#TheWeeklyRoundUp - 26.05.23

Collaborative Music Creation Platform Boombox.io Raises $7 Million (Digital music news) Boombox.io has announced it has closed its seed funding round, raising $7 million. The round was led by Forerunner with participation from super{set} startup studio Ulu Ventures.

The service launched in November 2022 as a collaborative platform where music producers can store, version, and track all of their music files. They can collect time-stamped feedback on audio files, communicate on the go with iOS & Android apps, and manage their splits for songwriting and recordings. Boombox.io leverages generative AI to enrich and extend a musician’s creative process with Boombot, a friendly, AI-powered collaborator that generates new ideas and fleshes out partial ones to make music creation more dynamic, faster and smarter. Boomboot can help users spitball lyrics and song titles, suggests chord progressions, and turns them into MIDI files creators can plug directly into their digital audio workstation (DAW). Purpose-built workflows also enable creators to track and manage their AI-generated ideas and evolve them on the fly with each other. The $7 million seed funding will allow Boombox.io to build its team, accelerate product development, build new partnerships, and continue serving a base of committed and fanatic early customers.

“As a musicians and engineer, I felt the creator economy was long on hype and short on tools for creators,” says Co-Founder and CEO Tom Chavez. “We aspired to build a platform that gives music makers an all-in-one platform to collaborate like GitHub, connect like LinkedIn, and earn revenue from music.” “There are a lot of tools that solve little pain points in the creative process, but ours is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end solution to enable musical creators to collaborate, connect, and earn revenue from their art.” While it works on growing to become the default platform for music makers to collaborate globally, Boombox.io plans to release a desktop app this year for file backup, automation of submissions to performing rights organizations (PROs), and video features to support live sessions with collaborators. “This is what so many of us have been waiting for: a system for musicians that helps us create beautiful art and get it out in the world,” adds Lucas Banker, Head of Partnerships at Boombox.io and a long-time music producer who has worked with Selena Gomez, Sting, and others. “It’s like Dropbox on steroids but with so much more, built by people who know how music is made.”

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Rock queen Tina Turner dies aged 83 (News24)

Tina Turner has died at the age of 83 at her home in Switzerland, according to Sky News.

She died after a long illness, the Telegraph reported.

She was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and had a kidney transplant in 2017, the publication reported.

"It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Tina Turner," read the statement on the official Instagram page of the eight-time Grammy winner, who encountered fame first with husband Ike Turner, then as a wildly successful solo act after escaping the violent marriage.

Her career began in the 1950s and she went on to become one of the top recording artists of all time.

The eight-time Grammy winner enjoyed huge success in the late 1960s and early 1970s performing with her former husband, Ike Turner, but the couple divorced in 1978 after a stormy marriage.

In 2022, Turner was honoured on the 40th anniversary of her hit song What's Love Got To Do With It with a Barbie doll created in her likeness.

"I am honoured to welcome my Barbie into the group of trailblazing women already represented and introduce more kids to my journey," she said at the time.

Her youngest son died months later. He was 62 years old.

Turner retired from performing after her last tour, which ended in 2009.

Turner, who was born in Tennessee, moved to Switzerland in 1995 to join her German-born record producer partner Erwin Bach, who she later married in 2013 and became a citizen in April of that year.