Innovation Awards: Frustrated musician makes music with Melosity

There’s nothing musicians like better than getting the opportunity to jam with each other but finding the time and space to do so isn’t always easy.

Technology has in recent years enabled better collaboration between musicians.

Indeed, bands such as The Postal Service have successfully made great music with each other without ever meeting in person.

These days, many musicians rely on cloud-based file hosting services such as Dropbox to collaborate, but it isn’t always as reliable as users might hope it would be.

This is where Melosity comes in. It's a free, dedicated online music studio where musicians can collaborate on the same track from anywhere without having to send files over and back.

The system, which could be described as a Google Docs for guitarists, is the brainchild of Rory O'Farrell, a former marketing man who having decided he wasn't good enough to make it as a musician himself, came up with a way to help him stay close to music.

Melosity was incorporated in May 2014 with a beta version of the music package launched a year later.

Currently, musicians are logging in from more than 50 countries and the technology has won the backing of producers such as Philip McGee, who has worked with the likes of Kodaline, The Script and Aslan.

If that weren't enough, O'Farrell has also won financial support from Done Deal founder Fred Karlsson, who also worked on building the platform, and Enterprise Ireland, which invested €25,000 in Melosity last December.

O’Farrell, who comes from Kilkenny, says he came up with the idea for Melosity after realising that he couldn’t shake the music bug.

“I’ve always loved music and the older I got the more I started regretting the fact that I wasn’t going to make a career out of it. I’d dabbled in music but didn’t have as much talent as some of the other musicians I hung about with, but being with them did allow me to see how collaboration could work better,” he says.

“Obviously, music has largely moved from the recording studio to the home studio and so people work remotely, mainly using Dropbox with revisions going back and forth.

“The problem with this though is that working on music is not like collaborating on a document, there are a lot of layers to it and Dropbox takes a very long time to get tracks down. I figured there must be a better alternative to it and came up with Melosity.”

O'Farrell came up with a prototype product last May to test the market and by the end of that summer had people collaborating on the same track from across the world on what was a fairly basic tool at that point which was built cheaply on Adobe Flash just to test the concept.

The company hired a chief technology officer (CTO) in November and started to rebuild the prototype out with a full version of the music studio expected to be ready to hit the market in August or September.

“One of the drawbacks with Dropbox is that you have to use a separate platform if you want to communicate whereas Melosity allows users to work on tracks and talk at the same time, which aids collaboration,” says O’Farrell.

He is hopeful that as Melosity is one of the first to market with its platform it will have an advantage over rival products.

“Most musicians find the music software that is currently available is too technical and the userfaces are generally bloated with lots of features that people aren’t interested in using.

“We’ve kept in the key features but left out the tools that aren’t really of interest. I think we’ve got a great platform and believe we’ve got at least a year-and-a-half headstart on any serious rivals at this point,” says O’Farrell.

The product will remain free to most users although who do wish to pay for advanced tools such as time stretching, more storage and so on, will be charged a monthly fee.

“The traction we’re getting from users suggests we’re onto a winner. We’re looking to get further traction when the full product launches later this year and early next year we’ll likely start looking at raising further funding to scale more,” says O’Farrell. CHARLIE TAYLOR