Photo Credit: Kenny Eliason
Ed-tech platform Conduction raises funding to re-imagine music education across the country and allow students to compose digital songs.
Conduction, the ed-tech platform revolutionizing the music classroom, has announced a $265,000 pre-seed investment from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The funds will be used to advance the company’s proprietary music software modules, increase corporate partnerships, and expand operations in schools across Pennsylvania and throughout the United States.
Despite efforts to keep music and the arts alive in US schools, millions of students lack access to these programs, according to research from the Arts Education Data Project. For many schools with existing music programs, teachers struggle to engage students with outdated curricula and limited budgets.
Conduction, which meets several national education standards, is designed to enable students to easily create and produce digital songs. Each week, classes vote on their favorite song creations, and Conduction sources local musicians to make music videos playing the classroom’s selected songs within days. With Conduction, individual schools and entire districts can bring music back into the classroom at a fraction of the cost of traditional programs.
Unlike other music platforms, Conduction provides learning experiences that align with the interests of present-day students. Students get to learn beat making, composition and songwriting, sheet music education, and band integration, all with an intense element of student engagement. These modules help increase classroom participation, reduce absenteeism and create new digital education experiences.
“Music is the one school subject that is meant to touch the soul, inspire aw, and light up life — and yet today’s music classrooms fail to do this,” said Joe Maggiore, CEO and co-founder, Conduction. “Music curriculums are often stuck in the past, focusing on topics kids never would want to hear about — like outdated classical music from the 1700s.”
“Today’s students want to become producers, DJs, songwriters, and beatmakers, and our schools are failing to meet them where they are in their interests while providing distinct curricular needs,” Maggiore continued. “We created Conduction to refocus music education on today’s student values while still finding a way to incorporate critically important national music education standards.”
Today, Conduction works with dozens of schools and districts, as well as countless community musicians, to bring students’ digital songs to life. Over the last 12 months, Conduction has seen growing demand for its platform, having spoken to over 100 schools that are fully ready to incorporate the solution into their education programs to enhance the overall student experience. The company also works with corporations interested in sponsoring individual schools by subsidizing the costs of music education.