Thriv helped Songen create a generative music studio for iOS

Building a music app takes more than great ideas and ambitious product plans. As Songen set out to improve its iOS app and push the boundaries of AI-assisted music creation, the team realised they needed additional expertise to bring their vision to life.

By partnering with Thriv and bringing in specialised freelance talent, Songen was able to strengthen its technical capabilities, accelerate development, and continue its mission of making music creation accessible to everyone.

Songen: Democratising music creation

Songen is a music app for iOS created by the company Vibin Oy. The company was originally founded in 2019 by a team of creatives and musicians wanting to build something connected to music making that serves both producers and artists. After multiple prototypes and products, the concept of Songen came to life: using AI for expanding creativity.

With Songen it’s possible to generate loops based on a comprehensive list of musical genres (Boom Bap, Country, Hyper Trap just to mention a few randomly chosen ones), chords by genre of your own choosing, and other tweaks by your preference. After having an idea of your track, you can edit the loop, instruments, tempo, key, pretty much anything you come up with and finally export and share your music.

The vision behind this: unleashing the full creative potential of individuals. According to Ilmari Koskinen, the tech co-founder of Vibin, music shouldn’t be restricted to only people who have studied it or have long experience in creating it. Unlike AI music generators that create full tracks, Songen offers the building blocks to make music easier. This way music is taken back to the grassroot level - if something sounds good, it is good.

Ilmari proudly says: “We have found the sweet spot in the creative process of music making between streamlining the creative work but not automating it, leaving enough room for the human contribution and fingerprint.” Something that was excitedly welcomed by the music producer industry, encouraging Vibin to push the AI music generator capabilities to its limits.

Finding the right talent through Thriv

As with any scaling, Songen had an ambitious roadmap based on received user feedback, but the team quickly realised they needed additional skills to deliver new features within a reasonable timeline. They wanted deep expertise in iOS development and UX to elevate their own team’s capabilities, as well as a desire for senior, entrepreneurial talent. Ilmari also feels that freelancers have a similar entrepreneurial mindset to startups, making them the best fit for the company.

Having worked at Futurice, the company that Thriv is part of, Ilmari was already familiar with freelancers. He had hired a few freelancers from Thriv for his own projects and had a positive experience. Ilmari states: “We got exceptional customer service from Thriv: we didn't have to interview too many candidates until we matched with the right talent. I feel Thriv really understood our needs and addressed them well.”

In the end, the onboarding process was fast and efficient thanks to the proactive attitude of the new team members. “The freelancers had a seasoned consultant approach and it was easy to get them both up to full speed with us. Communication with the whole team worked well.”

Improved technical maturity and faster innovation

The outcome of hiring freelancers to Songen: “We significantly improved our iOS tech maturity and overall tech diligence, allowing us to move faster and chase new opportunities.” In addition to speed and the ability to wish for even more, Ilmari got a few invaluable learnings that he was kind enough to share with us:

1. “It's important to have strong domain expertise. It's really difficult to build a music app if you don't know much about music.
2. Consider freelancers to positions where a founder attitude is needed. Same principles apply to freelancers as for any other team members. Build the team slowly and maximise talent density.
3. Agentic AI lifts the value demand to be higher in abstraction, towards service design, niche deep tech, and marketing combined with the ability to build products.”

Last but not least, our question was related to the ultimate dream scenario of Songen, Ilmari answered: “Finding a healthy collaboration between AI and humans in music making, without ruining music as the side effect. There's enough AI slop already.”

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Vibin Oy - Songen in a nutshell

Vibin Oy, a Finnish music technology company, that is on a mission to make music creation accessible to everyone. Through its app, Songen, the company combines artificial intelligence with music theory to help producers, artists and beginners generate unique ideas and transform them into original tracks. By offering the building blocks of music rather than fully automated songs, Songen empowers users to explore their creativity, and create music based on their own preferences.