Voisey

» see voisey.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Voisey solved a small problem precisely. If you wanted to put a vocal over a beat in 2018 you needed somebody's instrumental and software to record into, plus enough knowledge of compression and reverb to stop your phone microphone from sounding like a phone microphone. Voisey collapsed all of that into one screen. Producers uploaded beats to the app and you picked one to sing over, with the processing that normally lives in a studio chain applied to your voice as you went.

It was built in London from 2018 by four people out of the Norwegian and English music industries, with backgrounds at Sony Music and Universal and at a Norwegian audio startup called Soundio. The money came in small and from inside the business rather than from generalist venture funds. The first round closed on 19 June 2019 at around $807,000 from angels, among them the co-founder of Robbie Williams' management company and the founder of Platoon. Total lifetime funding was about $1.88 million, which for a consumer music app is close to nothing.

In December 2019 Stargate invested, which was the signal that mattered. Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen had written for Rihanna and Beyoncé and had just sold their catalog, and they described Voisey as where songwriting was going. Eleven months after that, Snap bought the company.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what snap wanted ~

The acquisition closed in November 2020, terms undisclosed, at a moment when every large social platform was reacting to TikTok by buying music capability wherever it was cheap. Snap was already building Sounds into Snapchat. Voisey brought the creation side instead, with the producer relationships and the licensing conversations that come attached to letting ordinary users sing over somebody else's instrumental.

The app kept running under its own name after the sale, which is more than most acquisitions of that size get. Then the market turned. On 31 August 2022 Evan Spiegel announced that Snap was cutting about twenty percent of its staff and killing off the projects that were not paying for themselves, a list that also took Snap Originals and the Pixy camera drone with it.

~ the october deletion ~

Voisey stopped on Monday 5 September 2022, five days after the announcement. Users were given until 17 October to download whatever they had made before it was removed from the database. Everything on Voisey was somebody singing in their own room over a beat somebody else had uploaded, held in one place with no second copy anywhere, so those six weeks were the only salvage anyone was ever going to get. There is no DNS record behind voisey.app today.

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