What happens when music meets artificial intelligence? Carving his path at this unique juncture is Mansoor Rahimat Khan- son of sitar legend Ustad Chhote Rahimat Khan and co-founder of Beatoven.ai. Together we dove into understanding the groundbreaking new technological tool, Beatoven.ai- empowering content creators with easily accessible royalty free music.
Born into a rich musical legacy spanning seven generations, Mansoor Rahimat Khan was inducted to the practice of Indian Classical music by his father Ustad Chhote Rahimat Khan, a flag bearer of the Dharwad gharana. Undergoing the rigorous training required of a sitar player in the Hindustani Classical tradition, he proudly recalls his family’s contribution to the field, “my grandfather, great-grandfather, his father and so on were all court musicians in various palaces in India. It is a very traditional family. We have made our own contributions to the Indian Classical space. There are two types of the modern day sitar- the kharaj pancham, and the gandhar pancham. The kharaj pancham was shaped in my family by my great-grandfather and that is the tradition we play today. We have what is called the ‘gayaki ang’ where we translate the nuances of singing onto the instrument and then the instrument becomes your medium. You are basically singing through the medium.”
Alongside his musical training, Mansoor’s love for mathematics led to him topping the subject in his final year of high school. Deciding to explore his interest in the latter subject, he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at the National Institute of Technology, Goa when he stumbled upon the field of music technology- a perfect crossover between his long standing love for music and passion for technology. Mansoor dove deeper into the world of music technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology before dropping out and returning to India to pursue his efforts in his musical career and founding multiple ventures like EDMofy and ACPAD. Below are the excerpts of an engaging, and insightful conversation recounting Mansoor’s journey building his latest venture Beatoven.ai with co-founder Siddharth Bhardwaj.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
How did you conceive Beatoven.ai?
Most ideas come through observations. Because I was neck deep inside the space of music, I was aware of the music production market which is a huge space. But we didn’t know how big the space is, and to get into any field you have to do your research and you have to understand that is it really a big market? Is it something worth pursuing? Because when you are building a startup, you are building a product and for that, you have to be sure of what you are building and who you are building it for. My co-founder Siddharth and I started with a lot of research. We had close to 500-600 conversations over a span of three months. We spoke to agency folks, youtubers, podcasters, and all kinds of content creators and we used to ask them- what are the challenges you guys face in today’s system? Where do you get your music from? How do you go about it? What are the budgets? What are the processes you follow? How much time does it take for you to be able to get a piece of music for your content? Some patterns emerged from these conversations. We realised that there are two kinds of extremes that lie in the market. One extreme are stock music libraries which are pre-created tracks licensed on a marketplace and the other extreme is hiring a music producer which is obviously an expensive and time-consuming process. After identifying the two interesting extremes, we asked ourselves the question- is there something to build in the middle of both of these extremes where you can uphold quality but also where you get to communicate to a system your requirements for the music in terms of mood, tempo, genre, etc. That’s the thought process that we started with.
How did you begin to execute this idea?
To validate the idea, we built a small prototype and we launched it with 200 users. From the feedback we understood that there is excitement and interest in this space from customers but we weren’t there yet because what we wanted to build was super deep-tech. Just think about the concept- you are letting somebody who doesn’t know anything about music make a piece of music. How do you enable that? You need to build something that is super smart, which considers users preferences, understands accordingly and creates a piece of original music in real-time within a couple of minutes. We understood that what we are trying to build is super ambitious, super tough, and we needed resources. We did a small round of funding and raised funds from a venture capital in the UK called Entrepreneur First. Then we built the first version of the product, launched it, got more feedback, there was more excitement, more users, and then we decided that we needed a team to be able to pursue this. Then we raised another round of funding from Info Edge and Entrepreneur First. Once we had the two big international investors, we were equipped with resources and we decided to form the best team possible to build the product.
Tell us more about the product.
We are basically building AI models for making music in different genres and styles of music. All genres of music have independent AI models that can make their own styles of music. Where artists come in is that to build any kind of AI system, you need a lot of data. You need hundreds and thousands of samples of data so that the AI can get really good in terms of how it makes music because ultimately what matters is quality. If your quality of music is not good, no matter how innovative your product is, nobody is going to buy it. We source and vet our own artists that we want to work with. We have a few artists from GMI working with us right now. I have been to EDM concerts, I have been to see Plini and progressive rock and one day I want all these artists to be a part of Beatoven.
How do you foresee the growing presence of artificial intelligence impacting the music industry and musicians themselves?
See, the next ten years is the age of AI. Everybody has agreed upon it. So it’s not like we are looking into the future- we are already there right now. This COVID wave has just accelerated all of this development. As a company, we don’t believe that any form of AI technology can compete or replace musicians. It will just make musicians more creative. If you think of it this way, today your creativity is limited by what you as an artist understand and your creativity lies in your background, what you have learned, and the things that have influenced you. Your music is basically a subset of all that. AI is not limited by that. AI can compose music in multiple genres and it can compose music in different styles because it is all about what it has learned from data. What we believe is that this interaction between artists and AI is going to be the next wave of creativity. Newer genres of music will emerge where the artists will use AI as an idea generator. It will not be a competition, it will be a collaboration.
How does Beatoven.ai contribute to the artistic community and empower artists?
Our vision is to build a very strong ecosystem where we are not competing with but creating an inclusive environment for artists. One fundamental part of our vision,being artists ourselves, is that we would never want to build something that would be competing with artists.
One very interesting concept that we are working on right now is that we want to create a layer where people can actually compose music in your individual style on Beatoven and when they are able to do that, we will have a monetising model of revenue sharing so every download that you drive on our platform, you get a percentage of that.
It’s not just about us making a lot of money but also having a space where we can have a monetisation model for artists. So kind of what Spotify does for streaming, we essentially want to do for the production market. That’s the kind of way in which we plan on giving back to the community.
Interviewed, written and edited by Senjuti
About Mansoor Rahimat Khan:
Mansoor Rahimat Khan, Co-founder & CEO of Beatoven.ai is a professional sitar player with 18 years of experience in the recording and live music industry. He comes from a family of musicians which goes back 7 generations called the Dharwad Gharana of Sitar players which includes several legendary sitar players and has contributed to shaping the modern day sitar. He is an alumni of the Georgia Tech Centre for music technology and has worked across several startups such as Great Learning, ToneTag in tech and product roles. Mansoor also co-founded and was a part of several music tech startups in the past such as EDMofy and ACPAD.