Splice raises $4.5m, goes into public beta and launches DNA Player
A day of big announcements from Splice, the LA-based startup aiming to connect musicians and their tools to the cloud.
Rockol first reported on the company back in March since it presented its technology at the Miami Music Summit. Now, after nearly a year in private beta, Splice has opened up the service to the wider public.
Splice’s technology allows musicians to synchronise their project data to the cloud on an ongoing basis so that is can be shared with others and used for collaborations. The service started out by supporting Ableton specifically but is now also available to users of Logic and FL Studio.
Splice’s ambition is not just to change the way people collaborate in the production of music, but also the way people can visualise it. Splice users will also have the ability to publish their tracks in the company’s brand new DNA Player, which allows anyone to visualise each instrumental track contained within a song, to solo or mute it and also to leave comments.
The first track to be demoed in this fashion is “Scream” by Henry Fong and J. Trick.
The DNA Player supports embedding, just like SoundCloud, but below the simplified visual representation of the wave sits a wealth of information that looks like a zoomed-out version of an Ableton or a Logic project. This data and the ability to play with it is going to be fascinating to music fans and invaluable to producers and musicians everywhere.
The company has also closed a $4.5m Series A round of funding led by True Ventures with the participation of Union Square Ventures. Additional investors include musicians that could really make or break the future of the platform with their support, such as Tiësto and Steve Angello as well agencies like WME and AM Only.
Splice has created a powerful bridging technology that goes far beyond a normal cloud backup but could potentially change the way music project collaborations are carried out and shared across the web, enabling an Ableton project to become more like a Google Doc for music - supporting real-time collaboration - than Dropbox, where there changes to a file would simply supersede any previous version.
If Splice works as well as advertised it won’t have any issues finding support in the tech-forward pockets of the artist community. It’s going to be more interesting to see what its strategy will be when it comes to reaching out to those who won’t immediately understand the benefits of their system.
(Andrea Leonelli)