Splice has launched its first-ever digital audio workstation (DAW), featuring agentic and assistive AI features to help new producers learn the program and finish songs. Most notably, the DAW features a chatbot, offering production tips and following instructions from a producer’s voice or text prompts. It also offers a way to mix and match samples from the Splice library with greater ease.
The company, known best for its library of more than three million human-made, licensed samples and loops, enters the DAW market at a time of disruption. While incumbent DAWs, like Ableton, Logic, ProTools and FL Studio, remain the market’s top players, new browser-based applications, like BandLab, have grown a fanbase in recent years, offering a simpler and cheaper option for the novice producer. Plus, as generative AI has taken hold, AI platforms like Suno and Moises have also leaned in to DAW features to provide users with more optionality after a track is generated.
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Meanwhile, remixing and DJ-like features — which also encourage fans to customize their favorite songs — have never been of greater interest. Spotify, Udio, Klay and more are working on AI-powered music remix features. Both Spotify and Apple Music include DJ features in-app, and start-ups like Hook are working on licensed remix concepts for the TikTok generation.
Despite all the buzz of generative AI, Splice has held steadfast on its commitment to providing only human-created samples, loops and instruments, instead, opting to use AI to better tailor and customize those samples by using it to better shift timbre, key, tempo and more. In 2023, Splice’s CEO, Kakul Srivastava, said in an interview with Billboard: “One of the things that we find disturbing about a lot of the work that is happening in generative AI is that it is ‘push button’ creativity,” she said. “For us, that’s eliminating the creative as opposed to putting tools into the creatives’ hands.”
In that interview, she discussed Splice’s Create in its first form: an AI-powered tool to mix and match Splice samples to, hopefully, help producers begin the song creation process and help them find the perfect sample faster. Now, Create has morphed into a full-fledged DAW, thanks to its acquisition of Kits AI at the start of the year. The DAW still has that original mix-and-match product at its core to help users find a starting place, and it further employs AI to help producers navigate the tools and get toward their final master.
In an interview with Billboard, Srivastava discusses the latest version of Create and why the company’s mission is to “not create a song for you, but to show you how to do it and collaborate with you.”
I feel like a DAW is a natural extension for Splice. Why didn’t Splice work on a DAW earlier?
Srivastava: We really wanted to go down the partnership route [with pre-existing DAWs], and part of it was recognizing that people have very sticky workflows, and so I was like, “Gosh, I don’t know if we’ll build a better version of these great products that already exist.” So we partnered with them, and we built these plugins for integration. What changed was this last year. It just felt like AI capabilities went so far that — for me as someone who’s worked in creative tools all of my career — I realized that this is really changing creative workflows in a big way, and I just didn’t see any of the other players leaning into it as aggressively as we thought we should, as we thought the industry should. We even talked to some of [the incumbent DAWs], and we said, “Hey, how about this? Is there a way we can partner with you to build these kinds of agentic capabilities?” There wasn’t a lot of interest, and so we almost felt like we had no choice except to build this because, I mean, I genuinely feel like this product needed to be built.
Splice acquired Kits AI in January, and you’ve noted that the Kits team was instrumental in building this product, but my understanding was that Kits was a voice platform. What did their team bring to the table for Create?
The Kits acquisition was as much of a technology acquisition as it was a team acquisition, and the people who have come over from the Kits side are just extraordinary.
It seems like everyone is interested in DAWs right now. How do y’all plan on carving out a space that is uniquely Splice’s in this crowded market?
I think relative to the [AI music] model companies, we have an edge because their superpower is around the model. They’re building a very thin application layer [with their DAWs], but it’s really about the model. For us, generative is actually not a very small part of this experience… I also think fundamentally that generative is tough for users who care about creative control, because you do a prompt, you get a song out, then you want to edit that song, and it’s very hard to get into the individual components to get fine-level control. Then you end up basically re-prompting, and that’s just a cumbersome, frustrating way to create.
We’ve also heard that from a lot of DAW incumbent [users] that because they’ve really cared about the mastery of this craft of building these tools, and they’ve done it for 30-plus years, there’s a little bit of a “how far do we lean into these new agentic capabilities or AI capabilities?” I think that it hasn’t been as much at the top of mind.
Could you see the longstanding DAWs catching up someday?
I do think that [the incumbent DAWs] will catch up. The one thing that will make it hard for them is they have so many users who love their products just the way they are. Building new ways of working, new integrated experiences, is actually really hard.
What is the goal with Create? Is the goal to just have people spend more time on Splice, or is the goal to open it up to new users who’ve never used Splice before?
The dream scenario for Splice — and it’s always the dream scenario — is to have more people make the music that they want to make. Create is an app that is a very natural extension of our core mission. If Create helps people do that, that’s fantastic.
We do hope that people like using it. We don’t expect it to necessarily replace people’s existing workflows, but hopefully we want it to accelerate them. If we do that well and continue [to] help the larger musical ecosystem grow, I think that’s a good thing for all of us. For us, [Create] is not a zero-sum game. We don’t think any tool should be, you know, replaced by Create. It’s about what we’re all building together.
