INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
jobs because they were earning enough from artists downloading those sounds to use in their songs
often expensive with no try-before-you-buy option
Even Kanye West got caught stealing the trendy Serum digital synthesizer.But Splice lets artists pay $7.99 per month to download up to 100
samples they can use royalty-free to create music
Splice then compensates artists based on how frequently their sounds are downloaded, and has already paid out over $7 million.Splice Sounds
messaging app GroupMe, which sold to Skype for between $50 million and $80 million in 2011
musician community and its $35 million Series B from December
Splice has just hired former Facebook product manager Matt Pakes as VP of product to lead core teams in New York, and former Secret
co-founder Chrys Bader to build out a new squad in Los Angeles
[Disclosure: I knew both from before they moved out of the SF social scene.]Splice now has 100 staffers, mostly hobbyist musicians
He wants his offices where the artists live
disagreements with his co-founder at Secret
up recently, pushing Splice to 1.5 million users, the startup has a grander vision for software to eat instruments
That means creating the same kind of tools that help programmers code apps, but for musicians to compose songs
safely work with collaborators without having to nervously save manually and fret about keeping all the copies organized.Splice saves every
Knowing income can be unpredictable, Splice lets musicians access plugins, software and instruments on a rent-to-own basis, where they can
pause payment and resume later
bootleg MP3s with a simple streaming service
Getting from a melody rattling around in your head to a few tracks laid out in your preferred composition software is the easy part
Polishing those parts, ditching the unnecessary ones, finding the rights sounds and tying it all together into something listenable can be
music producers out there are willing to pay
Citing internal research, he says there are 30 million music producers in the world
You might pay $200 for a plugin or $700 for Ableton
Square Ventures, True Ventures and DFJ could also attract competition
It might awake the interest of big creative services corporations like Adobe, or more established music production tool companies like
Native Instruments, which just launched a direct competitor called Sounds.com
But Splice is digging in for a long fight, giving away Splice Studio to lure in users and commissioning exclusive sample packs from top
But all good democratizations necessitate layers of curation to sort through all the output, which social networks have become, and tools to
