The next billion musicians: leading the digital disruption of music education
Music helps people express emotions and ideas, from the commonplace to the revolutionary. Playing a musical instrument is a great lifelong activity, and the benefits for the individual and for society are manyfold. Unfortunately, traditional means of music education do not work for most people. However, now the technological advances enable totally new solutions to emerge. Yousician is a mobile service that uses advanced audio technology combined with music exercises to motivate users to learn and play an instrument. Users play along on their real instruments as the app provides instruction. Yousician has both the benefits of private lessons, guidance and feedback, and of self-learning methods such as books and videos, affordability and 24/7 access anywhere. Because of its game-like design, Yousician keeps users motivated to practice and lets them connect to other players around the world. Yousician's educational approach is based on the best pedagogical practices and the learning patterns of millions of users. Today, Yousician is leading the disruption of the highly fragmented music education market which is in its infancy stage of digitalisation. By 2017, Yousician has reached 90 million downloads in 156 countries. However, we estimate the available market to be 1.1 billion people if learning music becomes more inclusive. The goal of this project is to make music education available to a billion new people. To do this we must: (1) increase the product range by adding more instruments, syllabi for advanced users and localisation to several languages and (2) build readiness to scale up in global markets. This project will help Yousician become a successful high-growth tech company of the sort Silicon Valley brings out. Furthermore, by giving millions of people access to music education, this project will massively grow the whole industry, ranging from music schools, bands, and artists to instrument manufacturing.