Smule, creator of hit iPhone music apps, raises $8M more
Smule, the company behind popular, music-based iPhone apps like Ocarina and I am T-Pain, has raised $8 million in a third round of funding. — The Menlo Park, Calif. company's apps usually take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities in cool …
Context & Ripple Effects
Smule built its reputation on titles that treat the iPhone's hardware as an instrument — Ocarina turns breath into sound, and I am T-Pain puts Auto-Tune-style pitch processing in users' hands — an approach the company describes as deliberately exploiting the device's capabilities. The $8 million third round reported by VentureBeat on December 16, 2009 is capital following that thesis: investors are backing a Menlo Park studio whose products exist only because of what the iPhone can sense.
First-order effects
- The round extends Smule's runway beyond single-title economics, letting it keep shipping sensor-driven apps without requiring each release to be self-funding.
- Artists whose brands Smule licenses — T-Pain being the proof case — gain a recurring software channel alongside recorded music.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in the App Store's music category now compete against a better-capitalized studio that pairs celebrity branding with custom audio engineering, pressuring them toward similar artist tie-ups.
- Apple benefits on both sides: apps that showcase the microphone and accelerometer sell the device's differentiators, reinforcing why developers build capability-first rather than port-first.
Third-order effects
- If funded studios keep proving that phone sensors can host genuine musical instruments, the App Store shifts from a novelty-app bazaar toward a professionalized market where venture-backed teams define categories.
- The pattern points toward music creation itself migrating onto phones, with labels and artists treating app-based distribution as standard catalog infrastructure rather than a marketing stunt.
The trend: Smartphone hardware is becoming a legitimate musical instrument surface, and venture capital is professionalizing the App Store studios that build for it.