Betaworks-Backed Blend.io Lets Musicians Collaborate Without Ever Abandoning Ableton

We’ve heard musicians despair over the same issue for a while now: There’s great music creation software out there, but nothing that makes it truly easy to collaborate with people who are far away in real time. People have tried to solve this problem, with companies like Vinylmint launching on our Disrupt stage in SF, but these solutions often force musicians to learn a whole new program.

Blend.io, a new startup launching out of betaworks and led by co-founders Paul Murphy and hacker-in-residence Aleksandar Kolundzija, looks to change all that.

The service is a social, collaborative platform that’s laid on top of Ableton Live and Maschine. Users of those programs will be able to set up a music profile to show off their tunes, much like a LinkedIn. As expected, these users will be able to browse other profiles and comment on tracks.

But it gets much more intensive. Blend actually lets musicians pull tracks from the service, remix them, and push them back out to the world. According to Kolundzija, there are more music producers than there are tech developers, but getting these producers to migrate to new software is asking too much.

That’s why Blend is built on top of Ableton, one of the most dominant music creation platforms out there right now.

The parallel between developers and music producers has clearly been in mind during the development of Blend. “Intentionally, we’ve made it so that no project on Blend is closed or private,” said Koludzija. “We think of Blend as a place for social productivity, so it’s not just about connecting with others. It’s about going through a workflow built around making music.”

Blend will begin looking at other platforms like GarageBand and Apple Logic, among others, but for now they just want to make sure Ableton and Maschine users are getting what they need from the platform.

It’s free to join, so if you’re amped about getting on Blend, sign up for an invite here.

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