Most generative AI music tools ask you to type a prompt and wait for a result. Máuhan M. Zonoozy wants you to play instead. His new startup, A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, just secured a $5.5 million pre-seed round from heavyweights like SV Angel, BoxGroup, and former Spotify executive Dawn Ostroff, who also joined as an advisor. Zonoozy, the former head of innovation at Spotify, left the streaming giant in 2024 because he saw a gap in how we interact with sound. Streaming solved access, but it turned listeners into passive consumers. He believes younger audiences, raised on games and filters, crave active participation.
The company treats its product releases like album singles. Each app offers a distinct, tactile way to manipulate audio. Speed Surfer alters browser audio playback in real-time. Stacks lets users mix tracks by toggling bars in a 3x3 grid. Drops turns physics into melody by deflecting marbles onto musical plaques. The flagship iOS app, bop, allows users to arrange instruments and effects on a grid to remix base songs, with easy exports to TikTok and Instagram. Recently, the team added prompt-based features, but they remain just one tool in a larger toolbox rather than the entire premise.
Zonoozy is explicitly resisting the industry rush toward fully automated song generation. He argues that if AI makes content infinitely abundant, human taste and curation become more valuable, not less. “I think if AI starts to make that content more abundant, it actually makes taste and human perspective and interaction and participation even more important,” he told TechCrunch. This contrarian stance positions the startup against the wave of “type-to-create” platforms flooding the market. Instead of replacing the musician, these tools aim to gamify the production process for people who might never open a digital audio workstation.
This approach mirrors the early days of social media, where low-friction creation tools unlocked massive user engagement. By lowering the barrier to entry without removing the joy of manipulation, A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya bets that people want to feel like producers, not just prompt engineers. With plans for a multiplayer remix feature and a “musical sandbox mixer” coming later this year, the question isn’t whether AI can write a hit. It’s whether users will care about a song they didn’t help shape.
