Melbourne start-up Disco began as an internal software used within music supervision company, Level Two Music, to share and access music. Fast forward twelve months and the service is set to compete in a global tech contest in front of leaders from Google and Universal Music, among others.
Announced yesterday, Disco is one of 20 start-ups to feature in the in the Midemlab contest (which has seen the likes of SoundCloud and Kickstarter compete in previous years) in front of a judging panel that consists of Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, Universal Music's Ty Roberts, Bandsintown founder, Fabrice Sergent, Warner Music Group's John Rees and Google's Christian Behrednt.
Disco founder and Level Two director Karl Richter, whose company has worked on popular TV shows like Underbelly, SLiDE and The Slap, will head to Cannes next month to pitch the product in front of the panel and businesses.
"It's a nice validation and a good next step for us," Richter said in an exclusive interview with The Music.
After proving to be a success within the team at Level Two Music, Disco quickly began to branch out and share with "some of the great innovative independent record labels and publishers here in Australia".
Now, a third of Disco users are based in Australia, a third in the US and a third in the UK.
"Disco replaces Dropbox, Box and iTunes," Richter explained of the service.
"The one thing that everyone that works in the music industry does is share music files and up until now, there has not been one industry standard, so that's what we’re building.
"[The consumer side of streaming] has obviously already been played out but the other side, the enterprise and industry side, has not."
Given the now-hugely successful start-ups that have gone through the Midemlab contest, the achievement is a feat to be proud of, however Richter is not letting the exciting news get the better of his team.
"At the moment we're a specialised product that is having a lot of traction," he said.
"We have about three million files that are currently managed around the world on it.
"It's definitely a view to scale but at the moment we're just making sure we have all of our users very happy."
For more details on Disco, click here.
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