Yousician

Yousician Ltd. is a Helsinki based music education company founded by Chris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen in 2010 under the name Ovelin,[2] and was part of the Startup Sauna accelerator programme at Aalto University.[3] Yousician states its mission as "Making musicality as common as literacy".[1] The company develops and operates a music service called Yousician, and a tuner application called GuitarTuna. As of December 2016, Yousician claims over 8 million monthly active users worldwide across their products.[4] In 2012, the company raised $1.4m from Silicon Valley-based investor True Ventures.[5]

The Yousician service is built on audio signal processing technology that can recognize notes and chords played by its users on their real instruments (both acoustic and electric).[6] Users are shown either a gamified, colourful version of sheet music or tablature notation for an exercise, and hear a backing track as they play along. Using the built-in microphone of the device, Yousician listens to the users play, gives feedback on accuracy and timing, and tracks users’ progress over time.[7]

Yousician is currently available for five topics: guitar, piano, bass, ukulele, and voice. For every instrument, Yousician features a syllabus developed and produced in-house by the company. Syllabi are made up of songs and exercises, tutorial videos and mini-games to learn new skills. Over all instruments, there are around 150 missions and over 25,000 exercises available. Yousician used to offer a user generated content platform where users can create their own content via an in-built editor for their own usage, or choose to share it with the community. There are some features available that do not require an instrument, e.g. ear-training or theory practice while people don't have instruments at hand. Yousician operates under a freemium model where one lesson per day is given for free, while unlimited lesson time is offered via paid subscriptions.[8]

Yousician was released in November 2014, to mostly positive reviews. Guitar World called it "modern technology's gift to music education" and in March 2015 it was featured as 'Editor's Choice' in the Apple iOS App Store.[9] Critical voices usually do not question the product itself, but contrast it to the option of learning to play an instrument in private lessons. Voicesinc.org for example stated that “If you’re happy to learn from a digital screen, then it’s great, but if you want a lot more human interaction and demonstration, there may be some better options.” As of October 2018, the Yousician app had 227,660 ratings on Google Play with an average 4.5 of the 5-star rating and on the iOS App Store 10,076 ratings with an average of 4.3 of the 5-stars.

Yousician was featured two times as 'Editor's Choice' in the iOS App Store and won a "Best of 2016 Apps" award from Google Play. Yousician was one of Wired's top 100 European startups in 2012,[10] and were also featured in The Sunday Times "World's Best Apps List 2012". Yousician and its apps have won several technology and start-up competitions, including SXSW Accelerator 2012 (Music)[11] and Midemlab 2012.

In June 2018 Yousician began what the company has called a "sunset of the song upload feature" which was completed with the October 2018 update 2.58 that removed all user generated content from the app.[12] The removal of user generated content sparked opposition among some vocal users online. Coincidence with introduction of what Yousician calls popular songs, licensed songs by well-known bands and artists, that was announced with the update 2.55 on 23 August 2018[13] led to speculation about the motives of the decision, however Yousician as a company has not elaborated on the reasons of their business move.

The creators of Yousician had been sued by Ubisoft over claimed patent infringement on their patent U.S. Patent 9,839,852, for an "Interactive guitar game", which Ubisoft had used in their game Rocksmith.[14] In August 2019, a federal district court ruled that the patent claims of Ubisoft were too broad and not defined in enough specificity, nullifying the patent and dismissing Ubisoft's suit.[15]

• Official website