Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians
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Arm believes the future isn't about technology. It's about people and the possibilities technology can offer us all. The future is built on Arm. You can discover more at arm.com slash discover. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil A. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Kakul Srivastav, CEO of music creation platform Splice. I don't think I actually need to introduce Splice. I just need to play this clip. ♪

If you exist on planet Earth, you know that guitar loop. It's the main loop from Sabrina Carpenter's hit "Espresso," which is an inescapable pop music phenomenon. That loop is part of a sample pack you can get on Splice. In fact, most of Espresso is built from samples you can get on Splice, which is one of the biggest marketplaces for loops and samples around. Anyone can just go sign up, pay the money, download royalty-free loops, and try to make pop hits all day long.

Making songs like this is just part of music making now, and it has been ever since Rihanna's monster hit "Umbrella" was built around a GarageBand loop called "Vintage Funk '03" in 2007. Seriously, this just comes with GarageBand. Now if you're a decoder listener, you know that some of my favorite conversations are with the people who build technology products for creatives, and that I am obsessed with how technology changes the music industry in particular, because it feels like whatever happens to music happens to everything else five years later.

So talking to Kakul really hit all those notes for me, because Splice is wrapped up in all of it. And some of its new products, including some new AI tools, might change how music is made all over again. Kakul's been the CEO of Splice for three years now. Before that, she was with 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 AI.

But if you've listened to any of our Adobe episodes or episodes about other kinds of AI-powered creative tools, you know that the flip side is that people actually use the tools at high rates because they're fun to play with and they do make some parts of the creative process easier. So I really wanted to dig into that with Kakul, not only because she's drawn some hard lines about what Splice will and won't do with AI, but also to see how the broader music industry can try and make sense of all this technology and what it might do to music in the future.

I also wanted to talk about how Splice is navigating the incredibly complex minefield of copyright law and attribution on the internet, something that's only getting more complicated with AI and the ever-increasing number of copyright lawsuits filed against the big AI companies by creatives of all kinds. There's a lot in this one, and Kaku is willing to fall pretty deep down some of these rabbit holes with me. I think you'll like it. Let me know what you think. Okay, Splice CEO Kaku Elshavasto, here we go. ♪

Cocko Shrestha, you're the CEO of Splice. Welcome to Decoder.

How's it going? I have wanted to do 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, yeah. A lot's changed. A lot's 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, musicians, music creators. That's our focus. Who are our creators? 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 music.

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 the sound but make it your own. We have compositional AI tools.

We just launched something brand new at South by Southwest called Spice 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 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 turn, 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, right?

Adobe, I think, is the paradigmatic example of this right now. You can just push gender to fill in Photoshop and it just does a bunch of stuff for you. You can prompt Photoshop now in various ways and 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

was people like, oh, this feels like cheating. This feels too easy. I need more controls. And so right from day one, we've been adding more sophistication, more technology and more customization, more personalization for users out of the gate. 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 kind of 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 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, Umbrella by Rihanna was a garage band loop, which I think is

That's just a moment in music that should belong in the history books, you know? Totally. How have you dealt with that? 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 sort of the AI generation era?

So I'm going to take exception with what you just said. Sure. I don't think music making today is putting just a bunch of samples together. I think that... By the way, I will concede that that is a very reductive criticism, but it is a criticism. 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

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 like the primary creative canvas, and

I think that's really important. Sorry, I got really heated about this. This is important to me. No, 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

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." 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 the sample and make it into something else? How do I get my musical idea? You saw this with the Splice Mike 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 sort of incoming about what your product should look like, right? You're getting feedback from artists, from musicians, from other creators. Yeah.

There's another side of the puzzle, particularly music, which is copyright holders, 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.

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, sample pack creator come into the splice platform? We have an entire organization that does the intake, does the QC, does

checks the provenance. If you're telling us you're the creator, do we know that you're really the creator, et cetera? 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. Like is the sound clear? Is the recording nice? All of that.

To the other end of it, which is 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 has the potential of you can 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. 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. Yeah. It occurs to me just as you describe that, that you are a creator platform for creators, right?

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 them in other songs. That's a unique situation. It really is. Can I just go back to your sample thing? Because you really poked me on that, and I want 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. And we work with, you know, so just 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. Yeah, it's a neat part of Splice. Are there creators who make their entire living just making sample packs for you? There are some, yeah.

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. Yeah.

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. 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, you know, 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? Yeah, that is growth. And growth is, you know, it's been an interesting journey over the last three years while I've been here, but growth is really good. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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We're back with Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava, getting into the big decoder questions to understand how Kakul's background at Adobe and other big software companies has influenced how Splice is approaching the music industry. I think that brings us kind of 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. I did. Right out of business school and when it was a perpetual business.

And more recently, well on its subscription journey. You know, Adobe is the creative software company. They have a very, I would say, back and forth relationship with creatives. You know, we had Shantanu and Ryan 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. It's still there. 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. And so at Splice, we have about a million songs that are samples that are sounds that are downloaded a day.

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 are people listening to? How are they creating things together?

What sounds go well together? And 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're going to make the tools that actually help you create the music. Yeah. You can look at it in a slightly more abstract way, right? In an early version of Spice, you downloaded some sample packs, you would open Logic or Pro Tools, you go off to the races. Spice doesn't see what you're doing in those apps. Yeah. But those are the dominant music creation apps to this day. They're still the dominant music creation apps.

You're suggesting with something like Spice Mike or Spice Create on the phone that you have on mobile that you're going to take some of that creation, right? 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 South by Southwest are interesting because they use AI to make that a little bit faster, more seamless, more sketchy, right? You can sketch an idea very quickly on a phone now. Is that the extension? We're going to go take some of Pro Tools market share. We're going to go take some of Logix 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 SpliceMic or use our mobile app as an adjunct part of their process that they will ultimately finish inside a digital audio workstation. 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, you know, I'll get into my Uber. I'll start playing with the Splice app. I'll generate a bunch of stacks. 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 is

I was just at my kids' 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...

We're going to take it 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 a 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 just 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 will go and 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 subfolder and they'll finally find the sub, sub, sub folder that has 20 kick drum sounds that they have like saved. And 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 digital audio workstations. 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 as integrated as part of your creative workflow experience.

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% all day long. How do those conversations work with all those digital audio workstation providers, right? 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, right? 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, right? Which is, they're just going to do whatever they want to do. That's just how they work.

Splice has done great with all of it. Some of them are expanding into your zone, right? They are adding sample packs and 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 DAW 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, etc.,

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 that 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 in to 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 kind of adopt. And so I think there's a lot of curiosity about that. Like, can 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 in people who have a core tech background, 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 a view into what tech will do to everything else five years out. Right.

How are you thinking about that dynamic right now? Inside of Splice, you 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. Inside Splice, we have some really great software developers who love music and are music creators in their own right. We're 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 there.

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. You know, again, there was all this threat around synthesizers and all of that stuff. And then Stevie Wonder took it to like 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. And 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

the cultural mindset for the tech industry and melded with the music industry. 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 now. 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 CX. And what's neat about that is I do keep CX very close to product. That's customer experience. Because I think that tight loop is super important. Wait, I just want to make sure. CX is customer experience? Customer support. Customer support, okay. So support, design, engineers, PMs, they're all in one org, and that's product dev, and it's our largest org group.

Our second largest org is our content team. And those are the people that are 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.

And 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 is important for content. Data is important for marketing. Data is obviously important for finance and how we run the business. It's 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?

Product dev is about, I don't know, it's 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 are...

They say they have investments in content teams, but they really just hope the scale carries them forward. 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 Spice can reach, or do you want to maintain control over the library? Yeah.

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 an age of AI, right? There's all kinds of stuff that's being uploaded to all of these big platforms. So it's not good. 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 it's around three big ideas in LA, 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. 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. And the reason that's important is because we're serving creative people. And that's what creative people do as well, is they take all these inputs and they turn it to something that didn't create. 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

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 build 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.

And 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. And 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, right?

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. You took over for co-founders. One co-founder left. He was a CTO in 2019. The other co-founder, Steve Martocchi, 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 proxy for values.

And that's why I answered it the way I did around data design 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 and

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. Second to go to our 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 decisions that

decision sets that come to me become more complex. And as we operate in an increasingly more complex world, fires, politics, et cetera, 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 on 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. We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination. Putting it off. Kicking the can down the road. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? In.

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We're back with Spice CEO, Kakul Srivastav. Before the break, you heard Kakul describe how she makes decisions and how Spice is structured and the kinds of values she says are really important when you're building a product for creatives. So now I really want to put those answers into practice, talk about AI and just how much of the songwriting process we should be automating with software.

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 here's what the numbers are telling us and here's 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 of any meaningful value.

It 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. And 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. And I think that is challenging a lot of how everyone is going to make decisions. 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. Yeah, let's do it. 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 Schulman. 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 Schulman is talking about. I think it's quite fun to make music. But that does track with what you're saying, right? That you just want to get the software out of the way. You want to get the creators creating music.

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. 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. And understanding the distinction between those two is the whole ballgame. 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 is 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 reduces this profound activity to a button. So this is where I think the line is inherently qualitative, right? 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, which 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're really clear about the people that we're listening to. We are listening to creative people who

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.

Fans are going to yell at you. 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, but...

Here's what I have seen. Here's what I have seen. I have seen really clear signal 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, you know, sort of

sub-genre 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 is listening to Serena Carpenter today and will listen to somebody else's music tomorrow will

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, you know, when that award was first introduced, it was a completely different sound. What art is and what is acceptable changes over time. I would expect it to continue to change over time, but...

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 know, you've done, 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. It's, you know, I think that is toothpaste is out of the toothpaste 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 order marking. 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, we 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 attention game. You're not in that game specifically. You don't have those incentives.

You do allow artists to make music with AI using your tools. Do you allow AI-generated samples to enter your library? We do not. We do not. 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, 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 that

And in as much 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. You know, I'm really angry about this particular issue or I'm reaching out for support for these fires in LA or, you know, these connections that we make and finding support around this very specific, you know, 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 hangs out on their desktop because it was just for the joy of creating. And some of it goes on and becomes a top 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 because I want to push on it. It feels important to me. Yeah.

We've talked a lot about the act of 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. 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. Like, 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, Nila, 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 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...

You know, that they care deeply about and they're using AI tools as part of that process? Absolutely. And 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 of 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, artist, 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. 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

It's not that difficult to tell the difference between a person who is creating that way and a person who's like, I typed in a bunch of prompts and I've 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 open AI 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, I think 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 artists voices or sound alikes? We're not. I think, I think there are lots of people who are playing in that space or interested in that space and,

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 self.

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. That lawsuit was like, you guys stole a vibe from Marvin Gaye. Not notes, not chords, anything direct, but the jury was like, the 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. 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 a James Brown. 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 whole conversation around reheated nachos and what that means. I think artists and musicians build upon each other's work. They're influenced by each other. This conversation has 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. Everybody kind of understands it. And along the way, there has been a lot of litigation, right? 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, right? The 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 music.

So we're 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. That's what governs our decisions around clean training data, ethical AI, et cetera. 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? It's not allowed. 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 this question because I know you haven't seen this document, but just go with it. It's basically what I'm saying. I'm asking that 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 has 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. Yeah.

Like, 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, right? 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 fair system? If you were clean sheeting this, how would you write a fair 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 don't, I haven't.

I haven't done anything useful in a long time. Gakul, 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 wanted 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 Mike, 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 on Decoder. I would love to. I had such an enjoyable conversation. Thank you so much, Neelay. Thank you.

I'd like to thank Kako for taking the time to join Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also see me directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. Check those out at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with that five-star review.

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. Now in its sixth year, the Alex Partners Disruption Index explores what the best performing and fastest growing companies are doing differently as they anticipate, shape, and respond to disruption.

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