The Hidden Market Inside MuseCool’s 2,000 Music Lessons

MuseCool has processed around 2,000 music lessons since its April public launch, and only about 40 per cent of each session is spent playing. CEO and co-founder Petru Cotarcea said the rest is explanation, discussion, and general talk, especially with children.

Tutors get the tool for free. Parents subscribe. The copy of those hours that could matter later belongs to conservatoires, instrument makers, and publishers who never sit in the room.

A Music School That Learned to Listen

Cotarcea grew up poor in Romania, where the old state system made lessons cheap enough for him to start. He later called that access one of the few good things about that system. By 14 he had a scholarship to Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. He trained at the Royal Academy of Music, and by 18 he was in the West End production of Sweeney Todd, where he met Stephen Sondheim.

After that first year he had saved about £10,000 and, at 19, put it into a peppermint farm in Romania, planning to study in London while the crop grew. A lab found the plants toxic, with no menthol and a chemical banned in the EU, and he burned the field. He went back to the work he knew.

He founded MuseCool in 2017 as a London music school for children aged 5 to 14, in person and online, with piano, guitar, violin, and drums. The company’s own site says the school has taught over 90,000 lessons. Cotarcea said piano takes roughly two-thirds of new beginners, and that teachers still tend to teach as they were taught, with pride in lineage. In 2024 the school added New York.

In 2019 he turned a retired double-decker into a music school with the aim of free lessons for children in London. Filmmakers Joe Pavlo and David Schendel rode that bus during the worst stretch of the pandemic for a 40-minute film, The Most Beautiful Noise. The AI product came out of the same studio, not out of a lab that had never billed a parent.

Forty of 100 Tutors Never Pressed Start

Cotarcea said music education is conservative, and the public beta read that way. Of about 100 tutors approached, about 40 would not try the product. Some told him they already had their methods. Of the 60 who did try it, 28 became users and brought their studios with them.

THE TUTOR FUNNEL

That is 28 studios from 100 conversations, and 32 people who tried the software and walked away. Cotarcea still calls the ones who stay sticky. Once teachers get used to a system, he said, they tend to keep it for a long time, which is where other apps in the field fail, because amateur players will dabble and working teachers will not rebuild a studio around a toy.

The 28 who stayed got more than notes. Sign-up for lesson payments takes around five minutes, which matters because Cotarcea found tutors can be awkward talking about money even though they need to be paid. The product is built as B2B2C: the tutor is the door, the parent is the subscriber.

Around 40 Percent of a Paid Lesson Is Talk

The recordings already contradict a simple idea of what an hour of tuition buys. MuseCool’s data suggests only around 40 per cent of the average lesson is spent on the instrument. The rest goes to explanations, talk about the music, and ordinary conversation, and that share is higher with children. Early tests had already shown beginner lessons contain less playing than people assume, with a lot of encouragement and attention management.

WHAT THE RECORDINGS SHOW

• Playing time: Around 40 per cent of the average lesson is spent on the instrument.
• The rest: Explanations, discussion of the music, and general conversation, above all with children.
• Volume so far: Around 2,000 lessons processed since the April public launch.
• Score library: Around 4,000 piano pieces, with the catalogue almost doubling each month.

Cotarcea put it plainly: there is much more happening around the playing. Parents who pay the Incorporated Society of Musicians’ median private rate of £40 an hour, the figure from the 2024/25 fees survey, are buying that mix, not a solid hour of notes. The app now lets a user click a bar on a heat map and see what teacher and student said there, and what was happening in the music.

Historically, no one has had large-scale data about what happens inside music lessons. If we scale, we could reshape music education research simply by providing real data.

Petru Cotarcea, CEO and co-founder, MuseCool

He goes to teaching events and hears stories about what someone tried and whether they thought it worked. He said he dreams of papers from this corpus, because the field has so little quantitative evidence of what actually works in the room.

What the Engine Has to Hear in a Child’s Lesson

MuseCool calls the product The Muse and bills it as a music lesson understanding engine. A tutor starts it on a phone, and it sits through the session. After the lesson it reviews the talk and the playing, then writes a summary, analytics, and, on the higher plan, daily practice games the tutor can approve, with a floor of 10 minutes a day.

The hard part is not the transcript. A child’s lesson is a messy room, full of talk, scraps of pieces, wrong notes, and what the company calls musical gibberish. Cotarcea said audio AI still lags text and image work, and that a machine does not instantly recognise a snatch of imperfect playing the way a teacher does. The engine is built on music information retrieval, the research field that tries to identify a piece, find the student’s place in it, and describe what is being played.

The company works with Queen Mary University of London on that problem and is preparing an Innovate UK project with the university to push the engine further. That puts it next to Queen Mary’s Centre for Digital Music, a group that already runs industry AI work on source separation, mixing, and lyric tools, and trains doctoral students in music understanding. Cotarcea’s line is that everything else in the product comes from listening to the music, not from filing the conversation.

A well-funded US rival launched this summer and made him nervous until he tried it. He said it can record speech, write summaries, and isolate the playing so you can hear it back, but it does not seem to analyse the music itself. That pitch matches Tonic Notes, a US app from the Tonic Music team that went live on 21 July and sells a lesson notetaker with transcripts, summaries, and audio clips of passages. Other studio apps, including Arco and ForteAI, are also racing to turn a lesson into searchable notes. The crowded, fundable version of this product treats a piano hour like a meeting. MuseCool is betting the unpaid problem is naming the bar.

Conservatoires Want a View the Tutor Does Not Sell

On the platform, tutors average 14.8 private students, so a small group of teachers reaches hundreds of parents. Cotarcea is aiming younger still, at people who already teach while they study. The company is working with student communities around several UK conservatoires, and he said that pipeline could put MuseCool in front of around 6,000 musicians.

THE CONSERVATOIRE LIST

• London: Royal College of Music, Royal Academy of Music, and Trinity Laban.
• Elsewhere in Britain: Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and Leeds, among others.
• The age band: Students between 18 and 25 who already teach and grew up with phones.

The institutional pitch is a dashboard, not a practice game. If tutors inside a conservatoire or music school ran the same recorder, managers could watch progress and attendance across 600 or 800 students without sitting in on every hour, and step in before someone quits. Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music research already flags drops in formal learning at 11 and 15. Its 2025 UK report also found 17 per cent of ABC1 young learners have private tuition, against 11 per cent of C2DE learners. Primary-age children who play still practise on about 10 days a month. An older ABRSM survey found that after group lessons at school, fewer than 25 per cent of learners go on to formal lessons, and 61 per cent of teachers named motivation and practice as the main drivers of progress.

Those figures are why a live feed of lesson time is a product for registrars, not only for parents. Instrument makers are the next implied buyer: if you can hear how a piano is actually played in teaching rooms, you know things a factory does not get from warranty cards. Music publishers sit behind that. Cotarcea said a genuine picture of what students in a city are learning would show which composers and artists are in the room. None of those groups is paying for the beta. The 28 tutors are.

Tutors Can Get Paid in Five Minutes

Sheet music is the other chore the school kept hitting. A lot of the classical teaching repertoire is in the public domain, so over the summer MuseCool hired a team, mostly in Ukraine, to grow that catalogue and convert it to XML. The app now holds around 4,000 piano pieces, and Cotarcea said software gains mean the collection is almost doubling every month. A parent does not have to buy a Mozart book for those titles. The firm hopes to add licensed music by the end of the year.

On the US site, The Muse is priced as a parent add-on inside the MuseCool app, with two rungs.

THE MUSE PLANS ON THE US SITE

The company says the app has no ads, no social layer, and no stranger chat, and that it does not sell personal data. Once enough tutors in a city opt in, MuseCool can spin up a local website so parents can find them. The longer plan is to repeat that marketplace in other cities and languages. That is a listings business riding on top of a listening engine, and it only works if the 28-studio pattern repeats.

The Bus Film Reaches PBS as the Raise Lags

FROM THE BUS TO THE BETA

1. 2017: Cotarcea founds MuseCool as a London music school after the peppermint farm fails.
2. 2019: He converts a retired double-decker bus into a mobile school for free lessons in London.
3. 2024: The school expands to New York City.
4. April 2026: The Muse goes out in a public launch after a planned March window.
5. 21 July 2026: Tonic Notes, a US lesson notetaker, goes live with speech, summaries, and playing clips.
6. 14 September 2026: Cotarcea says the engine has processed around 2,000 lessons, with 28 studios staying on.
7. Late September 2026: The Most Beautiful Noise is due on PBS on the US West Coast.

The company is trying to close its next funding round while it grows the platform. Cotarcea said music education is not a sexy area for investors, so the raise is an uphill battle, and that they are managing. He is already selling a later picture: a piano that understands the room, the way a fairy-tale object talks back, maybe in five or ten years, maybe sooner. The kit to read how a player touches the keys already exists, as does speech recognition. What he says MuseCool would add is the layer that knows the music in the air, who played what, and who said what, possibly with makers putting that software inside the instrument.

He has around 2,000 lessons on disk, 28 studios still logging them, and a film about a bus heading to American public television. The conservatoires, piano firms, and publishers in the pitch are not on the subscriber list yet.