Jukedeck

Jukedeck was a British technology company founded in 2012.^[1] It built a website that let users create royalty-free music using artificial intelligence.^[2]

Jukedeck

Type of business	Private
Founded	2012 in London
Founder(s)	Ed Newton-Rex Patrick Stobbs
Industry	Synthetic media Algorithmic composition

History

Ed Newton-Rex started building the first version of Jukedeck’s algorithmic composition system in 2010,^[3] and founded the company in 2012.^[4] In 2014, Patrick Stobbs left Google to join as co-founder.^[2] Stobbs and Newton-Rex had met at the age of eight when they were both choristers in King's College Choir, and they had later been at Cambridge University together. ^[5][2]

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.^{[6][5][7][2][8]}

Newton-Rex’s original algorithmic composition program was a rule-based system in which note and chord probabilities were hard-coded.^[9] By 2017, this had been replaced with a two-tiered approach, in which artificial neural networks generated musical compositions which were converted to audio using an automated music production program. Music could be generated in a number of genres, from folk to electronica.^[5]

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.^[10] In 2018, Jukedeck’s technology was used to compose the music for K-pop girl group Spica for a performance at a concert at the Blue Square Concert Hall in Seoul.^[11][3] Singer Taryn Southern also used Jukedeck to create backing tracks for her songs.^[3]

Jukedeck grew to a team of 20 people and raised £2.5M in funding.^[8] In 2019, it was acquired by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, for an undisclosed sum.^[12][13][14]

Awards

• Winner of Vator Splash London in 2013.^[15]
• Winner of the LeWeb startup competition in 2014.^[16]
• Winner of Pitch@Palace in 2015.^[17]
• Winner of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015.^[18][19]
• Winner of an Innovation Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2016.^[2]
• Winner of Hottest Media/Entertainment Startup at The Europas in 2017.^[20]
• Winner of Startup of the Year at the BIMA Awards in 2017.^[21]