As a musician himself, Tim Westergren had spent years on the road listening to other talented musicians, wondering why they could never get ahead. Their music was good—just as good as anything you might hear on the radio—and yet, somehow, they just never caught their big break. He imagined it must be because their music just never got in front of enough of the right people.
Tim eventually quit his job as a musician and took another job as a composer for movie scores. It was there that he began to think of each piece of music as having a distinct structure that could be decomposed into constituent parts—a form of musical DNA.
After giving it some thought, he began to consider creating a company around this idea of building a musical genome. He ran the concept by one of his friends, who had previously created and sold a company. The friend...