Music Mastermind makes a $3.1 million round

Lowering the barrier to music creation with software called SoundBetter, startup raises second round

Music Mastermind, a company that wants to lower the barriers to music creation, has secured $3.1 million in equity funding, according to an SEC filing issued Wednesday. This second major round follows a $4.85 million round raised in early 2010.
 
The Calabasas, Calif. company was founded in 2007 by Bo Bazylevsky, an experienced bond trader, and Matt Serletic, former CEO at Virgin Records America. At Music Mastermind, Bazylevksy serves as President and Serletic serves as CEO. Other names listed on the SEC filing include Andrew Bazylevsky, SVP of Operations and Business (and presumably a relative of Bo’s), as well as one Alberto Lomeli.
 
Though created years ago, there’s not very much information to be found about Music Mastermind. Ignoring some seemingly completely random retweet about a CityVille milestone, I learned the most about the company via their Twitter account.
 
This past November, Music Mastermind unveiled some details of SoundBetter, a cloud-based suite that lets anyone create studio-quality music. By the looks of it, SoundBetter appears to be a more advanced take on widely popular music-making games and apps, like Guitar Hero and Rock Band for consoles or Tap Tap Revenge and Ocarina for mobile phones.
 
“We’re at the forefront of the next evolution of music entertainment, and it’s time to break down the barriers that prevent people from expressing themselves musically,” said Matt Serletic, CEO of Music Mastermind. “This company is all about fun and easy music creation for everyone. All people love music, and now absolutely anyone can produce great sounding songs to enjoy and share with the world.”

More details about the software’s technology were supposed to emerge since that announcement, but so far nothing.

The latest news from the company, however, just came out yesterday, when IBM announced that Music Mastermind, would deploy SoundBetter on IBM's Smart Business cloud service. Desiring to rapidly expand worldwide, the young company chose IBM to help it address issues of scalability and networking and power requirements.

I’ve contacted Music Mastermind to hopefully get some screenshots or videos of SoundBetter, but have not yet heard reply.