Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raises $5.5m for music apps without AI prompting

Máuhan M Zonoozy spent years at Spotify, most recently as head of innovation, before leaving in 2024. He previously founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup acquired by Cricket Media. That background shapes A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya's thesis: streaming solved access, but most interaction with music remains passive consumption. The startup's answer is a collection of small apps it calls singles, each inviting people to play with sound rather than generate it.

The products are deliberately varied. Speed Surfer alters playback in a browser tab, Usersound turns letters of a username into notes, Stacks is a 3×3 stem mixer, Drops turns falling marbles into notes, and Sampler converts YouTube videos into beat-based samplers. The most ambitious is bop, an iOS app for gridding instruments and effects over a base track, with TikTok and Instagram export and a multiplayer remix mode in development. Zonoozy says AI is powerful but he does not believe the future of music is simply generation, and that abundance makes taste and participation more valuable.

What the outcome hinges on is whether these experiments feel like play or work. The company's plans for a musical sandbox mixer this year suggest it is still iterating on the format, and investor backing from names like Mantis VC, SV Angel and Dawn Ostroff gives it room to do so. For now, the proposition rests on Zonoozy's reading of younger audiences, not on a proven shift away from prompt-based tools.