Fusician

Music is a vital component of human society, however even in the digital age, creating and sharing music is still a major hurdle to amateur musicians. Most are intimidated by the complex software used to produce music, and never attempt to create original music, despite having an abundance of creativity. This is where Fusician comes in, providing an easy to use mobile app, where amateur/novice musicians can freely express their talent. All they have to do is record their part, position it on the songs timeline and hit play, Fusician does everything else. Fusician encourages creation through collaboration, allowing users to create unique compositions by adding their own tracks and beats to other users' songs. We aspire to provide all aspiring musicians the fun and simple tools needed to get started with their musical careers. 

Music is entrenched in Indian society, the average Indian spends 19.1 hours per week listening to music. 94% of online consumers listen to music, well ahead of other hobbies like sports (67%) and cooking(66%). Many Indians have also actively engaged themselves in musical education, with 44.65% having taken music lessons in school, and 41.7% learnt to play an instrument, and continue to do so. Despite India's deep connection with music and musical education, many factors continue to affect outreach of music and its benefits in Indian society. Fusician has identified that most efforts for music advocacy in India are unscalable, focusing on in-person sessions, rigid curriculums, and leveraging little to no technology, thus impacting the student's confidence in his or her creative abilities. This problem is more amplified during COVID with further setbacks around focus in music learning especially given the lack of technology penetration. Fusician aims to combat this fear/lack of confidence associated with creative music making especially with novices to create a sustainable and impactful platform for musical advocacy and in turn holistic learning.  Creativity is not just a gift that you are born with but we hope to bring that out with all children through music.

Fusician set out to answer the question, "How do we make music making simple and inclusive enough for anyone to start, and make it scalable to all people ?" Fusician achieved this by creating a mobile app, where users are not intimidated by the complex processes plaguing other music making software. Users have to simply record their part, position it in the timeline of the song and hit play! This ensures the simplicity and inclusivity of the platform. Another major feature that improves engagement is that other users can add their own tracks and beats to other songs, thus allowing collaboration between all users of the app, and creating unique compositions. By focusing on the simplicity of the music making aspect, and allowing for collaboration from all users, Fusician becomes a platform where anyone can express their musical talent, thus overcoming the lack of confidence in their creative music making skills, and does away with the rigid curriculum structure, allowing for increased peer learning and application of concepts learnt in class. Fusician promotes encouragement of families/friends and also visibility to markets/media houses in publishing the creative content on social networks. 

Fusician can be used by people of all ages, we intend to start with younger populations - especially those still learning music or want to try music (novice). The main beneficiaries would be those aged 13 to 18, tech-savvy children who would love to share their music on the internet, and grow their creative abilities.  More specifically, we would like to work with children from Government schools (Public schools) that are part of Atal Innovation Mission (Government of India) to introduce this app as part of STEM and introduce music making.  Children in Government schools typically have limited funds and less focus on music with lots of emphasis on traditional subjects.  More focus on holistic learning has come in recently given some by NGO's.  However, music education is very sensitive to funding and is typically the first program to be cut owing to budget pressures.  As a result, it is very had to sustain music interests among underprivileged children on a prolonged basis.  Fusician aims to remove lots of current/traditional approaches of music advocacy by making music making more fun, social and scalable leveraging technology.  This is made possible through Fusician features including marketplace of jingle/tracks, easy to use mix studio and powerful social network of family/friends to support/encourage music making.  While Fusician will be targeted for initial launch in India, the application of this solution provides a global answer to music advocacy challenges. 

The problem of lack of music advocacy is prevalent in India/world. Despite Indians having a deep connection with music, music programs in India are small and localised efforts, holding back the scalability to remote or physical environments. Fusician aims to combat this by providing a de-centralised learning experience, based on peer-learning and community engagement, by providing no fixed curriculum, and encouraging users to creatively express their musical talent. As a mobile platform, it allows for rapid scale, thus bringing an informal musical education to all users, thus providing all the benefits associated with a holistic education.

The app is in the prototype/MVP stage. We have released our beta release to about 100 students in music schools to gather feedback in Sep 2020.  Feedback from user sessions have been incorporated in the release that will be delivered in July 2020.  Internal testing is being conducted on both the iOS and Android operating systems.  We are consulting with technology experts (pro-bono) to learn on how to refine music sync issues and exception handling to handle unhappy scenarios.  The app is already deployed on AWS and we are finalising launch to start with Android in July and iOS in August 2021.  In parallel, given our volunteer experience with Government schools - over summer we are planning to market Fusician for music advocacy.  We are also consulting with faculty from University of Berkeley to refine product features, marketing approach, pitch and scalability across India.

We believe that there is no innovation in the market place that enables and sustain music advocacy through technology.  There are lot of music making applications which are predominantly used by serious musicians.  Our approach to music is not perfection but fun/simplicity with music making thereby covering the uncoverted novice musicians.  Additionally, Fusician stands out in two places in comparison to its competitors - ease of use and ability to collaborate. Fusician was designed with ease of use as a main indicator, as we did not want to intimidate any prospective users, who may already be unsure of their music making abilities. Ease of use is achieved by providing only the essential features needed for music making, i.e. - recording and editing on a timeline. More complex features found on other music making platforms (such as sliders to adjust pitch, tempo, etc post recording) were not added we found that beginner musicians rarely used them. The second aspect, which is key to providing an engaging platform is collaboration/social networking. Most other music making software does not allow for online collaboration, requiring one user to have access to all tracks of the song. By allowing any user to provide their own tracks, and add them to the song themselves, it allows for impromptu collaboration, allowing the app to be much more engaging.  Social collaboration is very essential to encourage and promote music and in turn music advocacy.

As the program is still in early beta testing, we currently serve 100 people. We estimate, based on the growth of other apps in the music industry, that this solution can serve 75,000 users in one year, and 430,000 users in five years. We expect around 20 to 25% of these users will be recurring monthly users, and this is the number of users we expect the solution will directly and meaningfully affect. 

Our progress towards our goal is measured in the amount of unique tracks created, the amount of collaborative projects undertaken by the users, as well as number of unique users. These metrics provide us with an understanding of how engaged the users are, how many people we have affected and how the community is building. The number of unique tracks shows us how many people are expressing their creative potential, the number of collaborations shows us how often the community works together, and the number of users serves as a baseline for the number of people who we have affected.  Social network measurements will also guide success around interactions bringing more friends/family to the application.  

2 part time 

1 contractor

This project was conceived by two high school musicians as part of LaunchX program (USA). Unable to find a piece of software that was simple for amateur musicians like themselves to create music, they set out to create their own platform. From there the project expanded into an effort to expand the creativity of aspiring musicians, and build a community of like-minded musically inclined individuals, who can build upon each other's ideas and create original music

The individuals of the team are personally connected to problem they are trying to solve, and thus are passionate and eager to solve it. They have experience in app development, servers and have participated in entrepreneurship programs, giving them skills needed to start, run and maintain new ventures. 

At this point, the team only consists of 2 part time workers, currently residing in India and Singapore. As the product grows, and the team expands, we are committed to ensuring that the team becomes diverse, fair and accepting of all people, and we will do our best not to exclude those marginalised in society. 

The main purpose why we are applying to solve is that we believe that our experience here, the connection we build and any funding we receive, would be vital to the growth and success. Despite the teams efforts to learn about the field, and the techniques to launch and grow businesses, we are still inexperienced, and would appreciate any help we could receive in that front, which would aid us in running the program to scale. We hope to come out the program ready to launch the program, and gain traction quickly, so we can achieve our vision of a sustainable and scalable solution. 

As a user-generated content platform, early growth and traction is necessary to make the program scalable and sustainable. Keeping this in mind, we would greatly appreciate any help that would allow us to market our program better, expand our user base, or provide us with the human capital necessary for this to happen, so that we can achieve early traction.