Top Music Startups in 2027

Sofar Sounds was founded from a rooftop concert in 2009 hosted by Rafe Offer. He had eight people come over and listen to musician, Dave Alexander, play. This hobby and desire for more personal performances founded Sofar Sounds. Sofar Sounds is about allowing people the opportunity to go to thoughtfully picked out performances in small venues in order to give people a more personal live experience. We connect thousands of artists and hosts to people who sign up. We are set up in 444 cities. Signing up is free, then you get emails inviting you to performances and from there you can buy tickets for the ones you wish you attend.

We're your digital library and bookstore, all in one. for one low subscription fee every month, you can read unlimited amounts of books and magazines from your phone, tablet, or computer. we also provide document hosting services. we're bringing print entertainment to the digital stage.

We believe every creator should be able to interact directly with their fans. Laylo allows creators to notify their fans the second they drop new content, merch, and events. We help creators build a direct relationship with their audience and drive more streams & sales for everything they release. Inside of the platform, creators have a CRM to connect with their fans forever in the future, build out landing pages for their new releases, and analytics to understand their audience. We work with some of the largest records labels, managers, brands, and creators in the world to bring fans and creators together.

Since launching in 2009, Grindr has grown into the largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people. We have millions of users who use our location-based technology in almost every country in every corner of the planet. And we’re still evolving. Today, Grindr proudly represents a modern LGBTQ lifestyle that’s expanding into new platforms. From social issues to original content, we’re continuing to blaze innovative paths with a meaningful impact for our community. At Grindr, we’ve created a safe space where you can discover, navigate, and get zero feet away from the queer world around you. Keep connecting.

Flat, created by Tutteo Ltd, is an online music notation platform that empowers music enthusiasts to create, learn and share music scores, tabs, and lead sheets. We believe that the old fashion sheet music industry has come to a point where it needs to be renewed. Flat is the forefront of a new way to write, teach and consume written music. We proudly support 5M+ composers and music enthusiasts around the world.

Volley builds the best voice-controlled games and entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smartphones, and Fire TVs. Popular Volley voice games include Song Quiz, Jeopardy!, and The Price Is Right. Our voice apps are used by millions of people every month. We believe voice control will become the main way people access entertainment in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and cars, and our goal is to become the "Netflix of Voice" for this emerging category of devices. Volley was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman in 2016. We're a 60+ person hybrid remote/in-person company, headquartered in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. While we work to make home entertainment more accessible and engaging, we like to have fun along the way, with team lunches, Friday happy hours, and very active #food and #pets slack channels. If any of this sounds fun to you (we promise it is), come join us! Read more about Volley's culture and mission here: volleythat.com/post/volley-mission-culture-and-what-we-create

We're creating a new way to make music. We’re building a creative ecosystem for music producers. With this ecosystem, we’re cultivating a global community of creators that fosters inspiration, connection, focus, and growth. At Splice, we seek to empower all musicians to realize their creative potential and share it with the world. We believe that an open ecosystem leads to more collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and discovery, which leads to more musicians and better musicians, which means more and better music.

In 2010 we started out by reinventing and modernizing the jukebox - for the first time ever enabling consumers to easily request their favorite songs right from their phone. After diving into the world of bars and entertainment, we saw that brick-and-mortar businesses across all industries struggled with outdated digital media products, fragmented systems, and tools that didn’t work together. Leveraging the foundations and technology already in place, we broadened our mission and started building a unified, multi-product platform – to help businesses large and small deliver better experiences and create stronger customer relationships. Today, Rockbot delivers Music, Audio-Messaging, Digital Signage, and Streaming TV to some of the world’s largest brands and thousands of small businesses across the US, allowing them to easily manage it all from one place. Across the platform, we’ve added Advertising and Retail Media solutions so businesses have more ways to generate revenue and monetize their environments. Rockbot continues to innovate and expand its services for our partners, from Walmart to Planet Fitness, Neiman Marcus to Shake Shack, and to many of your local “down-the-street favorites” - there’s no customer that is too large or small for us. We are here to help you succeed.

SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks. It takes just a click to share sounds to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare. SoundCloud can be accessed anywhere using the official iPhone and Android apps, as well as hundreds of creation and sharing apps built on the SoundCloud platform. SoundCloud has nearly 300+ full-time staff currently, with over 30 different nationalities and 30 languages spoken at the company. Today, SoundCloud reaches more than 350 million people every month around the globe, across the web, mobile, our embeddable widget and our API. More than 175 million unique listeners monthly and our creators post 12 hours of new content on SoundCloud every minute.

ZEFR provides solutions for professional content owners on YouTube and has built a premium network that brings together the largest and most diverse collection of movies, television, music and sports content. With more than 700 million monthly views after only 10 months on the platform, ZEFR is the fastest growing YouTube partner. They are the dominant company in the movie category on YouTube and have partnerships with six major Hollywood studios along with several prominent independents.