The way we listen to and create music has been undergoing a massive change with the rise of technology.

To discuss this change and what it feels like to build and sell a business, I invited Hazel Savage. A music industry veteran, she co-founded Musiio, a music technology company, in 2018 in Singapore. In spring 2022, Hazel and her co-founder Aron Pettersson sold Musiio to SoundCloud. Prior to that, Hazel was an early Shazam employee and worked at major music companies like Pandora and HMV (British music retailer). With 15 years experience in the music industry, Hazel is a true music-tech lifer.

Some of the topics we explore:

• Do we need machines to write music? Creative vs. descriptive artificial intelligence.
• What will be the next big innovation in the music industry? How will the creator economy evolve?
• Calculating risks before leaping into entrepreneurship. Building a company with Entrepreneur First, talent incubator.
• Secret ingredient for raising venture capital pre-seed and pre-revenue.
• Is it really that cool to be a CEO? And how does it feel to build a business and then sell it?

About Hazel Savage:

With 15 years experience in the music industry, Hazel is a music-tech lifer, guitarist and Co-Founder and CEO at Musiio. She started her music-tech journey as an early employee at Shazam and spent time understanding the pain points of the industry at Pandora, Universal and H-M-V. In 2018, she co-founded music technology company Musiio. It was acquired by SoundCloud in 2022 to bolster the music platform’s discovery capabilities. Hazel moved across to take a leadership role as Vice President of Music Intelligence at SoundCloud. Hazel is based in the UK.

About Darya Kamkalova:

Darya wears many hats: she is podcaster, a data industry professional, a startup mentor, a co-founder of Manifest Taproom (a craft beer bar in Berlin), and a speaker.

Her experience in the data industry spans 10 years, five continents and such domains as data monetisation & acquisition, data product development, strategic partnerships as well as data marketplace business operations.

Darya has been driving or supporting various projects empowering women since 2013. She is based in Berlin, Germany.