GroupMe Co-Founder Steve Martocci Just Snagged $2.75 Million For His New Music Startup, Splice
It wasn't.
Martocci is working on a music startup called Splice with Matt Aimonetti, a former LivingSocial and Sony PlayStation engineer.
Back in August, both Martocci and GroupMe co-founder Jared Hecht left to pursue their own respective startups.
Today, Splice raised a $2.75 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures with participation from True Ventures, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Code Advisors, David Tisch, Rob Wiesenthal, David Tisch, and Seth Goldstein.
The music industry is arguably a hard one to find success in. Whether it's dealing with record labels or trying to convince people to pay for your content, it can be rough. Just think about what's happening with Turntable.fm, the once super-hyped social music platform. It's currently fighting to stay alive.
That's why Splice is taking an entirely different approach.
"We have an opportunity to disrupt the music industry from the creators out," Martocci says. "It's the network of creators and content that's unique."
Splice is also opening up its community site, blog and a waitlist for the private beta today. Splice helps electronic dance music creators save, share, collaborate, and remix music by working alongside professional music creation tools like Ableton Live.
For one, Splice offer musicians access to all of their revisions in the cloud.
Let's say you made an awesome song using Ableton Live, but kept working on it. Next thing you know, the song sounds totally different and you can't remember what made the older version sound so good. That's where Splice comes in. With Splice, you can access your entire revision history - a feature that isn't possible with Ableton Live.
Splice is a downloadable client for your computer. Once you create your tracks in Ableton Live, the majority of your future interactions between with music will happen on the web.
Splice also aims to help artists better understand the building blocks, or DNA, of a song. Splice lets musicians see and analyze each specific element of a track, be it a MIDI, a clip, a musical instrument, etc.
Programmers have a wide variety of tools to help them develop and understand code. The Splice team says those same principles should apply to the music creation process.
"We care about that never-ending, unfinished piece of work," Martocci says. "We look at two-channel tracks like you'll listen to as the compiled code."
Martocci says he's always been the guy who's never been talented enough to make music, but knows how to support musicians.
"I've always been the guy who's never been talented enough to make music, but know how to support musicians," Martocci says. "It allows me to not start from scratch."
Check out some images of the interface below.
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