Revolutionising Music Education with Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir

Aidan McCullen: There’s always room for improvement with my music. I’ll take the feedback. Let’s get stuck in. Iceland has such a beautiful heritage in music. I was telling you, I’m a massive fan of Olafur Arnalds. I’m a massive fan of Björk, and Sigur Rós.

Beautiful music that comes out of Iceland. And I’d love to hear the origin of where all this came from, why are you doing it, what was the frustration?

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir: Big questions. Where it comes from I think both on personal level and maybe on Iceland level, there is a strong music tradition in Iceland, as you say. When I was a kid, music was taught in schools. Everyone learned the basics of music.

And there’s a lot of people who go to music schools and learn to play an instrument. Are supported by the government there’s also a sort of certain entrepreneurish kind of character, I think, in many Icelanders, and that spills into the music as well and maybe blossoms there. So I think when you have then people like Björk and Sigur Rós who have done quite well globally, Björk, of course, and Sigur Rós, like, outstanding. They become role models for the ones to follow. From a personal level, I played music since I was a kid. I think the earliest recording is me and my daddy performing together.

He was a teacher and a later school principal, but he always played in bands. And my whole family is very musical, so I both learned to play by ear, and then I started playing piano, and then I ended up at the Royal Academy of Music, finishing my postgraduate studies in voice. And in between that, there, on the road to there, there were bands and lots of things to do. when I just moved back to Iceland after my studies and working for a while in London. And my plan at the time was to just go have my headquarters in Iceland and go global and, , follow the footsteps of Björk or similar. But then I had a daughter and, and reality kicked in. At the time I was working a lot. I was doing radio shows in Iceland and I was singing in funerals with my chamber choir and traveling and touring and also trying to do well as being a mother.

But I just saw that this would become a difficult path to, go for me personally. And I decided it . to step into this world of entrepreneurship. And I had to there was one company that I started, which was based on someone else’s idea. And then I, I, did my last company called Musila.

We did a music application for children based on an adventurous game. And then I exited from there in 2020, and I had for a long time thought about this solutions, something similar to Moombix, where I would be serving adult learners and catering to what I believe that there’s a need for some sort of Services, learning services. There’s a lot of people who want to play. There’s a lot of people who regret having had the opportunity to learn to play, or they had the opportunity, but they were reluctant. Not motivated by what they were offered as children, or maybeot supported by the parents because it takes a lot of home practice. So, I think with Moombix, which is now for adults, but I think we will later, also go into schools and also for children with their parents. But with Moombix I think there’s a lot of people who want to learn, but they don’t have really access to music education. And taking a lesson takes you an hour, maybe, to commute, and, You have a lesson for half an hour and then you go back and you’ve forgotten everything that you learned. So yeah, this is maybe where it comes from, trying to solve this problem, which I think is there and unsolved.

Aidan McCullen: it’s interesting to hear your background story because of firstly the frustration that you saw, not just with your own work but, the opportunity and i wondered did COVID act as an accelerant? Was it a huge help because Suddenly the whole world started to connect on devices like we’re connecting here remotely that people weren’t really used to that but now all of a sudden they were used to it and it was almost like the perfect fertile ground for you to start Moombix.

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir,: Absolutely. And my daughter was playing the violin in the living room with her teacher. We only had iPhone. And she just placed it on a wooden shelf, so it made an amplifier. And it was just like the teacher was in a living room, and I, it really made me think seriously, at the same time, the teacher was frustrated because She called me actually, her violin teacher said, Margret, can you help me? The music school in my town was going online with this because we have to teach everyone online. And suddenly the whole town has my personal gallery of photos in their computers. So , the tools were inadequate to say the least at the time. And then of course, there are many other things that I wanted to add to this experience of just being online, on screen. , and with Moombix, we’ve done that. It’s not only a marketplace where , it’s similar to Airbnb, where you can get music lessons with a teacher, live online music lessons. But we also have this learning platform, which is equipped with digital tools that help you support the tuition, both the teacher and the student. Where you can plan the lesson, you can follow that plan during the lessons, you can, exchange comments and notes in your sheet music or chord progression those notes become your homework. And then you have this timeline, you can follow your progress in the timeline with the teacher. And then also it’s a more broad spectrum of music learning. It’s not only learning music to learn to play an instrument, but you can also learn to DJ, you can learn production, composition, , or even publishing.

Aidan McCullen: it’s useful to understand a model, like Airbnb for music lessons. Or Tinder for finding the right music, the right teacher for you.

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir,: Yes, and in many ways, it’s in a similar way. It’s very personal. It’s very revealing to meet some other person. So this is our current challenge, really, to figure out how we can make that connection less embarrassing, 

Aidan McCullen: That’s an important thing. 

People are gonna get it wrong like they’re gonna they’re gonna kiss some frogs to find your prince and i’m sure it’s the same where you have to find the right chemistry i work also as an executive coach you have a chemistry meeting where you see do we get on well cuz it’s important for both sides to get on well as a teacher, I’m sure for you as well, you have to have learnability as a student.

Otherwise, if somebody is being told by their parents, you go on to Moombix, you get yourself some lessons and they’re being forced. It’s not going to be very successful. So tell us a little bit about that process of matching the student and the teacher.

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir,: We are experimenting with this a lot. We are a startup, of course, so not everything that we dream of is there already, but , we are in the process of creating these things. Currently we are offering singing lessons.

We, have this profile of the teacher they have an intro video and they share photos of themselves and they write about their experience as musicians. We’re not only looking at academic music teachers, even though we love to have them there as well, but also I think people, many people are not necessarily academically trained, but they have a lot to teach.

They maybe have played in bands but they’re not maybe necessarily reading music so much. There are other ways also of creating the bridge and that is by packaging the lessons into group lessons and mix it with other mediums as well, videos and, there are other ways as well, more detailed like filter the genre. The music style we are aiming for more like a Netflix kind of when you start to use Netflix, you’re asked what kind of films you like, and then if you like these films, you probably like these films.

If you like, REM or Radiohead and you’re likely to like also other music from that same genre.

Aidan McCullen: When it comes to that, I was thinking about how. You have somebody who is not very good at finding business for themselves. So a musician maybe it’s a brilliant musician not very good business person, and what i love about Moombix, is the fact that that liberates somebody that might be living in a remote part of the world and now because they have the internet connection they can make a living and follow their passion actually use their passion to teach other people, when you look at the what this liberates with this frees up for people it’s really inspiring

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir,: Thank you. That is actually also a strong motivation for me to make this. When I was doing my singing studies, I travelled sometimes, hours to get one singing lesson with a teacher that I wanted to meet. And I know that people even go overseas, especially from Iceland. There are so many people that I know who travelled the world to get lessons with some gurus, guru teachers somewhere far away. But there’s also Even more, a stronger motivator for me is, is even that you can get the music. Like, if you want to learn a sitar it’s not likely to find a sitar player in Iceland. But if you go to India or London, even you will, you’re like more likely to find some high quality musicians in that field. 

Aidan McCullen: There’s a book i read called the goldmine effect and it was about how, say somebody like you have beautiful singers like Emiliana Torrini. Beautiful singer i’ve gone to see her here in ireland as well and you have a genre so each country almost has a genre, they learn from other people in the country or they might learn so they might create these collectives and they might work together to learn off each other when you start to hear global music and then you don’t have access to the teachers because nobody plays that music there it can be restricting and i really love that the fact that, somebody, their parent may play bluegrass music and it’s maybe it’s part of New Orleans culture, Louisiana or something like that and now i can actually reach out to people, that have this pocket of genius of that type of music and that this is what this book the goldmine effect is about was that you had pockets of, sporting genius in different parts of the world but now this can be the same for music

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir,: And I think if you can go even further and, think of all the folk music that is buried in all sorts of societies everywhere in the world. Something which is very difficult to access. like Norwegian mountain violin or, percussion players.

 There’s this fantastic Recordings of musicians who travel to Cuba or they travel to Australia to explore this culture and get it sinking in. But now you can do that online because everyone has a mobile.

Aidan McCullen: Margret for people who want to find out more about Moombix where is the best place for them to reach out

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir,: Just go straight to Moombix.com. It’s Moom, like Zoom, and Bix, like Mix. MoomBix. And Check it out and try it out if you’re interested trying a music lesson or be a DJ or, take the dust off your guitar that has been lying in your cupboard for years, and you want to renew your old skills. that have been lying silent for many years. Go to MoomBix. com and we have a great selection of teachers. There’s more than 100 teachers there, 150 or 60. We have a Grammy nominee there. We have an Emmy award winner.

We have someone who’s worked with Neil Davids from Massive Attack many years, made film scores and, TV music. So, great selection of wonderful people on Moombix

Aidan McCullen: Founder of Moombix, Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir thank you for joining us.

Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir: Thank you.