Artiphon’s Minibeats brings social music creation to Snapchat

In 2021, instrument maker Artiphon launched the Orbacam social video app, where users could shoot video, create music for it, and add perfectly synced video effects. Originally meant as a companion to the company’s Orba handheld beatmaker, the app simply placed a digital version of the Orba over a TikTok-like interface. However, the company soon realised that many Orbacam users were not familiar with Artiphon at all. Many were casual consumers who had never made music before.

This finding inspired Artiphon to launch a spin-off brand called Minibeats, which will be home to a variety of social music creation and interaction tools that are geared toward the average consumer. Many include what Artiphon terms “musical objects” — playable digital objects that are transposed over the user’s surroundings in their camera view using augmented reality (AR). For example, the Minibeats x Snapchat integration that launched in December 2022 includes a lens that lets users remix the artist KILLBOY’s track ‘Loser’ by placing AR tattoos on their faces, each one corresponding to a different element of the song. Another lens lets users place and play musical objects found in DJ Taetro’s workspace, including a coffee mug and a houseplant, in their videos. The six Snapchat lenses that were launched for the integration have been played over 12 million times since the launch, according to Artiphon. Snapchat made perfect sense as the place for Minibeats to debut, as 33% of Snapchat’s weekly active user (WAU) base is under 25-years-old, and its average WAU streams music for 8.8 hours per week, compared to the 5.8 consumer average.

Minibeats capitalises on two trends. Firstly, younger generations, who are stewed in creator culture, seek “lean-through” experiences that allow them to actively participate in the things they are fans of, rather than passively consuming. Secondly, advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI) and AR, are simplifying music creation, making it possible to design tools that fit within a social media user experience. This is accelerating music’s “Instagram moment” — where music creation will become another tool in the social media toolkit, unearthing new fandom and revenue drivers for the music industry.

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