Guest
Ken Kobori
Ken Kobori is Founder and CEO at Surf, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Ken Kobori, founder of Surf, explains how AI reference search and direct pitching let songwriters reach labels without a middleman.
Questions these episodes answer
Why did Ken Kobori build Surf instead of going through record labels and publishers?
Kobori built Surf to remove the layers between a songwriter and a buyer. As a creator himself he objected to a middleman raising the price and taking a cut when a song is placed, then taking another cut again, so Surf lets a songwriter pitch directly to labels, publishers and managers instead.
What problem did Ken Kobori see on the buyer side of the music industry before building Surf?
As a director at Universal Music, Kobori spent hours screening for new music by listening to as many as 300 CDs for only 15 seconds each. He built Surf's reference search so an A&R can paste a YouTube link instead and let the system surface close matches automatically.
What moment made Ken Kobori feel Surf had outside validation?
Kobori says the turning point was being named a finalist for the South by Southwest Innovation Awards in the media division. Until then he had been telling people Surf might help them, but that recognition was the first sign that people outside his own circle believed in the platform.
How did Surf get its first investor?
Kobori pitched Surf door to door, and the chairman of major publisher Fuji Pacific asked if it could be built exclusively for his company. When Kobori hesitated, the chairman took that as a no and said the idea would revolutionize the music industry, then became Surf's first investor.
How does Surf's AI song matching feature work for A&Rs?
A buyer can paste a YouTube link of a reference song into Surf, and the system pulls 110 data points from it to find the closest matching songs, both in Surf's marketplace and in the A&R's own past submissions, saving the hours labels used to spend screening tracks manually.