‘Beyond The Instrument’ is Sony’s music education initiative to get equipment into the hands of young people.
Tag: music education
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Youth Music CEO responds to government’s refreshed National Plan for Music Education (guest column)
This is a guest post from Matt Griffiths, CEO of UK charity Youth Music, where he responds to the government’s recently-refreshed National Plan for Music Education, in which the Department for […]
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Yousician adds a catalogue of songs to its GuitarTuna app
Yousician, one of the most established music-education services, charges subscriptions for its app teaching people how to play instruments and sing.
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Startup Singdaptive would like to teach the world to sing
Based in Canada, Singdaptive has just emerged from a year-long beta of a service that teaches people to sing with a roster of 21 vocal coaches.
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Gaana’s next music streaming frontier is… a robot
Smartphones, smart speakers, connected cars… and now robots are the new frontier for music streaming. In India at least, courtesy of a partnership between educational robotics company Miko and streaming […]
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Music education firm Yousician raises $28m funding round
We’ve been following music-education startup Yousician since its earliest days making an iPad app called WildChords. It’s come a long way since then: the company earned $50m of recurring revenue from its […]
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iManage Africa and Music Ally’s Music Business Academy for Africa
We’re delighted to announce our new joint venture with iManage Africa, the Music Business Academy for Africa. We’ll be working together to provide fully localised vocational education for aspiring creative […]
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Gibson’s new guitar-learning app uses video and AR technology
We’ve written about the Fender Play app launched by Fender to help people learn to play guitar, but there’s more than one axe-maker with that ambition. Rival Gibson has launched […]
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Violinist Rachel Barton Pine starts 24-part livestream series
Last year, classical violinist Rachel Barton Pine ran a series of free ‘Family Fridays with RBP‘ livestreams, and they have obviously given her a taste for the format. Now she’s […]
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Yousician adds music from Disney and Pixar’s new movie Soul
There’s been some positive buzz around Disney and Pixar’s latest film Soul in recent weeks, and now fans have a way to learn to play some of its songs. Disney […]
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Fender Play nears 1m subscribers thanks to free lessons
Instrument maker Fender is extending a promotion offering three months of free access to its Fender Play digital guitar-lessons service.
The promo launched in April, shortly after Covid-19 lockdowns began in many countries. Fender says that the Fender Play user base has grown from 150,000 to 930,000 subscribers since then.
With the promo extended until the end of 2020, that community of learners seems set to pass one million very soon.
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Roli boss talks Lumi keyboard and music education’s evolution
Music Ally first came across Roli in 2013, when it was named as a finalist in the SXSW Music Accelerator startups contest, before we reported on its $12.8m funding round the following year from investors including Universal Music Group.
The company was focused on music instruments, with its first being the Seaboard Grand, a keyboard whose rubber keys allowed players to bend notes a bit like a guitar. It was priced for professionals, but it marked the company out as one to watch in the music hardware space.
Since then, Roli’s products have been getting more accessible and affordable: there was the Seaboard Rise in 2015; the Roli Blocks modular synth controllers in 2016; the Seaboard Block keyboard in 2017; and then the Lumi keyboard in 2019.
Lumi, which launched with a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that drummed up £1.6m in pre-orders, was a hardware/software/service play. A keyboard that could light up with different colours, designed to be used with an app that would teach you to play piano, with access to a subscription-based library of lessons and songs.