kbcafe.com interviews Splice’s Wendell Davis III
We’d like to thank Randy Morin for the lovely interview he did at kbcafe.com with our very own Wendell Davis III:
Splice is an online music publishing community that uses the Creative Commons license to encourage users to share their creations. Today, I’m interviewing Wendell Davis III of Splice.
Q: Wendell, congrats on the release of Splice. Tell my readers more about Splice and your startup company.
Wendell: Thanks Randy. I think the best way to explain Splice right now is through analogy: If you can imagine something like Apple’s GarageBand, but as a web-based application wrapped in a social network (sprinkled with a hearty dash of Creative Commons licensing), you essentially arrive at the genesis of Splice. In essence, we have built a music-focused mashup community, a place where users can create songs that anyone can remix, and sounds that anyone can use. The primary difference between what we are doing and everything that has come before it is that the mixing tools are built-in, and the community is self-contained.
Q: Music splicing is something that I hadn’t heard of until you mentioned it to me. Was there an inspiration that led you guys down this path? Is there other companies in your space?
Wendell: Well, It’s important to note that several genres of music have essentially birthed out of what we might now label ‘remix culture’: If it weren’t for those severely clever urban block party DJs who figured out how to isolate the break (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_%28music%29) from a commercial record, there would be no such thing as Hip-Hop. And if it weren’t for a 6 second clip from a single, obscure Funk 45 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac), it’s arguable that such mystical musical genres as drum’n'bass could not have existed. Music, culture, and indeed most everything in the universe is hell-bent on taking what we have, and transmuting it into something else. We mean to facilitate that progress — and ideally the end result is an environment which encourages play by everyone, from the non-musician, to the amateur to the professional.For me as an amateur musician, the idea of a web-based, collaborative music-making package was personally compelling. Surprising as it may be, there aren’t any super-practical ways of collaboratively working on a track over the Internet. The solutions which do exist (www.ejamming.com for example) are primarily focused on real-time, performance-based collaboration, ie- ‘jamming via Skype’. This seemed to me like something with a very high potential of being intimidating to amateurs, not to mention entirely inaccessible to novices. So real-time collaboration is in fact quite different from editing and recording a song in a music-making package such as GarageBand or Cubase. Unfortunately none of those packages are sufficiently outfitted for a true ‘multiplayer’ experience: If you and I wanted to collaborate on a track over a distance for example, you would first perform or compose your part… The audio you worked on would be bounced down, any MIDI data exported, and the files probably compressed and uploaded to an FTP archive or transferred to me via something like Skype. I would then have to uncompress that archive and import the material into my own environment, following all of your steps in order to get it back to you after making my changes. All in all, this process costs time and precious creative energy. With Splice, however, I login, look at your track, and begin making my edits and additions right from my web browser. Everything is hosted, so the creative flow is significantly improved.
Q: I’ve previously known you as one of the guys behind Meetro, a localized instant messaging (IM) client. Tell me about your decision to more from localized IM to music splicing?
Wendell: Frankly, and I do mean to avoid all cliché in saying so, I’m a far better visionary than a software engineer or operations manager. I like building ideas, teams and execution plans. The future of music has long struck me as something that will be fluid, interactive, and entirely omnipresent. In other words, without boundaries of any sort. Creative Commons is the first step, and I think that Splice could be the next one. It’s hard to resist getting excited.
Q: What’s your plan moving forward? Are you guys fully funded and how do you plan on paying the bills?
Wendell: The next few months are going to reveal some fairly radical changes to the site. I don’t want to give everything away, but I will tell you about one of the things I’m most excited about, which is our upcoming public API. This will allow users to develop their own plug-ins and custom features for Splice, something that we feel will open it up to markets we haven’t even considered applicable yet. As for the bills, we took on angel funding to get us to this point, and will be looking to put together another round soon. Our current overhead is pretty small, so we think that some market feedback about what we have and where we should go will give us the clues we need with regard to the size of the round, etc. That said, all commentary is appreciated! Thanks Randy!
Randy: Thanks Wendell for taking the time to introduce Splice to my readers.