1 week Ago By David Swan
Mushroom Group chief executive Matt Gudinski has joined a chorus of investors collectively tipping $10 million into Australian technology start-up Disco, as music labels search for efficiencies in the face of revenue challenges and a highly competitive global streaming landscape. Australia’s music industry is under pressure given the recent wave of festival cancellations, venues closures and new difficulties in reaching audiences amid the rise of TikTok. Disco investor Matt Gudinski with Karl Richter and Pete Nicholson.
Enter Disco, a technology platform born out of the country’s largest music supervision agency Level Two Music, which selects and licenses music for advertisements, TV shows and films. Traditional solutions such as Dropbox and iTunes are not fit for purpose when dealing with hundreds of thousands of songs, according to Level Two boss Karl Richter, who dreamed up an answer that would act as a one-stop shop for managing and sharing music files. He says his result, Disco, has since become the music industry standard for file management, and has racked up 300,000 monthly users with almost 100 million files on the platform.
Its major clients – including Amazon and Netflix – use Disco to find the right music to fit their films and TV shows, and then easily manage those music files. Matt Gudinski was an early Disco user who has now come on board as an investor. He took over as Mushroom Group chief executive in April 2021, following the shock passing of his fat.
