2017 Winner
Wise 50 Over 50 Award™
Sanjay Belkhode & Mark Kershey – MuzeLounge
www.muzelounge.com
As a musician for 40 years, Sanjay’s passion for music and his engineering-based 30-year high-tech career provide the perfect match for executing on the company vision. MuzeLounge is a Music Technology company I co-founded with Mark Kershey to address a better way to use MIDI to control musical instruments or devices via an innovative software interface.
I started MuzeLounge at 53 years of age with Mark D. Kershey. We started the business because we saw an unaddressed long-standing problem musicians faced when finding their sound. A musician’s sound is their signature, their brand and finding it is as important as playing music. We have a unique solution comprised of high-utility software coupled with an online community.
For all musicians, their sound is their signature and brand, it is as important as their music. The unique sounds of Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour or U2 and many others are recognized the world over. Stifled by the complexity of (electronic) MIDI-enabled music devices and instruments for the last 34 years and a complete lack of a collaborative/sharing platform, they spend too much time finding their sound rather than playing music and being creative.
Musicians want to create. MIDI device/instrument manufacturers and musicians have told us they want a solution. An ideal solution would enhance a musician’s creativity potential. If a musician spends much less time finding their sounds, they would spend more time playing music and be more creative.
Our solution combines the immediate reduction of complexity via an enabling software application with a cloud-based community collaboration platform (our ecosystem) to greatly extend a musician’s creative processes and abilities. Our community is not simply for sharing sounds, they will serve as the spark for conversations among users and the subsequent posting of related content by users on our community.