MyPart finds that next def jam

Picture it: you have the perfect song for Kelly Clarkson. It’s a mix of genres and styles best described as “Since U Been Gone” meets “911 Is A Joke.” How do you get it in front of Kelly so she can add it to her next album (imagine her singing “My heart is on fire when you’re not there/But the Austin fire department doesn’t care”)? You talk to MyPart.

MyPart lets aspiring creators and musicians submit stuff to their favorite artists. A vetting system separates the hits from the chaff and, by ensuring the artist doesn’t see unsolicited content, reduces lawsuits. MyPart, founded in 2016, has added a number of interesting features to its platform thanks to AI and machine learning.

“MyPart has recently finalized our seed round with $1 million, and were named a MassChallenge 2018 top 10 startup award finalist,” said co-founder Matan Kollnescher. “This followed a $150,000 pre-seed round that enabled us to achieve an MVP, strategic industry partnerships and legal validation.”

Kollnescher was a former member of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and the other co-founder, Ariel Toli Gadilov, spent time inside Intel as a finance and legal advisor. Both are skilled musicians. They’ve also hired Evan Bogart, writer of Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Rihanna’s “SOS.”

The team soft-launched and have 2,030 users and hundreds of uploads. The platform is designed to ensure that good music floats to the top and not so good music doesn’t create false positives. In fact, say the founders, MyPart can even “read” a piece of music to see if it is stylistically relevant.

“Crowdsourcing art by conducting competitions is a problematic approach due to the multiple losers (since everyone are competing over the same project) and the need for active involvement and initiative defining exact projects,” said Kollnescher. “The publishing industry barely utilizes technology at all and most conservative competitors don’t have not will be able to easily develop differentiating technology to solve quality, quantity, and relevance issues — thus continuing to have immense scaling issues.”

The platform lets good musicians get discovered, a product that could truly be useful in today’s saturated media market.

“MyPart’s AI approach to the industry is the first of its kind; our platform sifts through thousands of data points and looks into the ‘soul’ of a song to then sort by relevance to the famous performing artist of our user’s choice,” he said. Luckily, Kelly Clarkson loves songs about reducing state budgets due to the inability of the Austin Police Department to get these squirrels out of my back yard.