow me on Twitter @alisonbcoleman or check out my most recent paintings in www. alisoncoleman. co. uk