Digital music startup Music Mastermind has raised another $11.4m in VC funding for its Zya music creation platform, while revealing plans to take it mobile through a deal with apps publisher Chillingo.
Due out this summer, the iOS app will let people make new music out of familiar hits, armed with licensing deals with Universal, Sony and other rightsholders.
“You can make a new song, mash-up world-famous hits such as Paparazzi, Fire Burning or classics such as Ms. Jackson and You Really Got Me or combine elements of both to create music that is uniquely yours,” explains the company’s announcement.
“We’ve poured our hearts into making Zya not just a game, but a new way for people to experience the joy of making music,” adds CEO Matt Serletic.
Zya’s launch has been a long time coming though: we first wrote about Music Mastermind’s ambitions to make music creation “fun, easy and intuitive for everyone” in early 2010, before covering funding rounds of $4.9m in February that year and $10.8m in May 2011.
Zya launched in a “First Look release” later that year as a PC and web product, but today’s news suggests it has now identified mobile as the way forward.
That seems sensible, but it’s fair to say that while there have been plenty of innovative music creation/remixing apps in recent years, we struggle to think of many that have been genuinely lucrative.
Or at least lucrative enough to lead to the kind of exit VCs would want after investing more than $27m in a startup. Of course, this may be the opportunity for Music Mastermind to break new ground. We’re looking forward to seeing how the app shapes up this summer.
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