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| Photo: Built In |
There
are countless videos on YouTube that can walk you through popular
songs. I’d learned to play guitar by strumming along to CDs, buying fake
books and fumbling through Pixies and Yo La Tengo songs. Couldn’t I
apply the same method to piano? Or, better yet, find a teacher to come
to my house once a week?
The
short answer is no. At 43, I’m a lot busier than at 16, and sight
reading sheet music is very different from following a chord chart or
plowing through a four-on-the-floor, three-chord rock song...
The app got its start in 2013 as
part of an incubator project led by CEO Chris Vance, then-managing
director of Zag — a brand invention arm of the digital creative agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty — where he was tasked with “launching products the world needed.” A
piano learning app fit the bill, not only because of Vance’s personal
interest (he’d tried and failed to learn piano three times), but also
because traditional methods didn’t appear to him to work very well...
Over
its history, the app has done remarkably well, with an estimated 1.5
million practice records per month, 20,000-30,000 monthly active users
and a 50 percent retention rate after 18 months. To date, Vance says,
the app has done roughly $10 million in sales.
Other music learning apps are also thriving. The Berlin-based Flowkey, profitable since 2016, reports a catalog of 1,500 songs and a platform translated to ten languages. Simply Piano by JoyTunes, recognized as an Editor’s Choice in the App Store, claims more than 10 million downloads, one million weekly users, and usage by 10 percent of U.S. music teachers.
Read more...
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| Photo: Built In |
Women in Tech Statistics for 2020 (and How We Can Do Better) by Sam Daley, staff writer for Built In.
Source: Built In
