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

“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. 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,”
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 things you say about bringing people who have a core tech background 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 in 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. How are you thinking about that dynamic right now? Insider 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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 DAO 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, et cetera. It's not something that they want to replicate. They want to make great experiences inside Ableton, the next feature. This is not what they want to do. I think the AI stuff is new to a lot of people in the industry. I come from a core tech background. A lot of the team that I've brought 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.”
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 there is integrated as part of your creative workflow. Do I think I'm going to replace Studio 1? 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.”
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 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 they will be a situation where they will go and they're like, oh, I 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 subfolder that has 20 kick drum sounds that they have like saved and they 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 searchwood sound experience. So we listen to what you're creating inside Studio One and we'll suggest the samples that go with it.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do we think that we're going to directly compete with the 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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 is 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. 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?”
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 that word take suggests a zero sum game. This is not a zero sum game. It's about expanding and exploring the creative process. Many of our users use Splice Mike 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. So 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. You know, I was just at my kids.”
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 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 Logic's market share.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can look at it in a slightly more abstract way, right? In an early version of SLICE, you downloaded some sample packs, you would open logic or Pro Tools, you go off to the races. Splice doesn't see what you're doing in those apps. But those are the dominant music creation apps to this day. They're still the dominant music creation apps. You're suggesting with something like Splice Mike or Spice Create on the phone that you have on mobile that you're going to take some of that creation, particularly on a phone, I think there's a lot of opportunity to reinvent how we make music.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 these other places.”
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 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 today. That's a lot. We have 28 million stacks that have been created using our AI tools. So we have a lot of impressions of what sounds 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 experience.”
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 was also head of product and marketing at GitHub. So I've had a chance to see crater 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”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
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 did. I did. Right out of business school. And when it was a perpetual business and more recently well on its subscription journey”
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, that is Growth and Brokers. You know, it's been an interesting journey over the last three years while I've been here, but growth is really good.”
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 are a subscription platform, so people buy a subscription to Splice and that gives them access to this unlimited library of sounds as long 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.”
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 the pro and the con of being royalty free. We are royalty free and that what that means for the creators is they don't have to get stressed about it. You can use the sample. It's clear. You don't have to worry about clearing the rights. The downside is you don't get to share in the sort of upside when something big like that happens. We're really here to make sure that as many people can create as possible. And that's part of how our model works.”
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 is for some people, for some people, they make hundreds of things. 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 feel good, you know, to be able to feel good about that too.”
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 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 Fonk 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.”
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 the other end of it, which is what is the experience with 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the splice side of things, we take this pretty seriously and we take it seriously throughout the entirety of our process, starting with ingestion, right? How does a sample producer, sample pack creator come into the splice platform? We have an entire organization that sort of does the intake, does the QC, 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fundamentally, it's about what is the creative process. And I personally spend a ton of time with creators. And what they are telling me over and over and over again is I want better tools. And when I was at Adobe, this is also something that we heard from people. I want better tools. And so the work for us, the work for any company that's wanting to really meet the needs of this growing and large market is how do you build better tools in this era of AI? It's not going to be, oh, let me type a bunch of prompts and I get a song out at the end. What happens next? How do I edit that? How do I change this particular part of the song and get it to sound a certain different way? How do I take this sample and make it into something else? How do I get my musical idea? I mean, and you saw this with the Splice Snike launch as well.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
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 of samples as the building blocks for how modern music is made. And it used to be a hip-hop thing. It used to be very specific genres. And now it's in every genre. One of our largest growing genres is country music, which I never thought would happen, but it is. You're using samples to make country music I think the artistry of using samples to make music is that you start with a sample, you start with the sound, but then you make it your own. One, how you assemble it, but how you change the sound, how you vary it, what you do inside the digital audio workstation, which is like the primary creative canvas. I think that's really important. Sorry, it got really heated about this. This is important to me, but.”
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'm going to take exception with what you just said. I don't think music making today is putting just a bunch of samples together. I think that”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a long argument in music. It goes back decades, it stretches before AI hit the scene. You must, 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 Luke, which I think is. That's just a moment in music that should belong in the history books How have you dealt with that? Okay, music is now just assembling a bunch of pre-made samples, and that's good or bad, people have a lot of feelings about that. Is that a framework you're using as you enter sort of the AI generation era?”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, one of the things that we learn 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
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 there's a lot here, which is here 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 may create our software starting to make, which is we're going to do it for you. It used to work at Adobe. Adobe, I think, is the paradigmatic example of this right now. You can just push generator 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?”
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 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. We just launched something brand new at South by Southwest called Splice Mike, which allows you to hum an idea, start with a musical idea right in your phone, and we'll help you compose around that by putting the right samples next to it to help you get you to your final track.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slice is Music Creation platform that is used by music creators, musicians, music creators. That's our focus. Who are our creators? And what we provide to them, we have this tagline starts with sound, you know, so we do start with sound and we provide them with probably the world's most diverse, most high quality sonic palette. We send people all over the world. In fact, right before this, I was looking at a report from our team that just came back from Brazil.”
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, 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Kakul Shravastov, CEO of Music Creation Platform Splice. I don't think I actually need to introduce Splice. I just need to play this clip. View exists 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.”
2025-03-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava on why push-button AI is “insulting” to musicians · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT