A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup releasing a series of small, playful music apps that let people manipulate sounds and vocals, rather than generating songs from AI prompts. It has raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, and Systemic Ventures. Dawn Ostroff, former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer, joined the company as an advisor.

The company was founded by Máuhan M Zonoozy, former head of innovation at Spotify, who left Spotify in 2024. He previously founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup acquired by Cricket Media. Zonoozy said streaming solved the access problem, but most interaction with music remains about consumption. He saw younger audiences growing up playing with culture through games, filters, and creation tools, and saw an opportunity to do something similar with music.

The startup treats its releases like musical singles within an album. Current experiments include Speed Surfer, a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of sound in the browser; Usersound, a website that creates an audio username where each letter represents a note; Stacks, a stem player with a 3×3 grid for turning bars on and off; Drops, a marble-dropping pattern game that creates musical notes; and Sampler, a website that turns YouTube videos into samplers based on beats in different song parts.

Its more ambitious product is an iOS app called bop, which lets users place musical instruments and effects on a grid to create mixes of a base song, adjust tempo, and add one-time effects. Mixes can be exported directly to TikTok or Instagram, and the company is working on a multiplayer version for remixing songs with others.

Zonoozy said the company is deliberately choosing not to infuse AI into every part of these apps, though it is open to using AI to build them and strengthen infrastructure. He argued that while AI is powerful, the future of music is not simply AI song generation. If AI makes content more abundant, he said, taste, human perspective, interaction, and participation become more important and more valuable. This year, the company plans to release a musical sandbox mixer product that would let users play with different elements of music-making, including creating instruments.