Payam Music, whose Santa Monica school teaches beginners to play piano through a proprietary alphanumeric notation rather than traditional sheet music, said it has partnered with composer Hans Zimmer and raised funding from a group of technology and media executives to expand across Southern California and the country.
The company said its Santa Monica location has become a springboard for that growth, drawing families from across Los Angeles and prompting plans for new schools in Encino and the Pasadena area.
"Once we opened in Santa Monica, we started meeting families from all over Los Angeles, and the two places that kept being requested were the Valley and Pasadena," founder Payam Khastkhodaei said. He said the Encino school is set to open this summer and that the company is searching for a site in or near Pasadena. "We go where families tell us they need us."
Payam Music also named Hadi Partovi, founder of Code.org, as chief executive. Investors in the round include entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Cloudflare co-founder and President Michelle Zatlyn, and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, the company said.
Khastkhodaei, a former pharmaceutical bioengineering graduate student who developed the method after rediscovering piano, said the approach is meant to make learning feel effortless. "We're building a movement that challenges the traditional model of music education," he said. "Our methodology creates an environment where learning feels like play, and success is a natural result of students falling in love with piano."
Featured recently on "60 Minutes," Payam Music says its method draws on the psychology of language acquisition. Instead of beginning with sheet music, students first read an alphanumeric notation the company says lets them play familiar songs from the first day. Payam Music reports that 96% of its students reach a diploma level within four years, compared with a national rate it puts at 2% over 12 years.
Under the partnership, leading students will be mentored by Zimmer and other composers through Bleeding Fingers Music, the Emmy-winning, BAFTA-nominated collective he co-founded with Russell Emanuel and Steve Kofsky.
"Music education has long been stuck in the past, with methods that often fail to capture the imagination of young learners," Zimmer, who is also an investor, said in a statement. "Payam Music is rewriting the playbook for how music is taught." He added that he was "thrilled" his production studio would mentor the school's strongest students to develop the next generation of composers.
Partovi, who scaled computer-science programs to 100 million students globally at Code.org, has a personal connection to the school: his son has studied there since 2020 and placed third nationally in the PTA Reflections competition for piano composition. "Everybody loves music, but most people never learn to play an instrument," Partovi said. "Payam Music enables any student to learn to play the music they love."
Partovi and the company cast the investment partly as a response to screen time and artificial intelligence, positioning music as a creative counterweight. "Building creativity, confidence, and grit are the critical skills that every parent and future employer wants to see," he said.
Cuban said the school had solved a persistent problem in music instruction. "Too many kids give up on music because traditional methods don't work for them," he said. "Payam Music has cracked the code with a teaching approach that keeps kids engaged and actually learning."
Beyond Santa Monica and Irvine, its current Southern California schools, Payam Music operates in Washington, New York and Maryland and says it aims to become the first national piano school. It also plans to broaden access through live, one-on-one online lessons. Online instruction costs $75 for 50 minutes and begins at age 7, compared with age 4 for in-person lessons, which start at $100, Khastkhodaei said. The curriculum and the teachers are the same in both formats, he said.
New students can enroll or request locations at payammusic.com.