YouSaid · the spoken record

Kakul Srivastava

lines on the record: 87
first: 2025-03-24
most recent: 2025-03-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 post 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what the labels were trying to do is support the rights of the creators. And we are creator-centric company. So we absolutely support the right to 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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? That artists are very upset about their work being trained on. Maybe not in your tools, but certainly in other tools, that labels are suing Suno and Udio. It's competitor for training on their data. Do you see that resolving? Because it seems like the problem is going to get worse faster than...”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is and it's also been a core part of how music evolves over time this whole conversation around reheated nachos and what that means. I think artists and musicians build upon each other's work. They are 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'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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the show a lot, I think, more than any other podcast. We've talked about blurred lines. Song which came and went, and whose moment is over, but it continues to come up on Dakota maybe once a month that lawsuit was like, you guys stole a vibe from Marvin Kay. Not notes, not chords, anything direct, but the jury was like, the vibes are too close. Robin Thick and Frerell have to pay the money.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Scroll J. Hansen'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 artist voices or sound alikes?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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've got a whole plethora of computer-generated sounds.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me again, I will take it down to something very simple. There's a human being who 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Art, 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think 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 SWICE? 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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Splice, and as the CEO of Splice, my focus was 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 in their desktop because it was just for the joy of creating. And some of it goes on and becomes 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. You know, I care a lot about where some of this stuff goes.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 border marking.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An end user who is listening to Serena 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, A completely different sound. What art is 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We haven't seen it yet. 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 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 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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That movie poster's coming down. It's maybe different. 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 and music the same way that we see it in visual art?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 gonna use it. It's not just Photoshop.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 give 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 with 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that you just want to get the software right away, you want to get the creator's 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. 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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 spent 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, Just try to listen deeply. And usually the answer is very clear.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. You know, I have a framework for decision making. I study all the different tools for decision making.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 use it for shout outs. It's a core part of who we are.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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, crater-centric, and optimistic.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 launch 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think the biggest change has been around, I would say it's around three big ideas Nile, 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's just a core investment, right? It's a core piece of, I think, your cost model. How was SPICE organized before? Again, you're three years into it. How have you changed that structure? Is this still largely the same, or have you reoriented the company?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the really interesting things here again to create a 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. 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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Support design engineers PMs. They're all in one org and that's product dev and it's our largest org. 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We 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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 cultural mindset from the tech industry and meld it with the music industry? And is that a difference? Is that a challenge?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's weird because there's actually more similarity than dissimilarity in side slice. We have some really great software developers who love music and are music creators in their own right. 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. 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT