Reinventing the Tools Behind Music Creation

Jakob Wredstrøm

Casey, I have been looking forward to the talk today.

Casey

Right.

Casey

Me too. Thanks for having me.

Jakob Wredstrøm

One thing we agreed upon when we started talking is let's try to make it nerdy today. I think this is a really interesting conversation. And even though I've been in music and audio for a long time, I actually I don't know too much about the gaming side. That's not necessarily entirely what you focus on, but you have a very rich career also on sort of the audio production there. And one of the great things when I l read about you is also your participation with game design for Avatar, the video game. So we obviously have an amazing person in the studio right now talking about your space and your company, Lunacy. So, Casey, for the people who don't know you, who are you and what do you do?

Casey

Yeah. Well I was a film composer for a long time. My dream as a kid was always to be like John Williams, Hans Zimmer. And I don't know. There's something so special about like the marriage of film and music that I've been obsessed with for years. But I went to grad school for film composition. I also have a small background in computer science, studied both computer science and music theory in undergrad and then in LA for about seven years I was a film composer working on games, working on TV shows, movies, sometimes some trailers, and that was a blast. But as I was working on these things, I became more and more interested in how the tools worked rather than how I would use them. So that was the impetus for Lunacy, which is my music tech company. And Lunacy started in 2019 as just a tiny little side hustle and has grown into a more proper operation with the dev team and sound designers and all that good stuff. And I love it. It's been so good. I ended up leaving composing to work full-time for Lunacy a few years ago. Because I just loved the idea of pushing music forward, coming up with new kinds of algorithms and sounds and all that nerdy stuff. So at this point I guess I'm mostly just like a manager. I manage our team and build plugins and products and whatnot. And yeah, it's been a it's been a fun journey from full time composer, musician to

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Casey

What my wife calls tech bro status and I hate that term, but I have slowly started to go more tech in my career. I'm not a tech bro, don't worry. But it is it is a really fun intersection music and technology and that's mostly where I sit these days.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, it's definitely fun. But it's also a very interesting industry. Like obviously there's been a lot of change. One is people who've been wanting to create plugins for years are typical, typically quite technical or audio engineers are. So there's been like a flood of plugins and small companies in this space. What does it take to differentiate these days when you have tools as a primary product?

Casey

I think it's extremely saturated, like you said, so it there are a couple different ways you can differentiate yourself. For us, our philosophy has always been it needs to look as good as it sounds. We want people to feel immersed in the plug-in. I think that's important because like people forget that these are creative tools. Like you open them to feel creative in most cases, and so they need to look creative as much as they sound creative. So for us our differentiation in the market has been like how we blend immersive visuals with controls. How do we flip like the concept of a knob on its head and like imagine new ways for people to interact with parameters that's not so cut and cut and dry, you know? I think when you see some of these old school plugins, they're really just a wall of knobs and for a new user or a new producer, that's pretty intimidating. It doesn't really feel inspiring. So the barrier to entry is pretty high. So I would say like maybe the best differentiator now is like removing that barrier to entry, making someone feel like they have a superpower with your product. Because you've made it so easy without it feeling like it's cheating, right? Like

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Casey

Yeah, sure, you can drag a loop in and like make a track out of loops. But if you give someone agency and make them feel like they're actually working creatively, but they've got these amazing shortcuts that you've given them, then I it's like a nice middle ground where you've like opened up the field to all sorts of people.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, you know, I can only I can only believe that your previous or past life now almost as a composer where music is in combination with something else, with something visual has a big say in your approach to that. So let's maybe just start there a bit. You spent seven years in LA composing music. Tell me a bit about how you got into that and what was the journey through that.

Casey

I moved to LA because I had gotten this fellowship with this studio called Sonic Fuel Studio. I love those guys. It's this it's this small recording space with like rooms for composers down in El Segundo, south of LA. And when I was there I was assisting a composer, working on lots of different TV shows. I worked on Supernatural, I worked on lots of Disney shows. And you learn very quickly the pace of these things is very intense. I think that's what shocks a lot of people. It's sort of like working in finance, but you're working in music. Like you work crazy hours. You work weekends, you work until midnight, like but you're just writing music, so it's a little odd. And that's one of these weird things that most people don't know about the composing industry. It's like

Jakob Wredstrøm

Please.

Casey

Kind of cutthroat and kinda it's very intense. Like the expectations are extremely intense and I think a lot of people burn out very quickly because they just wanna write beautiful music and that's just not how it works. It's you know, it's a factory with the whole entertainment industry behind it pushing things forward. So there's a bit of Go ahead.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But if you were in that makes sense, but if you were in finance, for example, like you were in New York and you were in finance and you were doing the equivalent journey, obviously there would be like a pretty huge ups upside. Like what is it financially to be in that position as a film composer?

Casey

Yeah, I mean it's very different, obviously. You can of course you can do very well as a film composer. I have some friends who have done extraordinarily well. They got the right movie with the right royalty statement and like, you know, are upset. But I think that's the weird part is like you're not doing it really for the money at all. You're doing it just because you're like obsessed with

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, sure.

Casey

Making the most beautiful thing. I think people in this world are more keen to impress people with art rather than like make the most money possible, which is very unique. So I mean people do well, like composers can definitely do well, but y you go into finance to make money, right? Like I don't think for the most part, I don't think people are like going into finance because they are obsessed with finance. Or maybe they are in a way, but people are going into music to make music and then the upside I think is just different. It's like you get to release this thing that the world hears and maybe some people love it and you change their life in some way. And that's cool. Like I think that's way more gratifying than making a million dollars or something. So yeah, I think I think it there's a funny parallel between this and like some other very intense industries, except that the upside isn't money, it's like artistic prowess or like accomplishment, you know. And I that it's cool.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. Wait, but LA is a is a particular beast. You know, I'm not an expert in LA, but I've been there a lot and I have more than a bunch of friends there who have both pursued and failed and some have succeeded within music. And LA is expensive. It is a difficult place to live. And music, regardless of where you are, is difficult to make money, but the amount of success or momentum you need in music in order to sustain a life in LA is it's more difficult than usual. So w was that sort of quickly something you solve with the career or was that a continuous sort of journey of, you know, you made what you could?

Casey

Mm-hmm.

Casey

I mean I was definitely poor for a long time. Yeah. I definitely didn't have a lot of money for a long time. Especially when starting Lunacy, which I'm sure we'll get to in a second. There was a lot of debt and a lot of risk in starting the company. As a composer I did get to a point where I was like established enough that I had a regular income. So I and I a lot of my friends found themselves in a similar situation. So

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Casey

If you I think if you work for four or five years in the industry and find the right connections and have the right jobs, it's totally manageable. But yes, LA is extremely expensive. I've seen it go the other way too, where people tried it for that period of time and just burnt out and moved to another more affordable state. Like it's very common, because it is really expensive, especially if you want a family or if you want like a nice living situation or whatever, like it adds up very quickly.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm-hmm. So you're doing this composing and you have this side project called Lunacy, like how did that come to be and why did he pursue it?

Casey

Yeah. So I was working on that show Supernatural for years. I don't know if you've seen that show. It was on forever.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I know what it is. I've seen a few episodes here and there, but nothing structured.

Casey

It's yeah, it's a it's not for everyone. I worked on it a lot, but I actually never watched it outside of work. Yeah. It that happens, you know, like you work on a show and you it's just not for you, but you like doing the music. So I was working on that show and as I was working on it, y you know, you do so many minutes of music every week when you're working on a TV show. You'll you might do

Jakob Wredstrøm

Here it is.

Casey

20 or 30 minutes a week of music because it's like an episode every week and it needs to happen, it needs to be submitted by Friday. No questions asked, otherwise the whole thing collapses, right? So there's like pressure to get these cues out the door. And the thing I kept hitting over and over again was we would have these long stretches of horror scenes or like drama scenes or whatever, and it didn't need that much music, but it needed like ambient. Pads and things that kind of evolved over time and would just add a sort of ambience and fear to the narrative, which is a little annoying to produce because you have to go in and automate all these things and weave in different sounds so that it doesn't sound like just the pad stretched over six minutes. And I had solutions for this, like I in the studio I had hooked up this little thing called a leap motion, which is an XYZ sensor for your hand. So you can map it to MIDI controls and like kinda wave your hand around and automate parameters that way and that kinda helped, right? And so I was like, I can map X, Y, and Z to like these three plugins and like hold down a chord and then maybe I can shape it myself, right? The problem with that is your hand gets really tired. So you kind of don't want to be doing that all day. You don't want to be like waving your hand around. So that was the idea for Cube. I had the thought, like, why don't I just make an instrument that has an XYZ pad built in and can blend between all of these different things that I've sampled. And so we started prototyping that. I started prototyping that. I showed it to two of my good friends and they wanted to invest a tiny bit to get the company off the ground and help me build it, help me create the sounds and presets and get it out there. And so at that point I didn't quit composing completely, but I kinda took a step back and started working pretty hard on this instrument cube, which was our flagship product. And go ahead. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But if I can interrupt for a second, like building a prototype is not something you just do. Like it's you know, it didn't exist, so it couldn't have been super easy to make. Like what was the process? Like what did you actually do?

Casey

Right.

Casey

I had experience in contact development before this. I would on the side build contact instruments for people, like in including myself. Like if I was working on a project, I would build a custom loop engine or build something that fit the project we were working on. I was hired to build contact instruments for proprietary projects and so forth. So I already knew contact scripting, I already had a background in

Jakob Wredstrøm

Really? Yeah.

Casey

Coding. So I had prototyped it in contact originally just to like give a proof of concept to people. And that wasn't too hard, but obviously bringing something into production that's actually sellable, marketable, takes a mu a much longer time. And we didn't want to make a contact plugin because there are all these limitations with graphics and modulation that were frustrating and we were like, we can't we can't do that. So we found another solution to let us build a custom sampler plugin. And so I spent like a year and a half programming this. The pandemic was like oddly convenient for me because I just like hauled up in my studio and coded and I would like take on some side composing gigs to keep the lights on. But

Jakob Wredstrøm

Well.

Casey

Yeah, it was like a year and a half of programming. And then we released Cube in May of twenty one. And it was a blast. Like I loved it so much. It was so fun to build. It kind of bloomed into something much bigger than like a pat pad generator. Like that was the original intention. And now it can kinda do everything. And fits like all kinds of genres. Much more than we were expecting, which is cool.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So obviously the audio plug in community is a very word of mouth community. It really relies on people recommending each other something new. Like how did the you know, your company still exists and it's to run so that must have gone something right in the process of relaunching it. Like how did people receive it and how did it spread?

Casey

It took a long time. Yeah. This is and I've had many conversations with like newer developers who were a who were asking me like how do you get the word out? And there's no single answer. The truth is that it took us many attempts. Like the first time we launched it, it was priced way too high. I think we were charging two fifty and people were complaining and like

Jakob Wredstrøm

Really?

Casey

The intro price was only like ten or twenty dollars off and we just didn't know like the game yet. Like we didn't really know how to price things, how to launch things. I think we sold like thirty copies in the first month, which sounds okay, but it's not. Like for a year and a half of work, I was like, Whoa, this is bad. It was really bad. And Crucially we didn't give up. It wasn't like we launched it and were like, Well, that was a dud, let's go back to our jobs. We kept pushing it. And the way we kept pushing it is like we were adding new features and adding expansion packs and like committed to making it excellent. Like we were very proud of what we launched, but we knew that in order to really get it out there, we'd have to keep growing it, and keep getting people to just pay attention. Like You have to like really get people to pay attention, which is very hard. For us, what really helped a lot was working with like influencers and kind of getting in with magazines and getting reviews and that kind of thing. I think the biggest moment for us was landing a partnership with Venus Theory, who is close friend and collaborator. We've worked very closely with him on many products at this point. He posted a video about it and it was finally the first moment where people paid attention and then started looking at the brand like a legitimate brand. But that was a year at least a year after the launch, right? So it was it took a while. Like the first year we hardly made any money. I had like mountains of credit card debt because we would

Jakob Wredstrøm

Wow.

Casey

Spend money on ads, make a bit more money, pay down the debt, spend even more money on ads, make more money, pay down the debt. And so it's an interesting and somewhat terrifying cycle that a lot of brands go through because the plug-in industry is so volatile. It's so sale-based, it's so seasonal. But you don't have one shot. Like you have many attempts to make something pop. And I think people like seeing consistent updates and like a commitment to making something great.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But so your sort of approach to the product is that cube was the only product for a while, or like how did you sort of start introducing more?

Casey

Yeah, cu Cube was our only product for three years, I think. In the sense that like it was the it was the only engine, but we kept recording new expansions. So like we would go book sessions with musicians and do like harps and marimbas and trumpet and vibrophone and we ended up recording like a hundred different instruments over the course of three years. And started fleshing out the ecosystem so at this point we're we've we feel like we've rounded out the engine really nicely. It has everything I think I would want in it as an instrument. But it took us a while to get to that point.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But at what point did you believe okay this might be a plausible pursuit and not just bankrupt you over time? Like when did that turning point happen for you guys?

Casey

Mm-hmm. When I could pay myself like a sal like a living wage, I think it was like maybe two years in. Is that right? Yeah. About two or three years in, I was I was splitting my time. So I was doing like forty hours a week on Lunacy and forty hours a week on composing. And Lunacy was paying me nothing. I was just like funneling all the money back into the business. And the composing was the only thing keeping me afloat. And

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hm.

Casey

There came a point in time, it was about two years in, where I was asked to work on another composing gig and I turned it down because I was like, I think this is the moment where I can jump all in on Lunacy and like there's enough money in the bank to sustain me and I feel good about like the next thing we're releasing and so forth. So it took a while, but there were like a good two or three years where it was two jobs at once to make it work.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So far, obviously you guys are really on an interesting path, but so far from a financial pursuit, is it worth it? Because again, you get went into music for composing music, but now you've built a business that, you know, are growing and successful. Do you think it's worth it the pursuit for the financial alone? Or does it need to be sort of combined with music for you in order to sort of have that purpose?

Casey

I think the pursuit's worth it. Definitely. For me it's the ability to wear so many different hats every day that keeps it really fun. I mean, I think there is probably a higher upper bound to what you can make with a business than what you can make as a composer, generally speaking. So financially I'm also like not too worried, if that makes sense. Like I don't feel regret about like finances for composing versus lunacy. I think I probably would be making more as a composer, truthfully. I still pay myself like a founder salary. We're still growing. But I the excitement is enough. You know, like launching products and building something from the ground up is so exciting. It feels like building a track. Like it's just a different avenue of creativity.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Let's go a bit into the product because when I was doing sort of my homework on it and I went into website and sort of started looking at some of the videos you had, like it's pretty I don't think I've seen like such a great introduction video to a plug-in before, like for a long time when I was sort of watched Cube, where it's a r it's a film, like it's a it's almost a game intro. So you sort of going back to what you discussed before with that meeting to have the visual aspect to it as well,

Casey

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

What is your philosophy behind this? Like w what is it that you think when you think this plug-in? Like, if you could just walk me through that.

Casey

I love the idea of like stepping into a world. So I want people to feel like they're stepping into the cube when they open the product, you know? Like I want it and that's why the launch trailer that we put up is like all this crazy CGI where you're like being thrown into the cube and the orb is going everywhere and like I want it to feel like it's alive and it's breathing. And it's like this little alien on your machine that's making these amazing sounds that you can harness and then use. So from a marketing perspective, we lean very heavily into that. We have for a while. Like this idea of surreal graphics married with beautiful ear candy and sound, is meant to be like the culmination of all of the products that we've built. It's meant to give you like a certain vibe, like a certain aesthetic that feels empowering or enticing. So our philosophy for the for the product though has been like let's make it beautifully and visually im immersive when you jump in. But it can't be gimmicky. Like it can't be for the sake of Beautiful artwork. Like there needs to be a purpose to all of the graphics. They need to be informative. So with Cube, the Cube serves a purpose. It lets you see visually what's happening as it crossfades between these eight samplers. So there's a real purpose, but it also feels immersive and it feels fun to play with. It's like playful. And so there's this balance between something feeling whimsical and playful and also intuitive and

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Casey

And powerful. Like it shouldn't feel like a toy. It should really feel like a tool that happens to be fun to use. And so there are like all of these other pages in Cube that are much deeper modulation matrices and all sorts of like sampler routing and arpeggiators and that kind of stuff. And so we kind of tuck all of that away because for

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Casey

The initial experience, we want you to jump in and feel excited and not overwhelmed, but there's always stuff under the hood that you can touch if you want to. And we've taken that approach with every product. Like the intro to the product, the homepage should feel inviting, not in like a kiddie way, but in a way that feels creative and useful. And then under the hood, there's plenty of stuff for our preset designers or like the tinkerers to get to.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. So obviously it's not your only product and you have multiple products. So what sort of went through when you've had Cube as an only product for three years? Like what is it that was missing in the arsenal within the company?

Casey

Cube was built on a platform called HIS, which is a sampler engine where you can code custom stuff on top of it, but it kind of handles some of the sampler mechanics for you. And it worked fine for us. We hit a lot of snags, but it was good enough for us to get the product out the door. The next step for us was to build start building our own engines and have like a real development team. Building custom algorithms. The obvious next step was like an effect suite. Like we felt like we had this really awesome engine for sound, and we wanted a way to modify the sound with like amazing effects. And so that's when we introduced Beam, which is our multi-fX engine. And Beam had the same philosophy. It's like we want you to feel immersed, we want you to feel visually intuitive. But like it's also extremely complex. There's tons and tons of stuff in Beam that's under the surface. So it's the same concept, but for effects. And similarly, it's like the same idea of blending different effects together in parallel or serial, the way you blend different sounds together in cubes. So it was like a natural evolution to a different but similar domain.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So what I find interesting really when sort of looking through the products is also the pricing. Like in my world, like the amount of things that are possible now in your products is fairly cheap. Like it's you know, most people can afford the entry level of your products. But what was what was the decision making there of how to approach the market?

Casey

Mm.

Casey

So as someone who has been a composer and had to buy so many thousands of dollars of sample libraries, I was just like I'm not trying to charge people an arm and a leg for these things. Like it just doesn't make sense. I mean, I for like a massive string library that costs half a million to record, I get it. Like you have to charge six hundred bucks, eight hundred bucks. For us We're not targeting composers specifically, right? So like we're not going for hyper realism. We're not going for like the best violin legato that you can buy. And so we wanted to strike a balance between like we want them to feel pre we want the products to feel premium. We want we don't want them to be so cheap that they feel like cheap, right? We don't want them to feel or look cheap. So we tried to price them affordably so that it's something that someone could buy and it feels like buying a group of friends like coffees or something. At least in LA. Coffees are like eight dollars in LA. I don't know how it is in Norway, but it's gotten it's gotten pretty bad here. But you get the point. Like we want it to feel like just the right approachable amount where it feels like you do want to value it. Like you don't want to undervalue products, but like if you spend

Jakob Wredstrøm

Well, not quite eight dollars, but yeah.

Casey

$30 or $40 on a product, you're serious about wanting the product, but you don't feel bad about having spent $30 or $40. You might feel differently if you spent $200. But that's been our philosophy. It's like, how do we bridge the gap between like detailed amazing composer products that cost $800 and like producer products that are much cheaper, but maybe more limited? And like what's the middle ground?

Jakob Wredstrøm

But that must have been a quite big transformation in your life and your way of thinking about business, coming from a composer to developing the software to now also need to be selling it and understanding the ICP, understanding how to market yourself and price things. Like have you has that just been trial and error, or were like were you able to partner up with some brains that knew how to do this?

Casey

I think plug in boutique was really helpful for us. We kind of studied how they priced things. They're like a really good partner with us. We launch everything like with them and they have their own data on like plug in pricing and you know, what tends to resonate well with people in terms of like intro prices and how much you discount and so on. We are very particular about how much we discount. Like we often never go above like forty. Maybe if it's Black Friday, fifty percent. But like we don't price things more than fifty percent off. It feels like wrong to the people who had already purchased it previously. So that's always like a delicate matter, how much you discount things. But in terms of learning the marketing, it was a lot of trial and error. I had some friends with marketing backgrounds come in and kind of consult with us, teach us how to do like email marketing, SEO stuff, which I know is like now kinda dead. We'll get into that in a second. But yeah, it was it was like a combination of like advice from friends who came in and helped us organize things and then lots and lots of trial and error, like five years of just trying things and seeing what works.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Yeah, but let's go into it because you know the digital marketing landscape is changing. Like it's definitely interesting. So I run a venture studio and we build companies and it one of the really interesting things that we do is because we work with eight early state startups and we built a lot of them and co build a of them, we always discuss maybe every three months, like where do we need to pivot now as a company, as a venture studio, because we need to stay relevant to

Casey

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

To the people we work with. And one of my big sort of stands like six months ago, okay, the next thing is gonna be digital marketing because everything is changing. Everything is becoming accessible from the data point. Like you can, you know, you don't need dashboards anymore. You can just, you know, have API keys, you can do your own sort of backend data analysis and you can do much more informed decisions. But that also means it gets more crowded. There's gonna be bigger differentiation between who sort of adapts and who doesn't. And especially in your space where also the products are now completely flooded and saturated, it's probably gonna be even more busy to s to stand out because the ones that don't know how maybe to build a brand, they probably pouring out a lot of dollars in order to push something that maybe shouldn't be pushed. So you're competing in a very interesting space. So how do you do it now? Like what's your approach?

Casey

Mm-hmm.

Casey

We are starting to move more into an organic approach because like you said, the barrier to entry to general digital marketing is so low now that like anyone can whip up a Facebook a meta ad account and start running ads and ask Claude how to do it, right? Like I think there's so much info out there that's no longer the hard part. And as a Counter to that, we've started to look more like more into the organic space where it's more about like live streams and vlogs and maybe like e email marketing is still extremely effective. Like honestly, that's the that's one of the biggest pillars for us. Paid advertising is kind of collapsing a bit. There are a lot of reasons for that, you know, there's AI is a big reason, but also iPhone Apple policies have kind of wrecked Meta's return on ad spend. There are a dozen different reasons why paid ads just don't work as well as they used to. As it's extremely saturated. So like that's tough. So we're not nearly as dependent on paid ads as we used to be. We now look more to like YouTube and that kind of channel to really grow things. More community space stuff. Like we have a Discord now. We post challenges. We have our announcements on there and that's been growing nicely. I think pi things are pivoting a bit more in that direction, especially 'cause now like half of all the ads are like AI generated anyway. So like people like to see something a little more human if they're being sold to. And that approach has worked well. Like we're still in the middle of that transition to a more organic approach, but that's that seems to be the next path for us.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Because it's interesting because sort of maybe in my analysis your product sort of lands in between two chairs when it comes to the very strong ICP types which you usually have in this space, which is one is the Uber nerds and the other one is, you know, mainstream consumers and yours sort of fall a tight bit in between. So how do you approach that specific persona? And maybe you can also explain who you believe the persona is.

Casey

In terms of advertising.

Jakob Wredstrøm

In terms of advertising, yeah, sort of getting well building community organically or digitally, yeah.

Casey

Yeah.

Casey

Yeah. It's tricky. It 'cause it applies to how you build the product and how you market the product. And so we honestly we have multiple personas that we advertise to. And if we're advertising to a tinkerer, like we're showcasing the deeper features in the products and if it's and if it's like a new music hobbyist, we are showing more of like the end result.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm-hmm.

Casey

Of what's possible versus the details of how it works. So I think we have multiple personas that we will try to target, so to speak. And that works pretty well. I think there's a delicate balance because if you go too far in either direction, you end up kind of isolating it too much in a bubble of sorts, but you also don't want to be so broad that the product becomes a little bit meh, you know, like it you can you can try to cater to too many people and then it just becomes like vanilla. It's like a little bit like it doesn't even know what it wants to be. And so I think we try to fall in a space that's not too academic and not too toy ish, if that makes sense. It's like right in the middle and like

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Casey

And we hope that both sides of it kind of see the value and come to the center. But you can you can absolutely target each individually. It's just you have to be careful about not diluting the value of the product by making it too broad.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. It sorry if b as I think you just answering so beautifully, that's why I'm asking all these questions that I'm sure the listener is also quite curious about sort of trying to build a company like this. But you know, everyone in the plug in space would know that the business models has changed a lot since the last, you know, fifteen years and that's been experimenting a lot. A lot has now gone into sort of subscription the last ten years services. Like what's been the what when you have a when you have a company with, you know, limited amounts of products and you don't have and you primarily sell it as like a fee, how do you sort of build up retention in your clients and how do you have that long, long tail of value?

Casey

Mm. I mean, this is why businesses love subscriptions, because it's really hard to operate a business on seasonal sales and new product launches without recurring revenue. So it's no surprise that all of these companies went down that path. We haven't we've been kind of sticking it out as a single purchase. I think it's called SAP, service as a purchase or something.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Casey

So we've stuck it out in that in that business model and it works. It's delicate because you get a huge influx of money at Black Friday and spring sales and whatever and then you kind of just have to bridge the gap from that point to the next product launch or the next sale. And so in terms of hiring and budgeting, it's very challenging 'cause you have to try to just project what you're gonna make each month. Based on historical data, but it's not it's really hard to do because it's fickle. Like people are more likely to buy when they've gotten their paycheck and people are more likely to buy when it's the holidays and not in the summer when they're vacationing. So like there are all of these components that make it very seasonal. And that's why subscription model is so much easier for businesses to use. I think creators see them as like a drag because your content that you work with, your tools are locked behind a subscription and that just like rubs people the wrong way. Our philosophy here has been subscriptions are for services, not for content. So like tools, plugins, whatever should not live behind a subscription. If you're paying for a service like storage or AI inference or whatever, it has to be subscription or usage based. There's no way around it. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That makes sense. Yeah, it's a difficult space also as a user, not to throw hate to anyone, but I'll do it openly on my podcast. For example, I used to produce a lot of music and I had like a big waves package. And then when I when I went back and like, I no longer can use this, I need to buy some upgrades or some renewals, and then when I want to go back again, like it doesn't work again. So what I used to own, like I need to repurchase two times. It you know, it's an interesting industry to be a customer in, that's for sure.

Casey

Right.

Casey

Definitely.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And it's also very confusing. So I like that. I love that. But you sort of mentioned when you talked about your journey, the early days, you had two friends who invested some capital. So there must be an element to okay, do you need to create some worth that can either be profitable and pay your own or something, or you want to sell at one point. Like what's your mindset or thought process behind that?

Casey

Yeah, I mean they both are dear friends and it was like I was very grateful that they invested, but it was a very nominal amount, all things considered. It was sort of just like enough to build us a site and record some musicians. And they were just like down for the ride. I mean, they were like excited about the idea of building a company together with me. And so I don't think they're in a rush to like cash out. I think We're all just like excited to be building stuff. We have raised money recently for our next big, big platform that we're working on. We've been very, very careful to only raise from composers, producers, angels, and not venture capital at this point because we're very, very precious about our control and like the artistic integrity. So we have are trying to maintain that sense of like artistry and like built by creators for as long as we possibly can. I don't know if like well we certainly wouldn't mind exiting at some point, you know, like sure. I think it would be great. I'm not thinking about it right now. Right now I'm thinking mostly about like how to it's more interesting for me to be To build something that's so amazing and blow people's minds than to like make a hundred million dollars. You know, like I it's just it's way more appealing. I'm sure our investors want to hear that we will exit. And I think there is probably a path to that at some point. But we're focused on building like the best stuff possible. And I think in doing that, more opportunities will arise. I won't throw anyone under the bus, but we've seen a lot of other companies take the VC route and just go straight for exit. And with that mentality you lose the integrity so quickly. And I think the products really, really suffer. So we're of the mindset like we'll just build it as best as we possibly can. And I think that's gonna yield better results than if we had like

Casey

Just focus completely on like the path to selling the company.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hm. But do you believe it like has it been difficult for you to be faithful to that assisting integrity when you have so much responsibility? Like you have employees, you have a brand, you have customers.

Casey

Yeah. Definitely. I mean, this is where like perfectionism can get in the way. Like there are products I wish we had spent another month or two on because there were like more features or like this knob was off by three pixels, like whatever. Like I but you have to you have to strike the balance between like we need to launch this month so that I can pay everyone's salary next month. And we've done it pretty well. Like I don't

Jakob Wredstrøm

Ha

Casey

There's nothing we've released to date where I've been like, that was a giant mistake. We like jumped the gun. It was it was too rushed. We've always been able to strike a nice balance. It just boils down to like really good organization and planning. Being able to prepare for all the scenarios, like what happens if this gets pushed by a month, what do we do in the intermediate time and so forth. We've but we've haven't needed to sacrifice any serious quality. And I think we have a well oiled machine at this point. So I think we're in like a good position moving forward not to have to sacrifice anything.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm. But what is your thought about the industry at large? Obviously you need to adapt over time as well. We talked about sort of these very traditional plugins with like with knobs and like 2D interfaces that's maybe not that inspiring and where you don't, you know, you're not in that category. But music will inherently be more and more well, machine output, to many degrees.

Casey

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

How do you think about how you probably need to adapt to that change in production of music?

Casey

We are working on it. Very much. That's our next platform, Nova, which I'm happy to talk about in this chat. Nova's coming out in about a month. Nova has been in development for like two years. Maybe even longer if you consider some of the underlying tech, closer to like six. It's sort of our magnum opus. It's been this thing that we've been

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But yeah.

Casey

Dreaming up for a long, long time, like ever since I was in college. It's something that I wanted to build, which was like 11 years ago or something. So this is a good answer to your question because Nova is our answer to this problem, like how music is evolving, the idea of a plugin is evolving, how you build plugins is evolving. The way you make music is changing, right? Like I think Suno is a giant threat. To a lot of creators, and we want to be the counter to that. We want to give people superpowers that really truly pushes sound forward in a way that we don't think those models would be able to. So Nova is the first platform where you can build plugins and share them with anyone instantly. The way it works is you build A actually this is the first time I'm announcing this, so this is cool. We're doing a live stream on August 4th too, where we're gonna like kind of unveil some of this to the public because it's the first time anyone's getting a peek. So we're yeah, we're pretty stoked about it. But Nova is a the first web audio platform where you can build plugins in your Chrome tab on your browser and you can share them with people.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing.

Casey

And they can load them in their DAW. We have a host plugin in your DAW that can load any of these plugins instantly. And so we've removed any need to install or activate or like send emails or presets to someone. Like we've removed all of that. It's the first time a plugin in your DAW can load any other plugin instantaneously and be changed and remixed and so forth. So The concept is basically like Figma but for sound. So we are building this new tool that lets anyone build plugins, share them instantly, and anyone can use them any anywhere without needing to install anything or activate anything. So it's this dream where a plugin is no longer a fixture in time, it is like this evolving thing that many people can participate in. Almost like a preset, but it's real it's a real plugin that can be adjusted. The algorithms can be adjusted, the sounds can be adjusted, the UI can be adjusted. And that's very cool because traditionally it's really hard to build a plugin. You have to like code in C in juice and you need to build an installer and an e-commerce site and all of this stuff that like is very tedious and has nothing to do with audio for the most part. And so we've like removed all of that and we just let you build. And that's been the concept for years. And then AI kept getting better and better and better. And as we were watching Claude and ChatGPT evolve, we had the thought that we could just build an integration with those and let people build plugins on our platform. Using Claude or ChatGPT. And it works exceptionally well because our platform is all JavaScript. And Claude and ChatGPT are incredibly well trained on JavaScript, right? And so it was that combination plus like having this huge repository of algorithms that we've hand coded over many years that make the system like so effective.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Casey

And so we've essentially built like the world's first actually good platform for vibe coding plugins and sharing them anywhere, being able to remix other people's work and have the quality be exceptional. And that's super, super exciting. We've drawn a line, a very hard line in the sand at people using AI-generated images or sounds. The AI is only allowed to code. And it has to do it within our platform and within our constraints. And that's very intentional because we don't want it to be slop. We want it to be like basically this amazing prototyping ground for people to explore ideas that were otherwise not possible, or would have taken months or years to prototype. And it's working it's working really, really well. We're super excited by the results. We're like onboarding lots of partners for this platform so that they can start building the way we've been building plugins. And then eventually later this year we will unveil it to the public so that many different people can build using these tools.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Well, I'm very happy to hear that. Especially because I've been exploring the plug in space for let's say around a year now, fairly deeply. I have friends who are quite successful in this space and I obviously have guests on the podcast about talking about this and Amplitude now also starting working with a couple of plug in companies. So it's something I'm exploring a lot and How things will change is gonna be the most interesting question for me. And I'm very happy that you guys are adapting and but not even adapting, you're basically trying to stay ahead of the curve in that aspect. That makes sense from a business perspective, but I guess that's also why you went out and raised some capital in order to sort of sustain such a big investment. Because obviously that's not something you just do.

Casey

Mm-hmm.

Casey

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. Well, Casey, I think it's been amazing talking with you and it's been it's been so interesting. Maybe one of the last questions into you, but maybe something about so the industry at large. You are adapting, many are not. What do you believe will be the consequence of the s the companies that do not adapt as fast as you? What's gonna happen?

Casey

I don't wanna be like the bad news bear, but I do feel I feel a sense of optimism for like smart and agile companies who are moving and looking for ways to push music forward. I do think some of the traditional plug in companies will have a very, very hard time. I don't think this model of like classic plug in development will stick. I think we have like

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Casey

A couple years left, truthfully. And I think the idea of a plu like it's like any app, right? Like any app that could be vibe coded is at i is being threatened right now. Why would I pay twenty bucks a month for this app when I could just do it with Claude in an hour and it's more bespoke and tailored to my needs, right? And so every industry is facing that. With creativity it's very different because Claude doesn't have taste. How do you handle that? And I think the companies who find really good integrations that feel creative and human and feel like tactile, like people are still at the helm, will succeed. And people who just keep doing what they do that they've been doing will have a very, very hard time. And I don't see like a real issue with that. I think it would be a shame if no one adapted and like the AI overlords just overtook all creativity, like that would suck, right? So I think the onus really is on us to beat them to that, to like power through and really build something that maybe uses AI as this like superpower, but the human is still at the forefront of the taste and the creativity and it's just this super shortcut to like an idea that you had. And I think there's something beautiful there if it's done well and the companies who strike that balance I think will succeed.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Well, I truly hope that Lunacy is gonna be one of those companies. Definitely resonate the way that you talk about it. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much sharing your journey. It's been a real pleasure.

Casey

Appreciate that. Thank you.

Casey

Yeah, happy to. Yeah, thank you, Jacob. Appreciate it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Great. We'll talk soon.

Casey

All right. Take care.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, stopping the recording.