Songscription

Photo Credit: Bruno Croci

AI-powered audio transcriber Songscription has secured $5 million from investors and disclosed long-term plans to develop an app enabling users to “learn any song on any instrument.”

Having set sail last year, Songscription announced the multimillion-dollar seed round today. Existing stakeholder Reach Capital led the raise, with other backers including London’s Emerge Capital, Munich’s 10x Founders, and Dent Capital (which says it invests “$250k-$500k in AI-first startups”).

Additionally, former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal has an interest in Songscription and is advising the subscription-based business.

Regarding Songscription’s goals for the fresh capital, the $5 million tranche “will go toward expanding the service’s available instruments and notation outputs.”

As things stand, this service can transcribe a single instrument at a time (with current support for piano, guitar, bass, trumpet, violin, and flute) from recordings and into sheet music, piano roll, or guitar tabs. These transcriptions are exportable in several formats.

According to the appropriate website, one can upload a file, record audio on-platform, or link to a YouTube video to get the transcription ball rolling. After that, Songscription prompts users to identify the target instrument, time signature, and key signature.

Coverage of an AI upstart that fields uploads wouldn’t be complete without a rights-related detour. In the first place, users must confirm that they “own or have obtained all necessary rights to transcribe” the audio.

In the second – and more important – place, per the terms one’s asked to accept at the upload stage, upon posting content to or via Songscription, an individual grants the startup “a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce,” and create derivative works from the media at hand.

Given the ample ground covered there, it probably won’t come as a surprise that the far-reaching right extends to “any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed.”

Furthermore, “[y]ou agree to pay all monies owing to any person or entity resulting from Posting your User Content and from Company’s exercise of the license set forth in this Section,” the text reads.

Back to Songscription’s funding and plans, the company said it’d “sourced material from the public domain, as well as from individual partnerships with artists and music businesses,” for training.

But it also mentioned seemingly ongoing collaborations “with global music publishers to get access to more diverse data.”

In a statement, co-founder and CEO Andrew Carlins touted Songscription’s perceived ability to help “fans to connect in new ways.”

“Most musicians can’t easily find notation for the songs they actually want to play, especially as platforms like Spotify have made more niche artists’ music increasingly accessible,” indicated Carlins. “We’re using AI to close that gap. Now artists can instantly create notation for their songs, allowing fans to connect in new ways.”