Anyone Can Build the Future of Music
Audiotool is a free, browser-based multiplayer music production platform with over 300,000 monthly active users across 200+ countries: a community that has created over 10 million tracks and more than 600,000 collaborations. Built for real-time co-creation from the ground up, Audiotool recently launched NEXUS, the first open developer platform for collaborative music production, giving developers, AI tools, and music apps full read/write access to live DAW sessions.
BBC Research & Development is a multi-disciplinary team which has been crucial to shaping the media and tech industry for over 93 years. Its global influence has been key to the development of technology like colour television, digital radio, Ultra-High-definition pictures and breakthroughs in TV graphics. It has influenced internet streaming, media provenance and a whole host of technology and standards linked to the production and delivery of media content. Multi- award winning and defined by the Royal Charter and public service values BBC R&D ensures that the technology is developed in a way which prioritises benefits for audiences and society, now and in an increasingly complex technological future.
Music Hackspace is a London-based creative technology organisation dedicated to bridging the gap between music, technology, and education. Through its flagship hackathon programme, Music Hackspace has become a leading force in the music technology sector, bringing together developers, musicians, and industry professionals to build the next generation of music tools and experiences. With events spanning London, Boston, Lisbon, Montréal and beyond — including partnerships with world-class institutions and brands — Music Hackspace continues to push the boundaries of building and bringing to market new music products and experiences.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, based in Ilmenau, Germany, has internationally recognized expertise in automatic music analysis and audio content understanding. Its research focuses on machine learning and signal processing methods for music information retrieval, including audio annotation, transcription, similarity analysis, and feature extraction. These technologies support applications in media production, broadcast monitoring, and music-related AI systems.
The Audio Programmer began in 2017 as a YouTube channel created to make audio coding more accessible. What started as one person teaching plugin development has grown into a global community of 40,000+ learners, developers, and music-tech innovators. They share knowledge through tutorials, books, and events, connect companies with top talent, and create custom audio tools for clients around the world.
Audiotool has expanded the collaborators for its Let's Build! Audiotool NEXUS Hackathon Series to include BBC R&D, Fraunhofer IDMT, Music Hackspace, and The Audio Programmer. Collaborating organizations will participate as challenge definers, mentors, and judges throughout the series: a free, global hackathon running May-July 6, 2026, open to developers, musicians, and creative technologists at all stages.
Let’s Build! invites everyone to help shape the future of music tech. To support this, all hackathon participants will receive up to $500 worth of AI credits, helping ensure that anyone interested in building music apps can participate and learn. The total prize pool is valued at more than $70,000, with participants competing across 6 categories.
Let’s Build! and NEXUS are extensions of Audiotool’s decades-long vision to expand access to professional-grade music tech to as many people as possible. Audiotool has been operating as a free, browser-based collaborative music creation platform for over a decade. NEXUS is Audiotool's open-source SDK, enabling developers to build and extend tools within the Audiotool DAW environment through open API access, AI intercommunication, collaborative multi-tool sessions, and no licensing fees.
“What makes initiatives like this particularly interesting is the open architecture of NEXUS. Unlike traditional closed DAW environments, NEXUS enables developers to build and connect new tools directly within collaborative music production workflows, creating the foundation for experimentation and community-driven innovation that a hackathon format depends on,” says Hanna Lukashevich, R&D Management Leader at Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT and juror of the Let’s Build! Hackathon Series. “For our research at Fraunhofer IDMT, this opens up exciting opportunities to better understand how AI can support collaborative music creation, which tools creators actually need, and at which stages of the production workflow intelligent assistance can provide the greatest value.”
BBC R&D's Future World Design team will define and lead a dedicated challenge track within Let's Build!, inviting participants to build rights-aware music tools for PHARE, BBC R&D's new prototype platform designed to give music creators transparent ownership, rights registration, and monetisation infrastructure.
The alignment between the two platforms goes deeper than a challenge track. BBC R&D’s vision for PHARE is about eliminating barriers between a creative idea and its execution, from finding collaborators and accessing creative tools, to discovering commissions. Audiotool is an online DAW where music gets made, collaboratively, in real time. Tools built on NEXUS during Let's Build! could become future creative toolset features in PHARE, allowing hackathon participants to directly help to shape PHARE's creator-facing toolkit.
"PHARE was built to solve real problems for real music makers. The developers who build on Audiotool NEXUS are exactly the people we want stress-testing our ideas and creating rights-aware tools. Let's Build! gives us the opportunity to put our research into the hands of a global creative community. We're excited to see what they build." says Edward Fotheringham, Product Principal, BBC Future World Design, Research & Development.
“This collaboration connects two complementary layers of the same vision: Audiotool and NEXUS are where music gets made and where tools get built; PHARE is where that music gets owned, protected, and monetized,” explains Audiotool co-founder and CEO Andreas Jacobi. “For the first time, the moment of creation and the moment of rights registration can happen simultaneously.”
The Audio Programmer, one of the most widely followed music technology education channels globally, joins Let’s Build! as a content partner and judge, producing video content and resources to support participants throughout the series. “For years, serious audio developers have had to choose between power and accessibility,” says Joshua Hodge, Founder, The Audio Programmer. “NEXUS opens that conversation back up: not by dumbing anything down, but by removing the friction that kept great ideas from becoming real tools. We’re joining Let's Build! because we want to see what developers who've never had this kind of platform at their fingertips will actually build with it.”
Audiotool's collaboration with Music Hackspace spans multiple in-person hackathon events across 2025 and 2026. The next event is in Boston on June 6-7, 2026, co-hosted with Berklee College of Music immediately following the Berklee AIMS conference. All events feature dedicated Audiotool challenge tracks inviting participants to build creative music applications on NEXUS.
Music Hackspace is also creating educational video content for the Let's Build! series to support participants globally. “Building music plugins used to mean C++, cross-platform headaches, and years of toolchain experience. NEXUS changes the equation completely: build apps directly in the browser, with a shared runtime that lets your tools talk to everything else happening in the session in real time,” reflects Dr. Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, CEO, Music Hackspace. “For the next generation of music tool builders, this is the on-ramp we’ve been missing.”
More about Let’s Build! at www.audiotool.com/LetsBuild/
Audiotool’s new online DAW and its extensions via NEXUS SDK can be found at audiotool.com.
