Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava says AI won’t ever replace human creativity

Today, I’m talking with Kakul Srivastava, CEO of music creation platform Splice. I don’t think I need to really introduce Splice, actually — I just need to play this clip:

If you exist on planet Earth, you know that as the guitar loop from Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which is an inescapable pop music phenomenon. You can check out the sample in full right here in the “Espresso” chorus.

That loop is part of a sample pack on Splice — in fact, most of Espresso is part of a sample pack on Splice, which is one of the biggest marketplaces for loops and samples around. You can just sign up, pay the money, download the loops, and try to make pop hits all day long. This is a part of making music now, and it has been ever since Rihanna’s monster hit “Umbrella” was built around a GarageBand loop called “Vintage Funk 03” in 2007.

Now, if you’re a Decoder listener, you know that some of my favorite conversations are with people building technology products for creatives and that I am obsessed with how technology changes the music industry, because it feels like whatever happens to music happens to everything else five years later. So this one was really interesting because Splice is all wrapped in all that — and some of its new products, including AI tools, might change how music is made all over again.

Srivastava joined Splice as its CEO three years ago. Before that, she was at Adobe, so she has a lot of experience working at a company that makes tools for a creative user base that’s threatened by things like automation and AI. But if you’ve listened to any of our Adobe episodes, you know that the flip side of that is people actually using these tools at high rates, because they’re fun to play with and make some parts of the creative process easier.

So I really wanted to dig into that with Srivastava, not only to understand where Splice stands, but also to see how the broader music industry can try and make sense of this technology and what it could do to music. I also wanted to talk about how the company navigates the incredibly complex minefield of copyright law and attribution on the internet — something that’s only getting more complicated with AI and the increasing number of copyright lawsuits filed against big AI companies.

There’s a lot in this one — and Srivastava was willing to fall pretty deep down some of these rabbit holes with me. Let me know what you think.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kakul Srivastava, you’re the CEO of Splice. Welcome to Decoder.

I have wanted to have this conversation forever, so I’m glad I’m here.

Yeah, we ran into each other at the Code Conference last year and we just were off to the races talking about music and technology and AI, and I’m glad you’re finally here because so much has changed since then. But all of the issues are kind of still there and still working towards resolution.

Yeah, a lot has changed. A lot is going to keep changing, and you’re right, some of the core issues are still the core issues.

And along the way, at least one massive hit single has been made using loops from Splice, so there’s that.

Oh, come on. Not just one, not just one.

I think “Espresso.” There’s “Espresso” and there’s a lot of other ones.

I love “Espresso.” It’s awesome, but a very large proportion of top music everywhere uses Splice.

Let’s start with the very basics for people who maybe aren’t familiar with how music is made today or with Splice, what is Splice? What do you do for folks?

Splice is a music creation platform that is used by music creators and musicians. That’s our focus — who are our creators? And what we provide to them, we have this tagline “starts with sound,” so we do start with sound and we provide them with probably the world’s most diverse, most high-quality sonic palette. We send people all over the world. In fact, right before this, I was looking at a report from our team that just came back from Brazil, and we’re recording sounds.

We’re meeting artists on the ground, so we’re capturing the sounds of the world, and we make that available through our platform. We also provide AI-based creative tools that help you start with a sound, but make it your own. We have compositional AI. We just launched something brand new at SXSW called Splice Mic, which allows you to hum an idea, start with a musical idea right in your phone, and we’ll help you compose around that by putting the right samples next to it, to help you get you to your final track.

So there’s a lot here, which is “here are the foundational pieces of making a song,” right? “We’re going to do loops and samples, we’re going to have this library of audio,” and then there’s this term, which I see a lot of companies that make creative software starting to make, which is, “We’re going to do it for you.”

You used to work at Adobe. Adobe I think is the paradigmatic example of this right now. You can just push generate to fill in Photoshop and it just does a bunch of stuff for you. You can prompt Photoshop now in various ways and it does stuff for you. Are you all the way there with Splice and where you’re going, where you can say, “Write me a country song,” and Splice will just do it for you?

Actually, we’re totally not. That’s totally not what we’re trying to do, and I’m so glad you asked this question because I really want to put this idea out there. Our creatives, our musicians, our artists, the people who we think about all day long, the last thing they want is someone to make the song for them. In fact, one of the things that we learned when we launched Create, out of the gate people were like, “Oh, this feels like cheating. This feels too easy. I need more controls.”

So right from day one, we’ve been adding more sophistication, more technology, more customization, more personalization for users. Because for our users, it’s really about the creative process, and how is that interesting? How are they able to get the tools to capture what’s happening inside and turn it into a song, turn it into a vibration, turn it into something that they can share with other people? So it is absolutely not push-button creation. That’s not fun.

This is a long argument in music. It goes back decades. It stretches to before AI hit the scene. You must at the company have some sense of how people perceive building music out of sample packs. And even before “Espresso,” like “Umbrella” by Rihanna was [made with] GarageBand, which I think is just a moment in music that should belong in the history books.

How have you dealt with that? Okay, music is now just assembling a bunch of pre-made samples and that’s good or bad. People have a lot of feelings about that. Is that a framework you’re using as you enter the AI generation era?

So, I’m going to take exception with what you just said.

I don’t think music making today is putting just a bunch of samples together. I think that using samples to create music is a really profound creative process.

By the way, I will concede that that is a very reductive criticism, but it is a criticism.

Yeah, it’s a process that’s been developed over decades that it’s really powerful. So I think of samples as the building blocks for how modern music is made, and it used to be a hip-hop thing. It used to be very specific genres, and now it’s in every genre. One of our largest growing genres is country music, which I never thought would happen, but it is. You’re using samples to make country music.

I think the artistry of using samples to make music is that you start with a sample, you start with the sound, but then you make it your own. One, how you assemble it, but how you change the sound, how you vary it, what you do inside the digital audio workstation, which is the primary creative canvas. I think that’s really important. Sorry, I got really heated about this. This is important to me.

I asked that question somewhat to provoke that response, right? Because like I said, it is a reductive criticism, but it’s a criticism that has existed. And I guess I’m curious, you have that response to the criticism of sample usage. Is that informing how you’re thinking about the criticism of AI usage?

Fundamentally, it’s about, what is the creative process? And I personally spend a ton of time with creators, and what they are telling me over and over and over again is, “I want better tools.” And when I was at Adobe, this is also something that we heard from people. “I want better tools.” And so the work for us, the work for any company that’s wanting to really meet the needs of this growing and large market is, how do you build better tools in this era of AI?

It’s not going to be, “Oh, let me type a bunch of prompts and I get a song out at the end,” but what happens next? How do I edit that? How do I change this particular part of the song and get it to sound a certain different way? How do I take this sample and make it into something else? How do I get my musical idea?

You saw this with the Splice Mic launch as well. A lot of it is: how do we get more of you into the music creation process as quickly as possible? So that’s fundamental, whether we’re talking about using a synthesizer to make music, or samples to make music, or AI to make music, how do you make sure the creative process is respected throughout those different transitions in music innovation?

That’s a lot of incoming about what your product should look like. You’re getting feedback from artists, from musicians, from other creators. There’s another side of the puzzle, particularly music, which is copyright holders and labels. Now there are these huge private equity companies that own huge catalogs that want to assert their rights in various ways. There’s the distributors themselves now, like Spotify and YouTube. Do they have a point of view that’s informing how you’re using AI, or how you’re thinking about sample licensing? Because that seems like the most complicated part of your business.

Yes and no. We are aligned across the industry — whether it’s with Universal Music or any of the other key, high-quality players in the industry — we are very aligned that the rights of the creator have to be respected. And again, our position is super simple. We’re going to focus on the creators and what creators want, and we’re going to try to meet their needs. So the rights of the creators have to be respected.

On the Splice side of things, we take this pretty seriously and we take it seriously throughout the entirety of our process, starting with ingestion. How does a sample producer or sample pack creator come into the Splice platform? We have an entire organization that does the intake, does the quality control, and checks the provenance. If you’re telling us you’re the creator, do we know that you’re really the creator? So that process of ingesting is something we take seriously.

Is it tagged effectively? Is it tagged appropriately all the way through getting onto the platform? And all the quality stuff: Is the sound clear? Is the recording nice? All of that. On the other end of it, what is the experience of someone who is downloading a sample from Splice and able to use it? We want to make sure that every single download that you do on Splice lets you download the PDF that says, “You’ve got royalty free, you’ve got full rights to this material to use it for any kind of creation.” So that’s something that’s a basic part of what we do, and it’s been that way for a long time.

On top of that is the AI story, and that’s the big story that everyone’s talking about, and I think there, it’s really simple as well. It should be, which is if you’re going to use content to train, you should train on content that you have rights to. It’s not okay to disrespect the rights of creators, and I think, again, most players in this space are pretty aligned on that.

It occurs to me just as you described that, that you are a creator platform for creators.

We are, yeah. Both sides of it.

There are people who sit around making sample packs and then they might make money uploading sample packs to Splice, and then on the other end, you’ve got artists who are downloading the sample packs, paying you money to go use some in other songs. That’s a unique situation.

It really is. Can I just add, go back to your sample thing?

Because you really poked me on that, and I wanted to come back to that for one second. That’s what’s really magical about using samples to make music. It’s not just a random sound that you got on Splice. There’s an artist at the other end of that. Just for the Sao Paulo team, we work with some of the people who are really at the forefront of funk, and what that means and what that sound is, and how it’s evolving.

So when you’re using a sample pack from Splice, you’re collaborating with those people, and it’s a collaboration. It’s a storytelling between those two different artists coming together. I think that’s really fun. It’s a neat part of Splice.

Are there creators who make their entire living just making sample packs for you?

Is that a viable approach to being a professional musician?

I think it is for some people. For some people, they make hundreds of thousands of dollars. For some people, they’re building their own musical career and this is part of what they’re doing, so we see a big range of people. I will say that the revenue that we’ve shared with the artists on our platform over time, it’s at an all-time high. So it’s nice to be able to feel good about that, too.

I’ve been spending a lot of time just thinking about the economics of creator platforms, whether they’re sustainable over time. On sort of the big consumer platforms, you see that creators have to augment their income. They all have to do brand deals, they all have to do brand expansions or sponsored content or whatever.

You can’t really do that on a Splice. Is there a ceiling to how successful you can be on a Splice? I’ll just use “Espresso” as an example. Sabrina Carpenter makes “Espresso.” I’m guessing the person who made that sample pack did not get paid more money because that song was a hit, just based on how your licenses work.

Yeah, that’s the pro and the con of being royalty-free. We are royalty-free in that, what that means for the creators is they don’t have to get stressed about it. You can use the sample. It’s clear. You don’t have to worry about clearing the rights. The downside is you don’t get to share in the sort of upside when something big like that happens. We’re really here to make sure that as many people can create as possible, and that’s part of how our model works.

How does your revenue work? Where does Splice take the money?

We are a subscription platform. So people buy a subscription to Splice, and that gives them access to this unlimited library of sounds, along with the creative tools that we’re investing in heavily for the future. You get a certain number of credits per month, and use those credits to download sounds that you can then use as you want.

And is growth just getting more and more artists to use Splice on both sides, as creators and as people who are subscribers?

So that is growth and both is, it’s been an interesting journey over the last three years while I’ve been here, but growth is really good.

We should talk about that. I think that brings us to the Decoder questions. You’re a newish CEO. You’re three years in, you were at Adobe before. I think you had two different stints at Adobe?

I did. Right out of business school and when it was a perpetual business and more recently, well on its subscription journey.

Adobe is the creative software company. They have a very, I would say, back-and-forth relationship with creatives. We had [Adobe CEO] Shantanu Narayen on the show. We got feedback on that episode of Decoder like nothing else we’ve ever experienced.

People have a lot of feelings about Adobe, what that software represents, what that subscription is worth, what AI means to Adobe as a company and its user base. You obviously have some of that experience. As you’ve come into Splice, how have you thought about applying those lessons to what is well on its way to being one of those companies for the musical community?

Adobe has been a really important part of my career journey. I learned a ton of great things at Adobe, both good and bad. I was also one of the early people at Flickr, the photo-sharing site, which I don’t know if you ever used, but a lot of people loved it.

There’s some Flickr users right now who are writing us emails. I’m just letting you know, they still love it. [Laughs]

I was also head of product and marketing at GitHub. So I’ve had a chance to see creator tools in multiple different places, and all of that has really informed what I’m bringing here to Splice. The journey for me has been a little bit around pattern recognition. One thing that I’ve seen at Flickr, at GitHub, some parts of Adobe, that I see here at Splice is that you have a business that’s centered around content, and you have a lot of rich metadata around that content, and you have lots and lots of impressions around that content so that users are giving you information about it.

So at Splice, we have about a million songs that are samples that are sounds that are downloaded today. That’s a lot. We have 28 million stacks that have been created using our AI tools. So we have a lot of impressions of what sounds people are listening to, how they’re creating things together, and what sounds go well together. That’s been a really interesting thing. Once you have that data, once you have that metadata, you can use that to build rich experiences on top, which is what we’re doing now with the creative tools, the AI-based creative tools. That feels very familiar to bring to Splice, to bring to the music industry where I’ve seen it at GitHub, I’ve seen it at Flickr, I’ve seen it at these other places.

That turn to, “We are going to make the tools that actually help you create the music.” You can look at it in a slightly more abstract way, right? In an early version of Splice, you downloaded some sample packs, you would open Logic or Pro Tools, and you’re off to the races. Splice doesn’t see what you’re doing in those apps, but those are the dominant music creation apps. To this day, they’re the dominant music creation apps.

You’re suggesting with something like Splice Mic or Splice Create, you’re going to take some of that creation. Particularly on a phone, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to reinvent how we make music. It’s still fairly cumbersome. Phone screens are small. The features you launched at SXSW are interesting, because they use AI to make that a little bit faster, more seamless, more sketchy. You can sketch an idea very quickly on a phone now.Is that the extension — “We’re going to take some of Pro Tools market share. We’re going to go take some of Logic’s market share”?

So I think that word “take” suggests a zero-sum game. This is not a zero-sum game, right? It’s about expanding and exploring the creative process. Many of our users use Splice Mic, or use our mobile app as an adjunct part of their process that they will ultimately finish inside a digital audio workstation (DAW), and I love to see that. So one of our super, super top-end producers has worked with many of the big names that you would recognize. He’ll tell me, “I’ll get into my Uber, I’ll start playing the Splice app. I’ll generate a bunch of stacks so that by the time I get to the studio, I’ve got a bunch of ideas that I can show the artist right away to say, ‘Do you want to go this way or do you want to go that way?’” And that’s a really core part of his creative process.

I was just at my kid’s school where they have a digital music production class. And for them, listening to sounds on Splice is a really core part of learning, “What does this genre sound like? What does this genre sound like? What does it mean to create a Bollywood hit? What does it mean to create something that’s a K-pop sound?” And I think that’s a different way to use this experience. So for us, it’s not that we’re going to take [market share] away from this place or this place, but how do we expand how much we’re part of the creative journey in different ways?

But the idea that you’re going to start and finish a song in a Pro Tools, you’re not looking at that.

Do we think that we’re going to directly compete with Pro Tools? No, I don’t think so. I think Pro Tools has its place, just like Photoshop has its place. There are people who tell us every single day, “You will take Ableton out of my cold dead hands. It’s not going to happen.” And there are a lot of other parts of the creative process that are painful.

So for example, when I sit down with one of our creators, inevitably there will be a situation where they’re like, “Oh, we need to find a certain kind of kick drum.” And they’ll find a folder and they’ll do a subfolder and they’ll do a sub-folder, and then they’ll finally find the sub-sub-sub folder that has 20 kick drum sounds that they have saved.

You just go through and you listen to these sounds. That is painful. That is a painful process, and it shouldn’t be that hard. And so, we’ve just done this new experience that we launched in October last year where we integrated with Studio One, which is one of the top DAWs, and there’s a Splice integrated search with sound experience. So we listen to what you’re creating inside Studio One, and we’ll suggest the samples that go with it right there integrated as part of your creative workflow.

Do I think I’m going to replace Studio One? Absolutely not. Can I make the Studio One experience a lot better, because Splice is there and Splice is smart with AI? 100 percent, all day long.

How do those conversations work with all those digital audio workstation providers? They’re all very different. The companies that make them are all very different. Some of them are very quirky. Some of them are Apple, which…

All of the music tech industry is very quirky.

It’s all very quirky. There’s a lot of, I would say, eccentric Europeans floating around this industry in particular. It’s great. It’s one of my favorite parts of the tech industry to cover. And then you have a company like Apple, which is, they’re just going to do whatever it wants to do. That’s just how they work. Splice has to integrate with all of it. Some of them are expanding into your zone. They are adding sample packs, libraries, and subscription features. A lot of them are adding AI tools. How does that competition and cooperation work?

Generally speaking, it’s a very strong cooperation. I’ve actually been really impressed at how collaborative the industry really is. So the conversations with Studio One was very, very positive, and we’re working with other partners as well to bring that integration, and it’s been very, very positive. I think there’s generally a recognition that we’re good at what we do, the kind of work that we can do in terms of bringing these sample packs to the world, the global coverage, the high quality, or consistent high-quality, control process. It’s not something that they want to replicate. They want to make great experiences inside Ableton, the next feature, this is not what they want to do.

I think the AI stuff is new to a lot of people in the industry. I come from a core tech background. A lot of the team that I’ve brought into Splice over the last few years comes from a core tech background. So, we have a lot of expertise around that, which is unique in some ways for the music tech space. So I think there’s a lot of respect around that. I think there’s an attractiveness to a subscription business model that has been difficult for this industry to adopt. And so, I think there’s a lot of curiosity about that. Could we use a content business model to get more recurring revenue? But I think many people have found that it’s not as easy as it looks, and they’ve struggled with it.

One of the things you say about bringing people who have a core tech background is that helps you innovate in things like AI, I’m sure, right? Where you just need to be on the cutting edge of the technology. Tech and music in particular have always just crashed into each other. The thing I say on the show over and over again is if you pay attention to the music industry and what tech is doing to the music industry, you have the view into what tech will do to everything else five years out.

How are you thinking about that dynamic right now? Inside of Splice, you’ve said, “I need to hire more tech people.” Is it just for AI or is there something else you’re trying to accomplish with the addition of that talent?

Innovation is really important, and when I look at the music creation process, especially as an outsider, I feel like these music creators have been underserved with great innovative experiences, and I think it’s important to focus on the creative workflow and provide people better tools over time. When I think about the collision between tech and music, it’s weird because there’s actually more similarity than dissimilarity in Splice. Inside Splice, we have some really great software developers who love music, and are music creators in their own right. We have a whole bunch of musicians and artists who think in that same weird mathy way that great software developers think. So, there’s a lot of similarity. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of similarity.

I also think that there’s this mindset out there that musicians are scared of technology, scared of innovation. I actually think that musicians love hacking. They love trying new things. Again, there was all this threat around synthesizers and all of that stuff, and then Stevie Wonder took it to a totally different, magical new place. I think artists love innovation, and it allows them better tools to get to the other place. What they don’t love is push-button creation. I think if you stay away from that, if you stay close to the creative process, you will find the right ways to bring technology innovation here. I think there’s something else that you’re pushing on here that I think is important, and maybe it’s one of your Decoder questions, around how do you bring the cultural mindset from the tech industry and meld it with the music industry? And is that a difference? Is that a challenge?

Yes, that’s definitely where I’m going. I might as well ask you the Decoder questions. You’ve been the CEO for three years. How is Splice structured today? How have you changed it?

This is the tech part. We are fundamentally a product company first. So my largest organization at Splice is the product development organization, and that’s product managers, engineers, designers, and [customer support]. And what’s neat about that is, I do keep CX very close to product. Because I think that tight loop is super important.

Wait, I just want to make sure. CX is customer experience?

So support, design, engineers, [product managers], they’re all in one org and that’s product development, and it’s our largest org. Our second largest org is our content team. And those are the people that they’re going to Brazil, they’re going to South Korea, they’re going to India, they’re recording these sounds. It’s our quality control department. It’s our data and ingesting, and metadata tagging groups. So that’s the content org.

Maybe the third thing that I’ll point out that’s really important to me and how I structure the org. Is we have a very strong central data organization that reports directly to me. So a lot of people put that inside product dev, but for me, data’s important for content, data’s important for marketing. Data’s obviously important for finance and how we run the business. It’s really important for product. So I have that as a central organization, and again, it reports directly to me.

How big is Splice now? How many people is it?

We’re about 200 people, a little bit less than 200 people.

And how is it split between those three groups?

So product dev is our largest org, maybe 80, 60, somewhere between there. And then content is the next biggest, and it’s somewhere between 40 and 60.

One of the really interesting things here, again, it’s a creator platform for creators, which is just an interesting dynamic. Other creator platforms at scale, they say they have investments in content teams, but they really just hope the scale carries them forward, right? Instagram does not have some huge content team that is traveling the world to get content. They just wait for people to come to them.

It’s the same with YouTube or TikTok or whoever else. They might manage some of their top influencers, but really the volume of content comes to them. Is that a tipping point that you think Splice can reach, or do you want to maintain control over the library?

It’s really important for us to make sure our library is the highest quality that it can be. So, it’s not going to be a free-for-all where anyone is uploading anything they want, because we need to maintain that high quality, especially in the age of AI, right? There’s all kinds of stuff that’s being uploaded to all of these big platforms, so it’s never going to be that way for us.

And so, that’s just a core investment, right? It’s a core piece of, I think, your cost model. How was Splice organized before? Again, you’re three years into it, how have you changed that structure? Is it still largely the same, or have you reoriented the company?

So I think the biggest change has been around, I would say, three big ideas Nilay, which are core to how I run a business. The first is data. I’ve brought in a lot more data people. It’s very, very critical. The reason that’s important for me is because I need to understand what our customers actually care about. So, how are they voting with their clicks as opposed to whatever opinions everybody else has. So, that’s a big investment.

The second is design, and that is really where data and the math and the science turns into something else, which is a real experience that people can feel. It’s where the art becomes magic. The reason that’s important is because we’re serving creative people, and that’s what creative people do as well — they take all of these inputs and they turn it into something new.

So building a strong design team that is either made up of music creators themselves or people who spend a lot of time with music creators is really important. And the third thing that I really brought in that’s important is that we build our products with the customers. So everything that we launch, there are tools that we built in to allow people to give us feedback. In fact, when we launched Create, the biggest button in the Create experience was the feedback button. It was weird, but it was important for us.

Every single time someone typed in something to give us feedback, it comes into a Slack channel that’s with all the designers and the engineers and the product managers. So we’re actively talking about the feedback from the customers as it’s coming in, and responding to it for the next version. I love that. I absolutely love that we build product that way. I think everyone should build product that way.

One of the reasons I always ask about structure on the show is that it’s a proxy for culture. You kind of get what you get. You make some big choices about how things are organized, and that leads to a culture. You’re in an interesting spot because you took over for co-founders. One co-founder left, he was a CTO in 2019. The other co-founder, Steve Martocci, he’s the executive chairman now, but he’s off doing another startup. How have you thought about changing the culture, inheriting the culture, and the balance between the two?

The reason I love your question around structure is because I do see that it’s a proxy for values, and that’s why I answered it the way I did around data, design, and building with customers. Those are fundamental values that I want to bring and inculcate into the company. There’s something else that we also did that was around building culture. I spent a lot of time listening to the team, trying to learn what made this culture unique, and then I reflected back to the organization, “Hey, these are the values that I’m hearing from you all. Do you think this captures it?”

And we came up with something that we call our DISCO values: direct, inclusive, Spliced together, creator-centric, and optimistic. And even though these are new values that we came up with after I joined, they have felt so authentic to the culture that we have that’s existed for a long time, but it’s given voice to it. So DISCO is something we talk about a lot. Every single new employee that comes on talks about which DISCO value they resonate with most. We use it in performance reviews. We do use it for shout-outs. It’s a core part of who we are.

The second Decoder question, which is also in many ways a proxy for culture and values, is about decisions. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

This is something that I’m working on. I’ve always been a very math and science kind of person. I’ve always been someone who’s very analytical. I use a lot of data. I have a framework for decision-making. I study all the different tools for decision-making, but as the decision sets that come to me become more complex, and as we operate in an increasingly more complex world, fires, politics, etc., I have found myself relying more and more on intuition, and I think balancing those two.

So, I would say that my decision-making process is, I will drown myself in data. I will really get deep. People know in my team that I spend a lot of time on our dashboards. I will spend a lot of time watching research videos and understanding how people are using our tools. I will spend a lot of time personally talking to different customers. I’m talking to customers all the time, and once I’ve kind of drowned myself in all this information, I’ll just try to listen deeply, and usually the answer is very clear.

All right. We’re going to put this into practice because the “making creative software for creative people in the age of AI” is about as tense as it gets in the balance between what the numbers are telling us and how the people feel. And what I mean specifically is the numbers are telling everyone that people are using the AI tools. Just down the line, every software maker I’ve talked to has introduced AI tools with any meaningful value, says the users are using them, they’re clicking the buttons, they’re doing generative fill all day long. I’m sure you see that in your numbers, too.

Then what you hear from the creatives on social media or online, or in letters to Congress is, “Get this out of my face. They stole everything from me.” And that is about as big of a divide in tech, in culture, in creativity as I have ever experienced. I think that is challenging a lot of how everyone is going to make decisions. So I’m going to read you a quote from one of your ostensible competitors, and it tracks with everything you’re saying, but I suspect you are going to disagree with this quote, and I just want to sit with that for a minute.

So you have said, “Right, creators just want to create, they want all this stuff to get out of their way.” So here’s the CEO of Suno, Mikey Shulman. Suno is just “push a button, it makes you a song,” right? You say country song, it just spits out a country song at you. And here’s what he recently said: “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice. You have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music. It is not really enjoyable to make music now.”

Now I’ve made a lot of music. I have no idea what Mikey Shulman is talking about. I think it’s quite fun to make music, but that does track with what you’re saying, that you just want to get the software out of the way. You want to get the creators creating. But he spun the knob all the way to “just prompt me for a song.” And a lot of people reacted to this quote very strongly.

Yeah, I heard a lot of feedback.

How do you sit in the middle of that to say, “There’s a line and I’m going to enforce the line, and we’re not just going to prompt it all the way to a song?”Also, do you think he’s right? Do you think people don’t enjoy making music?

Here’s what I have learned by serving creative people for most of my career: the creative process is essential for people who create. It’s not essential for everybody. For the people who create, it is a sacred experience. It is a core part of who they are. They can’t not do it. And there is a struggle, but the struggle is to authentically translate what is inside you into something else. And sometimes, your tools will help you —will enable you to do that — and other times your tools will get in the way. Understanding the distinction between those two is the whole ball game, but it’s really about allowing the struggle to come to life.

Giving birth to something new is hard, but it’s profoundly important, and to dismiss it by this push-button set of tools, it’s insulting, it’s dismissive, it’s reductive. And, I think the creative process and creative people deserve better. They deserve better technology that enables them, as opposed to reducing this profound activity to a button.

So this is where I think the line is inherently qualitative, right? “Well, here’s what we’re going to do and here’s what we’re not going to do.” And the tension of, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” you can describe that as using the software sucks, or I just want to have an idea and hear it as fast as I can. And then you can describe it the way you’re saying, which is there’s some parts of the struggle that are the creative process, which make the art compelling.

It’s profoundly important.

If the data tells you that people really want to just click the button and make the music, are your values strong enough to not send you all the way down the road?

I think it depends on which people you’re listening to. We are really clear about the people that we’re listening to. We are listening to creative people who love the process of music creation, that it’s essential for them. Yes, are there challenges? But the challenge is the creative process, right? That is the challenge. And for those people, the signals are really clear. They do not want push button creativity. In fact, like I was sharing before, when we gave them Create for the first time, they’re like, “This is too simple. I don’t want this. I want something that gives me more creative freedom, more creative control.” And so for us, the signal, the people we’re listening to are super clear and the signals they’re giving us, there’s no confusion in what they want. They want more creative process. They want more creative control.

The other side of this marketplace is consumers. We see consumers and fans all the time now react very strongly to AI generated imagery. In particular, you make a movie poster and it’s got a bunch of AI in it. The fans are going to–

It’s not just Photoshop.

That movie poster is coming down. It’s maybe different in AI. It’s not in your face. You can’t see that the characters in the movie poster have 12 fingers and their hair bleeds into the skyscraper behind them. It’s not as obvious, but it’s there. Do you perceive that kind of consumer or fan backlash to AI in music the same way that we see it in visual art?

We haven’t seen it yet. Here’s what I have seen. I have seen really clear signals from our customers that they are not really interested in computer-generated samples, and it’s clearly not our strategy. We are in fact investing in more human-created samples, human-curated samples. This is why we’re sending people out to the sort of subgenre locations, talking to authentic artists, getting their voices. It’s really important for our strategy to continue to do that, because people want to connect with the stories of the real artists on the other side of the sample. So that’s really, really important, and really clear for us.

I think what an end user who’s listening to Sabrina Carpenter today and will listen to somebody else’s music tomorrow, what they can hear is going to be interesting, is going to evolve over time. I love that Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music, and the people who won the Pulitzer Prize for music, when that award was first introduced, it was a completely different sound. So what art is and what is acceptable changes over time. I would expect it to continue to change over time, so I don’t want to reflect on that. I know that artists will use different tools, and they will use AI-based tools. Absolutely.

At least on the visual imagery side, there’s a lot of endless, sort of futile, discussion about watermarks and encryption, and letting people know when images were edited by AI or created by AI. I would not say that’s come to anything, and I would say there are some deep and meaningful challenges with even making that technology work consistently. There’s not anything quite like that on the music side.

Do you think there should be?

I think it’s going to be really hard to disambiguate around sound, and around images, around video. You’ve had some really great conversations about this topic on your podcast. I’ve listened to them. I think it’s a really important debate and discussion to have. There is going to be a bunch of bad AI-generated content out there. It’s already happening. It’s going to happen with music. I think that the toothpaste is out of the tube.

I think as an industry, we have to do the right thing around respecting the rights of creators, and doing the right thing with respect to training data, respecting credits. This is work that has to happen. I don’t think it’s solved yet. Maybe some of these cases that are open will help us get to the right answer, but I don’t think it’s going to come out of watermarking.

You talked about the flood of AI content that’s coming. We can all see it. The big consumer platforms are embracing it. I think to some extent, Mark Zuckerberg would love it if all the content on Facebook was AI and he was paying zero out to creators. I think to some extent, YouTube is really leaning into the idea that you should interact with your favorite creators through AI avatars, and that they should make even more videos or AI should help them make even more videos to increase the volume of content that appears.

That’s all very complicated. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but I understand the incentives for those platforms to make those choices to say, “Actually, what we want always is more content because that will create more attention and we can serve more ads, and we’re in this finite zero-sum intention game.” You’re not in that game specifically. You don’t have those incentives, and you do allow artists to make music with AI using your tools. Do you allow AI-generated samples to enter your library?

Draw that distinction. Why is it okay to make music with AI but not to have it in the sample library?

I think it’s what users are coming to Splice for today. They are coming to find those authentic sounds made by humans. That’s not to say that people aren’t using AI to master sounds or things like that. You’re using AI to master your audio and video probably here. I think those are tools, and that’s fine as long as there’s an authentic artist’s artistic vision and voice behind it. So, that’s super important for us to continue to be focused there. With respect to these social platforms that you’re talking about, I think that’s a really important insight. And inasmuch as these social platforms are important for our creators as a way to share their output, to share their musical idea, they’re really important for us.

But these social platforms have grown because they allow people to have emotional connection with each other. “I’m really angry about this particular issue,” or “I’m reaching out for support for these fires in LA,” or these connections that we make, and finding support around this very specific cancer that I have that I can’t find other people to connect with online. If we erode that, if we erode those actual emotional connections between people in order to save a buck in paying out creators, I think the value of these platforms will diminish over time, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time on TikTok. Maybe we should spend more time creating music on our own.

So I think these are really interesting evolutions that are going to happen in the industry. And as a mom, I care a lot about where some of this stuff goes. For Splice and as the CEO of Splice, my focus is going to stay the same, which is I’m focused on creators, I’m focused on what they need, and so many things our users create just to hang out on their desktop because it was just for the joy of creating. And some of it goes on and becomes a Billboard top 100 hit. Great. I’m happy that that happens, but I’m just as happy that someone is spending time creating, and it just hangs out on their desktop.

Let me ask that again in just a different frame. I want to push on it. It feels important to me.

We’ve talked a lot about active creation and what the tools are for and the fact that your customers, artists, do not want ready-made, push-button songs. They want controls. They want to add something to what the computer-generated product is giving them, right? They want to add something to the AI, they want to add something to the samples, and that process of addition creates additional value. Some very important songs have been made that way using Splice and other tools.

But you’re saying that is not a good enough argument to get AI-generated audio into the sample library, and I’m just wondering why the difference, because you could make the same argument. I use Splice to generate some samples. I tweak them, I filter them. I made a bunch of different things. If it’s good enough for me to send to a major label and play on the radio, shouldn’t it be good enough to get into the Splice sample library?

So I think that the distinction in my mind, and I think for many of our creators is that, is it AI-generated, or was AI used as a tool to bring a human creator’s idea to life? Do people use technology to create the samples that end up on Splice? Absolutely. People are using Pro Tools. People are using synthesizers. People are using lots of tools and technology, and like I said, some of those tools might be AI-based, like mastering tools or mixing tools, things like that.

That is really different from, “I’ve created an algorithm to pump out a whole bunch of samples that are computer-generated for the mass market.” Those are not going to end up on Splice, I will guarantee, but if there’s an authentic user, the Stevie Wonder of the AI age, who is creating art that they care deeply about, and they’re using AI tools as part of that process, absolutely. That distinction is very important.

I agree it’s important. I just don’t know how to write it down in a way that can be consistently enforced across all the geographies that you’re operating in, with all of your teams going out in the world, or in a way that’s understandable to artists who might want to be part of Splice. Is there a definition you have of where the line is? For how much AI is too much?

For me, again, I will take it down to something very simple. There’s a human being who we have a relationship with on both sides of our platform, and so on the side of the platform where we are working with a musician, an artist, an instrumentalist who wants to provide a sample to Splice. We actually have a relationship with them, and we talk to them about what they’re trying to do, what the idea behind their label is, what is their artistic vision, and we will work with them. What is your tool set? How are you doing it? How many sample packs do we need every quarter? All of those kinds of things. And some of those people are, there’s a Japanese potter who is making handmade percussion instruments that he then records, that end up on Splice. That’s a really cool part of the process.

And then, we’ve got crazy kids making all kinds of super electronic, super grungy, super sharp technical sounds, and they’ve got a different tool set that they’re using as part of their process. We’re not going to tell them, “Oh, you can’t use this tool because it’s AI-generated or not,” but do you have that authentic vision for what you’re creating? And it’s not that difficult to tell the difference between a person who is creating that way, and a person who is like, “I typed in a bunch of prompts and I got a whole plethora of computer-generated sounds.”

The other extremely challenging piece of the puzzle with AI-generated content is when you veer into impersonation. We’ve seen this in the hip-hop industry a lot recently. We’ve seen it with OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson’s voice. There’s a lawsuit. The voice got pulled. Who knows how that’s going to play out? We see there’s the Elvis Act, in Tennessee where impersonation is illegal, and I don’t think there’s a great answer for whether Elvis impersonators themselves are now illegal. Are you playing in that space where you’re letting people use artist voices or sound-alikes?

We’re not. I think there are lots of people who are playing in that space or interested in that space. We are focused on creative people, and creative people are actually really clear with us. They are coming to Splice because they want to find their authentic sound, and so we work really hard at the very other end of that, which is how do we allow our users to authentically find their own vibe?

Voices is one thing, right? They’re pretty recognizable. The fake Drake song set the industry ablaze. It was just very obviously a fake Drake song, or Drake’s voice. There’s not a great legal system for saying, “That’s Drake’s voice. You can’t use it.” We’ll get there. It seems like we’re on our way to understanding how to get there.

Then there’s kind of the existing mess of music copyright. We talk about the “Blurred Lines” case on this show a lot. I think more than any other podcast we’ve talked about “Blurred Lines,” a song which came and went and whose moment is over, but it continues to come up on Decoder maybe once a month, right? That lawsuit is “you guys stole a vibe from Marvin Gaye, not notes, not chords, not anything direct,” but the jury was like, “These vibes are too close. Robin Thicke and Pharrell have to pay the money.”

That’s something you could very easily see a user of Splice wandering into, right? We’re going to prompt for a beat. We’re going to do a stack. We’re going to layer some samples and we’re going to get to a vibe that’s too close to another artist. Is that something you worry about? Is that something you try to protect users from? It feels like in the age of AI, it’s ever more of a danger.

It is, and it’s also been a core part of how music evolves over time. There’s this whole conversation around reheated nachos and what that means, and I think artists and musicians build upon each other’s work. They’re influenced by each other, and this conversation’s been around since the beginning of sampling, which is “what am I referring to when I use this sample, and what’s the story that I’m trying to tell?”

You could argue that it’s derivative, or you could argue that it’s an homage, or you could argue that it’s building on a shared piece of work that’s a community piece of work that continues to evolve over time. I think that that’s what makes art and music in particular super fascinating. I love that you guys have this whole debate around that particular song. I think it’s fascinating. I think it’s going to continue to grow, and what’s right and wrong should be defined by the artists.

But the idea that you would accidentally boost too much of an existing song by using an AI tool, which is trained on bits and pieces of existing songs. That’s a new danger, right? I mean, the cycle you’re talking about with music, I agree has existed since music. We’re all building on one another. We’re all lifting bits and pieces. Great artists steal. Everybody kind of understands it, and along the way, there has been a lot of litigation. That’s the other part of the cycle.

The push and pull is people being very unhappy about the money, and now we’re at a place where it’s easier than ever to be derivative, and the money is absolutely not clear — that artists are very upset about their work being trained on, maybe not in your tools, but certainly in other tools. The labels are suing Suno and Udio, its competitor, for training on their data. Do you see that resolving? Because it seems like the problem is going to get worse faster than the legal system will even comprehend the technology.

Most of these problems get worse before the legal system catches up. I mean, we know this. We know this for privacy, we know this for many areas. Technology outpaces how quickly legislative action catches up. I think in the music industry, we’re doing a lot of work to try to create standards within, so we’re a part of a coalition of, again, great companies in the music space that are saying, “We’ve got to support ethical AI. We have to support the rights of creators. We have to make sure our training data is clean.”

So, I think there are a lot of companies that are trying to do the right thing. Is there one standard that has won out amongst all the others? No, but I know that a lot of people are working really hard on this problem, and we are too. We care deeply about the rights of creators, so that’s going to stay really important for us.

How do you feel about the labels suing Suno and Udio? Is that something that’s a warning sign for you? Is that something you support? Do you think that that is going to get resolved?

I think what the labels are trying to do is support the rights of the creators, and we are a creator-centric company, so we absolutely support the rights of the creators. Do I take one side or the other? No. Ultimately, it’s always going to be about the creators first, and I know my customers deeply care about the fact that they have rights to the content they create using Splice.

That’s why we allow people to download the rights PDF. It matters to people, even if they’re not putting their song up on Spotify or trying to make a billion dollars from it, they want to know that they have the ability to do that. So that’s what governs our decisions around clean training data, ethical AI, etc.

If I wanted to sign up for a Splice account, download a bunch of tracks, and then train my own AI on them, is that allowed in your license?

And you spell that out. You say you can’t train AI on these tracks?

I bring this up and you probably don’t know, I’m going to pre-apologize to you for this question because I know you haven’t seen this document, but just go with it. Basically what I’m saying, I’m asking a question just today, I’m sure you haven’t seen it, but Google filed a letter with the government basically saying, “Look, you need to make an exception of fair use to allow us to train on everything.” OpenAI filed a similar letter in the past few days.

There’s a big push from the AI companies to say, “Look, we just need this stuff. Give it to us. We don’t want to pay for this. It has to be fair use. This is going to slow us down too much.” At the same time, you’re saying, “Here in our license we’re saying you can’t do that.” Do you think that can get resolved? That seems like a big problem where if you steal enough of it, you get to write a letter to the government saying, “Write us an exception.” And if you steal a little of it, you might end up in court. And I don’t know how to resolve that.

Yeah, I don’t either. It’s such an important issue. And the scale of the Internet, the scale of content on the internet is so vast that — What is fair use? What is not fair use? What is public consumption? What is public record? What is public ownership? We are in uncharted territory, and we’re going to be watching it just like you are.

How would you write a fairer system if you were clean sheeting this? How would you write a fairer system that makes creators feel valued, gets them paid, and still allows people to build these AI systems that a lot of people are getting some value out of?

I would love to say that I’m the expert who could write something like that. I have a much more straightforward problem to look after, which is, how do I help creative people be creative and get the ideas from their hearts and minds out there? Yeah, I’m going to leave that problem to people way smarter than me, who are legal minds who are working really hard on this.

Well, if I get anyone on the show who has an answer, I’ll let you know.

You’re a lawyer, right?

I just talk for a living. I haven’t done anything useful in a long time. Kakul, you’ve given us so much time. What’s next for Splice? What should people be looking out for?

So, what’s next for Splice is that we’re going to keep going deeper into the creative process. I’ve been really public about this with my blog posts and all of that. Users keep telling us, “I love Splice. I want it deeper in my creative process.” So whether it’s these partnerships that we’re doing with DAWs, thinking through how we build more creative flexibility for users on our own platform, whether it’s with Create or Splice Mic, there’s a lot for us still to do, and we’ll keep going down that path.

All right. We’ll have to have you back soon as some of these issues play out. Thank you so much for coming by.

I would love to. I had such an enjoyable conversation. Thank you so much, Nilay.

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