Artificial intelligence and user-generated content music tool company Mayk has announced the launch of its latest product, popstarz.ai. With the promise of helping anyone playfully assume the identity of a popstar and let a user sing their favorite song, the company hopes to revolutionize karaoke and strengthen the artist-fan relationship.
To get popular songs on the service, the company licensed the library of longtime karaoke company Stingray Karaoke. All a user needs to do is sing a little, and then the service does the rest. “Instead of using auto tune, we take a three minute voice sample and create a more perfected AI version voice of your own voice. Think of it like a voice ID,” says Stefan Heinrich, founder and CEO of Mayk.
Then users take a selfie, select their song, and popstarz.ai produces a cleanly sung version of the karaoke selection using the user’s own perfected voice model and pairs it with a selfie of the user in the style of their favorite artist. The result is vertically cropped and easily sharable on social media.
A playful tool, Heinrich envisions his target audience as being younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha, looking for something fun to do with their friends. “Being a popstar is one of the top three dreams that kids have,” says Heinrich. “This makes it possible in a fun, easy way.”
Heinrich founded Mayk in 2020, taking his experience from years as head of global marketing at TikTok, CMO at Cameo, and product marketing at YouTube and applying it to his own vision. The company creates fun tools for music fans to further engage with their favorite artists and is largely focused on offering products for the kid-to-teen audience.
The company also has other services, including its UGC-song creator app mayk.it and covers.ai.