On the very last day of our stay in the Silicon Valley, we had the opportunity to meet the founder of StarMaker application.
Jeff Daniel and Nathan Sedlander founded StarMaker in March 2010. Their main goal was to enable everyone to create quality music and to find a new generation of talent. That´s the reason why the formal executives decided to develop on-stage mobile apps – The Starmaker and the Voice. In recent years, the company has had its ups and downs and ended up in the hands of a Chinese company called KUNLUN. Jeff and Nathan have now become shareholders owning only 25% of the firm.
Starmaker is a social singing app which allows users to create and edit audio and video content to share with other users (e.g. audition for American Idol, The Voice, America’s got talent..), but also to promote songs and performances.
The user base vote for their favorite and the winner can get the opportunity to perform with a star, to record a song, etc… Usually, there are between 1 000 to 5 000 participants per contest. Users can receive feedback from the social platform and share their video performance.
The app is giving the user little pieces of professional tools eg. being able to add vocal and instrumental sound bites, or visual aesthetics such as filters. It also includes pitch detection software, facial recognition, and autotune that detects the voice and scores it. The purpose is not at all technical, it’s only for fun and mostly for bad singers ! In fact, it’s a karaoke app for people to have fun in their bedrooms but maybe some can become a star!
The visit to Starmaker company was very educational for us because we could learn a lot about growing a business and how to keep a start-up idea “alive”. Furthermore, it was very interesting for us as “amateurs” to see how the karaoke application worked in detail and what its goal is.