Tuning Artificial Intelligence to make music

Having your father as a business partner is as good a testimony as any to the steady hand that is bound to help you as you seek to navigate life’s transitions for success.

Aghin Johnson had a crazy idea. He wanted to create a global music community by leveraging Artificial Intelligence. “The basic idea was to build a social community which connects over music. Just as there are smaller communities who share similar interests, my intention was to use music as the binding factor and build a social community around it,” says Aghin.

However, seeing his son plunge headlong into unchartered waters to start a music business was not an idea that Aghin’s father, Johnson PM, took to gamely. “My father always presented a negative side rather than a positive side of the story. But when it concerns ideology or doing things in life, he always said if you don’t have a passion and don’t like what you are doing, there is no point in doing it,” says Aghin.

Entrepreneurial journey

That emotional support was enough to energise Aghin to take the first step in his entrepreneurial journey.

SocialMob, a Kochi-based start-up came into being. The platform, developed by Padath Infotainment, aims to connect individuals at a global level who share similar interests such as music, entertainment, food and travel. SocialMob currently represents over 500 independent artists from around the world accounting for more than 5,000 hours of music.

Initially though, the chords were all tangled for Aghin.

“I was working in a logistics and cost management multinational,” said Aghin, who has an MBA in International Business and Marketing from the PSG Institute of Technology and Management in Coimbatore. “I always had a passion for music, and while working at the MNC, did a lot of research. This led to understanding how certain aspects of music tend to help certain people, how it affects the psychology of an individual. I call it string theory,” adds Aghin.

Noting that “everything in the world is tuned to a vibration,” Aghin points out how music fulfils a certain need, and how some people get emotional when they listen to certain kind of music. “At that time, I was in touch with several music artists and decided to build a community connected through music.”

A feat that was no music to the ears of his father who runs a wholesale grocery business. Despite his reservations, the father pitched in with seed money to get the son’s business off the ground and ended up becoming a partner.

“My initial idea was to build a digital radio station around this concept. Research showed it would be an expensive proposition, given the licensing rights. The tech boom in 2011-12 and the advent of smartphones led me to realise that we could share information on a more scalable level. That’s when the entire idea shifted from a digital radio station towards an online experience, to an app,” says Aghin.

With its AI ‘engine’, the app aims to present recommendations for users based on their psychology and preference in various genres.

Aghin came against many walls. “My friends mocked me. They said you are not a tech guy, have no engineering background and are starting an IT company,” he says. With little support, Aghin soldiered on. Realising that “people in India do not give much importance to intellectual property for music,” Aghin decided to study other “business implications in order to understand how ROI works.” He decided to take the help of engineering students “for technical integration.” And for seed capital, he went to his dad. “Initially, it was more of a concept and nothing tangible. I wanted a prototype and money was needed to create the prototype. So, I took a 5-year plan to my father. The initial capital came from him,” says Aghin.

That was in 2013. However, “the whole concept had to be discarded, for both Android and IOS had massively changed. When we built the first prototype, we spent around ₹15 lakh on it and had three people working on it. Since technology changed rapidly, it was scrapped. For the second version, we started working with a team of six people and now have a 25-member team,” he says.

As of now, Aghin and his team are focussed on “perfecting the technology behind the platform and product development.”

Hailing from Kochi, Aghin’s plans would understandably gravitate to the innate ecosystem for start-ups. “It was no use. Everyone I approached for this project advised me to shift to either Bengaluru or Delhi, terming these places more start-up friendly. So it was a bit of a challenge for me to set up operations in Kochi and take it further from here,” says Aghin.

A guiding force

The biggest challenge though was to sell the idea to his father. Though Aghin’s father “maintained he had no idea about technology” and knew little about what his son was aiming to achieve in building an app, “he has infinite patience. He has always been there like a guiding force when it comes to giving advice and on every other aspects of my venture.

Even with hiring, he tells me if it is time or not,” says Aghin, who is now striving to address the gap in the music industry, given that it is largely unorganised and fragmented.

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