Montreal software startup LANDR rocking the music world

LANDR has acquired $6.2 million in a recent round of funding, although for the Montreal-based startup, the names of the investors are considered as important as the money itself.

Warner Music Group, New York rapper Nas, a private equity firm comprised of electronic music DJ’s Richie Hawtin, John Acquaviva, Tiga and Pete Tong, as well as Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté are investing in LANDR and its namesake software: a drag-and-drop engine that masters recorded audio automatically in seconds.

Since launching in May 2014, LANDR has already mastered 1.2 million tracks, more than the number of songs that were professionally mastered in the United States last year, according to founder Justin Evans. The service is offered either on a track-by-track basis or a monthly subscription with different price points. LANDR has 250,000 subscribers.

“I really wanted to solve the problem of musicians not being able to afford professional mastering,” Evans said from LANDR’s Mile End office.

Evans, a former musician who at the time lacked the means to master his band’s recordings, doesn’t want LANDR’s machine learning technology to replace real studios or human engineers, but rather present a cost-effective alternative for cash-strapped artists who can’t afford studio time. CEO Pascal Pilon thinks it could simplify the creation and sharing of music like Instagram did for pictures.

“Our ambition is to make it so that anyone who makes music can feel they made something of professional quality,” Pilon said.

The engine comes from The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, which is where popular music-identifying phone app Shazam was also created. LANDR the company, formerly known as MixGenius, purchased the intellectual property and built a commercial version. A new iteration of the engine, called Ionian 1.0, has been released after six months in development, and there is a professional version coming.

The 1.2 million songs users uploaded onto LANDR’s cloud database were instrumental in letting the team figure out the engine’s limitations and what to fix for Ionian. Improvements have been made on the genre analysis side — in other words, how LANDR figures out what style of music is being made and then makes the right adjustments.

“It’s more granular,” Evans explained. “It understands your music to a greater degree of specificity.”

Evans and Pilon have been making frequent trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles in the past year with the purpose of attracting investors from both the Silicon Valley and music industry realms.