Gijs Bekenkamp, Co-founder and COO, Chordify

Chordify is an online music service that makes it possible for musicians from all over the world to play along with their favorite songs. We use advanced technology to enable that, and we always work together with our users to perfect the scores and the chords that we provide to them. The chords can be displayed for guitar, piano, ukulele and mandolin.

I thought about this question, and I believe it can be best described by some insights we had way before we started Chordify itself, probably 15 years before. It’s a bit of an origin story.

Music was part of my upbringing. My mother was a music enthusiast. She played the piano, and she didn’t insist, but she stimulated all her kids to start playing music.

Bas, one of the founders of Chordify, and I formed a band when he was 15 and I was 16. I played the drums, he played the guitar, and we played in a band called Chorfus. We rehearsed in my bedroom and in the attic of my parents’ house. Let’s be honest, the music we played was not easy on the ear. But for a full decade, we played together with a bunch of people who became my closest friends. We shared our music and exchanged our musical tastes in those formative years, and these people stuck with me.

The band doesn’t exist anymore. We played for a decade, maybe more. But the friendship stayed, and we still get together. Every year we gather as a group of friends somewhere in a house, bring up memories and do musical trivia. What stayed with me is the connecting power that music has.

Then, 14 years later, Bas was finalizing his PhD. We were close friends and had worked together in the past. He said, look, this is one chapter, and I believe it is a powerful chapter that we can make a product out of. So we started working on it together with Taiming, one of the other founders, who was also the drummer in another of Bas’s bands, and with Dion, who is a music enthusiast.

The most important thing we learned from there is that we knew what music does to people. Music is a very strong connecting power in the world. We stuck with that, and that’s what initiated Chordify and how we started growing it.

We used this thought as a starting point, and from there on, we followed what people actually did on our platform when playing along with songs. If somebody hears a song and it gets stuck in their head, they just want to play along with it, and they want to do it straight away. So this is what we built. From discovering a favorite song to playing along with it, we try to make it as easy as possible.

This resonated with many people around the world. To give you some numbers, last year alone, 89 million unique visitors came to Chordify. That’s a huge number of musicians worldwide. Virtually every country in the world has people in it who play along with Chordify. I always say, from Filipino pop to Christian rock, it doesn’t really matter what your musical taste is, we’ve got your back.

As soon as a song lands on YouTube, SoundCloud or your favorite DSP, our algorithms have the chords ready within seconds so you can play along. Our users relate to that. They rated our app 4.7 out of 5 in the app stores. People keep coming back to this concept of playing, not because they have to, because it’s a curriculum, but because they want to. They want to relax, they want to unwind, and they want to connect to the people they love through music.

I believe this is a founding principle that has been super powerful for us from the beginning, or actually from 30 years ago already. It stuck with us and brought us the success that we have today.

That’s an interesting question. We’ve been talking to so many people, and every time the same question popped up: are you an educational service, or are you a service for leisure?

Most of our competitors in the market are built around improvement: levels, lessons, tricks, what have you. Everything is built around becoming a better musician. And that works for quite a few people. But the fact of the matter is that the majority of musicians in the world do not make music to become the next rock star.

What we found out is that most people want to play music for relaxation. After a busy day of work, they want to unwind, pick up the guitar or sit behind a piano and play a song, or play along with their kids or their family and connect with other people. For the majority of people, that’s the real incentive to play music, and that’s what sets us apart.

That’s also why I made music, as in the founding story. I was going to school back then, and on weekends we got together as friends and made music. We had some gigs here and there, but we never anticipated big rock star careers. Being together, or being at home and living your music, that’s where you make the difference.

We’re not a teacher or a coach. We don’t work with excessive streaks and push notifications. Chordify is more like the bandmate who sits next to you, knows the chords of every song and helps you get on with playing along. We often hear back from our users that it feels like playing in a band, because you play along with the music you love. You’re the guitarist or the piano player in that band, and that’s a powerful feeling.

The second thing that’s important to mention is that behind the intent of our users, there’s also a powerful engine that we’ve built, and I believe this is also a differentiating factor. First, we have AI-fueled algorithms that do the heavy lifting. If a song lands on YouTube, we can calculate the chords within seconds. Then comes the second layer: thousands of musicians on our platform take these chords as a starting point and start editing them when they believe something is wrong.

The combination of man and machine, our algorithms and our user corrections, forms a powerful couple that results in higher-quality chords and helps musicians from all around the world to keep playing. These are thousands and thousands of editors. You could fill the O2 Arena in London with them. Together, they edit the songs, not to perfection, but to better-quality chords. That sets us apart from the competition.

There was an article, I think it was written by MusicRadar about seven years ago, and it stated something important: nine out of ten guitarists quit playing within the first year. This was not because playing is too hard, but because learning scales is tedious.

We set ourselves the goal of changing that and making it easier and more fun to play along with music. So we flipped the order. Traditionally, you went to a music teacher, where you had to learn scales, theory and exercises, and maybe after months of hard practice and blisters on your fingers, you got to play along with the songs you love. We start with the song you love. That’s the basic point.

You can change the key if it feels too difficult, repeat the parts you love, slow the song down to make it easier and get tips on how to play the difficult parts. Everything we do is meant to make it easier to play along with the songs you love. That’s our starting point, and that’s how we approach making music differently than it was before Chordify.

It might be good to add that even though I put a lot of emphasis on relaxing, unwinding and connecting with other people, musicians on our platform still learn. They still become better musicians, but it’s not set up as a course or a music school. By making it easier to play along with songs, one day you suddenly realize it has become easier to play that song you like. So it’s learning by playing instead of learning for the sake of learning.

It must be our chords and lyrics view. We started off with just chords, and we have had lyrics for quite a while, but now we also have a new view that combines the chords and the lyrics. Our users asked for it for a long time, and now you can see the two together. You can sing and play along at the same time, and a lot of musicians also use the lyrics as a reference point for where they are in the song. That’s a good example of something we’re super proud of.

Secondly, and maybe I’m even prouder of this, we have rebuilt our editor interface. I just mentioned the power of the algorithms and our users, and how together they improve the quality of the chords. We have created a new editor interface where you can correct not only the chords, but also the lyrics and even the strumming patterns, and we’ve made it super intuitive. It’s currently in a closed environment, shared only with some dedicated contributors, but we intend to open it to everyone soon. This is an important step to further improve the output we show to our users.

I have to circle back to what I said before. We expected mostly ambitious musicians, people working hard to become the next rock star, and we really expected that to be the dominant group on Chordify. In reality, not even one third is there for that. We have some professional musicians on our platform as well, but when we talked to our users, we learned again that most people who play music aren’t there to change careers at all.

I had an interview with one of our users. He’s from Brighton, I believe, 56 years old and a broker. Busy day, every day. Then he comes home, sits on the couch and plays along with songs from the past. For him, it brings back nostalgia and takes him back to his youth. It connects music to emotions. He picks some sad songs and plays along with them, and when he’s energized, he picks energizing music. That’s how he unwinds and how he likes to live his music.

He also sees music as a lifelong venture. I mentioned that nine out of ten people stop within the first year. But once you’ve passed that point and are able to play songs you like, it’s something you take with you for your entire life. This guy is 56 years old, he has been playing for 30 or 40 years already, and he will never quit. And he uses Chordify to play along with his music.

It reminds me of my brother-in-law as well. He’s a car mechanic, always busy, and it’s quite physical work. He’s tired after a long day, with two adolescent kids at home, which can be busy as well. Then he takes himself off to his bedroom. He’s a UK guy, so he’s probably playing along with Beatles music.

First of all, music is universal. As I said, virtually every country in the world has Chordify users. But we are committed to making Chordify feel like home, no matter where you live. So we’re currently in the process of differentiating the experience for users in various regions.

For instance, the type of music people in the UK listen to is different from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy or wherever. So the songs we suggest to you are different in the UK. The onboarding is also differentiated for our UK audience. We tap into moments that matter for people in the UK: Boxing Day, bank holidays, the BRIT Awards, Beatles Week. We tap into these national highlights.

We do this country by country, deciding where to focus first with the capacity we have. The first countries we’re focusing on are the UK, Germany and Poland. The same model, AI-driven chords refined by thousands of our musicians, carries into each of these local versions. Beyond the Western world, where we predominantly provide our service, we see great potential in the Global South. It’s obviously a huge and very diverse region, but countries like Brazil and India are really big opportunities for us to tap into.

My former band never made it to the O2 Arena. But the friendships outlived the band, and that’s what the power of music is about. For most people, it’s not about becoming a rock star. It’s about the song that gets you through a long day, or the people you play music with. That’s what Chordify is for: to keep you playing. That’s the reason we exist, to make the world live its music. That’s the message I would like to bring across to your readers.