Last.fm founder backs Tonada, an AI startup selling royalty-free in-store music

Tonada, a Stockholm-based AI music startup, came out of stealth on May 27, 2026 with an undisclosed funding round and a stack of brand customers already in the door. Hawaii Poké, Thai House Wok, El Birria, Convendum, and Vercel are on the public roster. Last.fm founder Michael Breidenbrücker is among the named investors. CEO Juan Manuel Serruya, formerly an engineering lead at Spotify, is selling retailers a sound system that bypasses background-music licensing entirely.

The product generates original adaptive tracks tied to each brand, then plugs into POS, occupancy sensors, weather feeds, and event calendars. Music shifts in real time to what the space is doing.

The pitch is no PROs, no royalties

Tonada’s marketing names the target by name. “PROs like SAMI, GEMA, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC charge per-location fees that compound as you expand,” the company’s homepage reads. The product replaces those per-location fees with a flat subscription and a brand-owned track library. Every composition is generated, owned by the brand, and license-free.

Serruya’s launch pitch reframes the sector as a software stack with a missing layer. “Brands have a CMS for their website, a POS for their checkout, a CRM for their customers, and nothing for how their spaces actually feel,” he wrote on the Tonada launch blog. The company positions itself as the missing operating layer for sound.

The contrarian read is the pricing language. Tonada calls Spotify and YouTube use in retail spaces a “legal risk” on its own homepage, and pitches the AI alternative as predictable cost. That framing puts background-music licensing on the same footing as a payroll-tax compliance product, not an art purchase.

What it means for working musicians

The retail and hospitality background music sector is a quiet but large royalty pool. Library composers and session musicians have written into it for decades. PROs distributed billions to writers in 2024. If Tonada and its peers take 5% of that pool, the per-writer cut on every distribution shrinks by close to the same amount.

The reader-facing read for indie artists and producers is concrete: Tonada is not coming for your release-strategy revenue. It is coming for the floor that paid composers between releases. If you write library music, sync, or background instrumentals, the threat is real enough to plan around. The escape route is upmarket, into original sync for film, TV, and games, where the brief still requires a human composer on a deadline.