Topic
Music Production and Audio Tools
Plugins, DAWs, mixing and mastering tools and the companies building software for music makers. 16 conversations with founders, investors and experts, newest first.
Episodes (16)
Casey Kolb, founder and CEO of Lunacy, explains why plugins must feel as good as they sound and how Nova lets people build them with AI.
Noam Levinberg, founder of Safari Audio, on why AI-built plugins and prompt-based music tools may make DAWs and plugin companies obsolete.
Christian Ringstad Schultz, CEO of Masterchannel, explains how proprietary AI mastering and a white-label API built a profitable, lean music tech company.
David Ronan, founder and CEO of RoEx, explains how AI mixing and mastering tools get a track to ninety percent so a human can finish the creative ten percent.
Alexandre Turbide and Nicholas Laroche of BeatConnect explain why they built a collaborative DAW on Unity and switched from a paid model to freemium.
Antony Demekhin, CEO and co-founder of Tuney, explains why his ethical AI music tools skip scraped training data and aim to simulate real music production.
Michael Jacob, CEO of Lemonaide Music, explains how his AI beat-making tools pay artists under legal contracts and aim to protect musician income.
Kanru Hua, founder of Dreamtonics, talks about building AI vocal synthesizers as instruments and his path from hobbyist programmer to music tech founder.
Daniel Rowland of LANDR explains how AI mastering grew into a full creator platform and why he thinks AI will assist producers instead of replacing them.
Host Jakob Wredstrøm and his AI avatar AI Jake discuss how AI is changing music jobs, the shift from skill to ideas, and the ethics of AI music.
AI host AI Jake reports on Tencent Music's AI predictive model, subscription growth to 106.7 million paid users, and the legal risks of AI in music.
AI Jake reports on BandLab passing 100 million users, its free music creation tools, and the d4vd success story behind 'Romantic Homicide'.
Ken Kobori, founder of Surf, explains how AI reference search and direct pitching let songwriters reach labels without a middleman.
Jørgen Iden, co-founder and CEO of Crescat, explains how collaborative software replaces outdated riders and running orders in live event production.
Christian Ringstad Schultz, co-founder and CEO of Masterchannel, on AI mastering software, aligning co-founders, and expanding a Norwegian startup globally.
Hannes Andersson, COO of Oeksound, explains how Soothe spread through word of mouth and why the team shields developers from customer noise.
Questions these episodes answer
Why should a music plugin look as good as it sounds?
Casey Kolb of Lunacy says plugins are creative tools, and old plugins that were just walls of knobs intimidated new producers. Lunacy blends immersive visuals with simplified controls so producers feel inspired when they open a plugin, while deeper modulation and routing stay tucked away for people who want them.
How does Lunacy decide what to charge for a plugin?
Kolb wants plugins to feel premium without feeling like a splurge, so Lunacy prices them around thirty to forty dollars, enough that a buyer takes it seriously but does not regret the purchase. He compares it to buying a group of friends coffee. Lunacy rarely discounts more than forty percent, and never more than fifty even on Black Friday, to protect value for people who already paid full price.
How is Lunacy using AI to help people build music plugins?
Lunacy's new platform Nova lets anyone build audio plugins in a browser tab using Claude or ChatGPT to write the JavaScript code, then share and load them instantly inside a DAW. Kolb draws a hard line: AI can only write code, never generate the sounds or images, because Lunacy wants human taste and creativity to stay in charge of the result.
Why doesn't Lunacy sell its plugins as a subscription?
Kolb says subscriptions suit services like storage or AI inference, where the cost matches ongoing use. Lunacy keeps its plugins and tools as one-time purchases, because charging a monthly fee for content that people already made feels wrong. This choice makes revenue seasonal around Black Friday and spring sales, which makes hiring and budgeting harder to plan.
Why does Noam Levinberg think plugin companies will not survive?
Levinberg argues plugins depend on DAWs, and he does not think DAWs have a future. He points to millions of people now making music through AI prompts on tools like Suno and Moises, and doubts they will ever move to installing Logic and downloading dozens of separate plugins the way producers do today.
How did Noam Levinberg grow Safari Audio without raising funding?
Levinberg bootstrapped Safari Audio for three years with no outside investment, starting it after leaving his job as head of audio at Artlist, first as a personal project before it grew into a company. The company has grown to a team of nine and built a loyal user base by releasing small, playful, single-purpose plugins on a monthly schedule instead of one large product.
Does a great product or great marketing matter more for a plugin company?
Levinberg says the product matters more in the audio software niche, because engineers actively search out good tools even without marketing, citing Valhalla as an example. But a strong distribution system cannot rescue a plugin that does not sound good, so quality has to come first.
How is AI already changing how plugin companies are built?
Levinberg says AI tools now handle work that used to take specialist skills, such as rendering 3D knob designs that once took hours in Blender. He has also seen a producer build five plugins that sounded good with an AI coding tool and no hand-written code, which he takes as a sign the technical barrier to building plugins is disappearing.
Is it still worth starting a plugin company today?
Levinberg says no, from a pure business standpoint, because he sees far better opportunities elsewhere right now. He keeps building Safari Audio anyway because he enjoys the process, and argues that enjoying the work is what makes a venture worth pursuing even when the odds are not great.
How does Masterchannel's AI mastering work without a huge dataset?
Instead of comparing a new song against a huge library of reference tracks, Masterchannel's model tests each upload against benchmarks built from co-founder Simon Hestemann's own mastering preferences, generates two to three thousand versions, and returns the best one, which keeps costs low and needs no new dataset for a new genre.
Why did Masterchannel build a white-label product instead of just selling an API?
Distribution companies like TuneCore or Amuse have little in-house tech capacity, so pitching them an API to integrate always got pushed down their roadmap. Masterchannel switched to an embeddable widget, like inserting a YouTube video, that a marketing team could add without engineering help, which let it sign 35 partner platforms.
How much capital can a niche music tech company like Masterchannel realistically raise?
Schultz says a niche music tech company can typically only be funded up to about 20 to 30 million dollars, which rules out most VC funds and pushed Masterchannel toward angel investors who do not expect the outsized returns a venture fund needs.