Beatoven.ai has discontinued its B2C service after 6 years, with the core team moving to Rusk Media

Beatoven.ai has discontinued its consumer service. Co-founder and CEO Mansoor Rahimat Khan announced it in a LinkedIn post, saying the B2C product was officially discontinued last month after a 6-year run. The core team has been absorbed by Rusk Media, where it will keep building in generative media. The technology stays behind: the Maestro model and the company’s music intelligence work remain with Beatoven Private Limited, which is now licensing both to businesses.

Khan describes the peak this way: “At our peak, we were proud to be the #1 AI music service on the internet.” I cannot verify that ranking and no public numbers back it up. What is verifiable is that Beatoven.ai was one of the first companies to license the music it trained on and pay royalties on every generated output.

Rusk Media, the company taking the team, is a Mumbai digital entertainment business founded in 2019 that makes mobile-first video across scripted fiction, unscripted shows, animation and vertical drama. It raised 100 crore rupees in a pre-Series C round led by Nazara Technologies in June 2026, with a stated plan to build proprietary AI production tools that cut the cost of making content. An audio model team fits that plan.

What Mansoor Rahimat Khan says pushed Beatoven.ai out of consumer AI music

The explanation in the post is a market one. Beatoven.ai licensed its training music and built foundation models from the ground up, then watched rivals with far more capital take the other route.

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Our original approach of ethically licensing music and building foundational models from scratch faced strong headwinds as heavily funded competitors emerged, building models through data scraping.

He is straight about the second problem too, and it has nothing to do with training data. Getting users was the easy part. “Acquiring users becomes relatively straightforward once you cross your first 100,000 users,” he writes. “However, retaining them gets even more difficult as competition stiffens and consolidation begins.” Retention, in his words, is the primary nightmare of prosumer content creation.

The licensing itself was the third drag. Khan calls music licensing extremely hard, fraught with roadblocks, fragmented players, and gatekeepers, then adds the line most founders in his position would not put in writing: it is entirely understandable why some chose to bypass that approach given how difficult the music industry is to work with.

That is a founder who spent 6 years doing it the slow way declining to moralise about the companies that did not.

What happens to Maestro, the licensed model Beatoven.ai spent a year building

Maestro launched in August 2025 as what the company called the first fully licensed and fairly trained music model, built on partnerships with Rightsify, Soundtrack Loops, Symphonic Music, Bobby Cole, Vadi Sound, and Pro Sound Effects. The payout mechanism came from a partnership with Musical AI, which tracked which licensed songs contributed to each generated track so royalties could follow the output rather than stopping at a one-time training fee.

That model now becomes a licensing business. Khan says Beatoven.ai is actively licensing Maestro and its music intelligence for commercial and enterprise use, and is in conversations with potential partners. The consumer app is gone. The rights-clean model it was built on is for sale to whoever wants a generator they can defend.

Why $2.4M against $400M was the real fight

Beatoven.ai was founded in June 2021 by Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj, came out of Entrepreneur First, and raised roughly $2.4 million in total across its life, with Redstart Labs, Capital 2B, IvyCap Ventures and Plug and Play among the backers.

Put that next to the companies it was competing with for the same user. Suno raised over $400 million in June at a $5.4 billion valuation. Stability AI closed a $76 million Series B with all 3 majors taking equity in August. ElevenLabs signed a licensing deal with Universal Music Group this month.

Licensing first and paying royalties on output is now the direction the whole market is moving. Beatoven.ai got there years early, on 0.6% of the capital its largest rival raised in one round, and ran out of runway before the industry caught up to the position it had taken.

There is a version of this story where ethics lost. That version is wrong. Every company named above is now licensing, and 2 of them are doing it with the same major labels suing their competitors. What Beatoven.ai could not fund was the wait.

For anyone making music with these tools, the practical part is smaller and more immediate. If Beatoven.ai was in your workflow for background scoring, the consumer product is gone and you need a replacement, and the one lesson worth taking from the whole episode is that a licensed catalog is a business model, not a moat, unless someone is paying for it.