RadioandMusic
| 22 Nov 2024
Eyegroove Raises $1.25M and Launches Instant Music Video App, Riding Fan Video Phenomenon

MUMBAI: San Francisco startup Eyegroove has just closed a $1.25M Angel round and released its instant music video app for iOS. The free Eyegroove app is simple, yet groundbreaking: choose a piece of streaming music, record video, add instant interactive effects, and you've created a Groove.

The Eyegroove app rides the rise of fan-created music videos. In 2013, the world expressed its pent up desire for fan music videos when 40,000 people created Harlem Shake YouTube videos in two weeks (the total now tops 500,000). And, for the first time last year, revenues generated from fan-created music videos exceeded official music video revenue, as reported in the 2014 IFPI Digital Music Report.

Eyegroove's investors are well known Silicon Valley names including Roger McNamee, founding partner of Elevation Capital and Silver Lake Capital; Matthew Papakipos, Senior Director of Mobile Engineering at Facebook; Joshua Schachter, Delicious founder; Aditya Agarwal, VP Engineering at Dropbox; Amarjit Gil, serial entrepreneur with Facebook, Google, and Apple acquisitions; Puneet Kumar, Director of ChromeOS at Google; David Kirk, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, and other A-list angels.

Eyegroove's founder, Scott Snibbe, is best known for pioneering the "App Album" genre with bespoke interactive music apps including Björk: Biophilia, the Beck-produced Philip Glass: REWORK_, and apps with Metric, Passion Pit, and other bands.

Asked why he turned in the direction of Eyegroove-a kind of Instagram for music video—Snibbe says, "We wanted to create a platform that lets hundreds of millions of people express themselves through music and video. There's nothing more emotionally powerful than music; and when you combine music with video and effects, it transcends the amateur quality of raw phone videos to make everyone's videos look and sound terrific."

Snibbe believes music video may ultimately become the most popular form of social video: "Music video is the most popular content on YouTube, and it seems inevitable that user-generated music videos will become a wildly popular form of social content, now that we've given people a tool to create them instantly and effortlessly."

Eyegroove is available for free in the iTunes App Store for iOS.