An array of music-industry veterans and operators, including the co-founder of online music pioneer Last.fm and the CEO of cloud app hosting startup Vercel, are backing a Swedish AI-generated music platform designed to shake up the staid world of retail background music, which is emerging from stealth today.
Tonada was founded by Juan Manuel Serruya, previously engineering lead at Spotify, and Jonathan Andersson, previously head of sales at Wolt, with a plan to overhaul the world of retail and hospitality background music.
Tonada says that physical spaces still run on intuition when it comes to background music, like a licensed playlist someone picked once, set to shuffle, looped forever, identical to the place down the street.
It points to research showing that the tempo of background music in a physical space can move sales by more than 30 per cent.
Tonada has built a proprietary AI generative-music engine that works with each brand to define its "sonic identity", which then produces a unique catalogue of original tracks, it says.
