Jukedeck


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

History

Ed Newton-Rex started building the first version of Jukedeck’s algorithmic composition system in 2010, and founded the company in 2012. In 2014, Patrick Stobbs left Google to join as co-founder. 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.
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.
Newton-Rex’s original algorithmic composition program was a rule-based system in which note and chord probabilities were hard-coded. 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.
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]. 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. Singer Taryn Southern also used Jukedeck to create backing tracks for her songs.
Jukedeck grew to a team of 20 people and raised £2.5M in funding. In 2019, it was acquired by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, for an undisclosed sum.

Awards