Splice: The Art of the Chop in the Digital Age
A Product Analysis
Moonlighting in Music Production (sorta, sometimes, kinda)
I love the feeling of flipping a sample. First letting the sample play once, just to know what we’re working with. Then to really lean into that vibe switch, when that original tune gets chopped and pitched up and around into something completely new. Whether it’s a classic hit or an obscure vinyl find, a good flip instills in me a pure delight, hearing what newness can be generated from existing music.
A Short History
At its heart, sampling is about making the language of music accessible to anyone with the tools and will to dissect their favorite audio, evolving their inspirations into the truest depictions of their sonic vision. It’s most common in underground hip hop (my favorite genre), but the technique has become hugely influential, especially to EDM, indie, and pop — it’s now a supremely dominant practice in the music industry.
Despite the importance of sampling to the music landscape, accessibility has been neutered by the decades of copyright lawsuits and industry exploitation. What began as a notion to preserve credit for the originators of the sample became a way for industry giants to comb through literally any song that exists and profit off the slightest evidence of uncleared sampling. Sampling became a navigational landmine and prohibitively expensive, locking an entire style of music creation behind gates of privilege where only the most successful of artists at this point can sample relatively freely. Not even the estates of tragically deceased artists like J Dilla can escape the scavenging for sample lawsuits. Even so, sampling has become so instrumental (literally) to music production that artists at all stages in their career still endeavor to hide sick samples in their music, regardless of the risks.
The Art of the Chop in the Digital Age
Enter Splice. Splice Sounds is a product that, through a subscription model, allows musicians to download royalty free sounds: drum hits, instrumental loops, vocal runs — something for every genre, all for use without copyright risk. Royalty free music is nothing new, but manufactured stock music has not historically been worth using or investing in. I’m talking about the muzaky jingles that come with an apple product, or the amateur tracks from Free Music Archive that I used to put in the background of my high school video projects.
But with Splice, any musician can publish their own sounds and receive a cut for every download they get, incentivizing both the creation and sharing of high quality audio. Splice also leverages partnerships with top music producers to release sample packs that guarantee refinement and draw users to the platform.
The downfall of sampling in its original form came from the industry aggressively plugging up the avenues for creativity. Splice instead dramatically lowers the barrier of entry to sample in a legal way, neutralizing the several decade long standoff between publishers and samplers. And so, in the same way that Spotify’s pervasiveness largely killed online music pirating culture, Splice attempts to do the same for illegal sampling.
So how does it look as a product?
Splice makes finding sounds pretty straightforward. The website UI is pretty slick — my favorite feature is the simple and beautiful down key to audition. It makes parsing through hundreds of sounds in a single pack really fast, and I can pretty much get into a listening flow state, instantly deciding whether I want a sound based on a gut feeling. It’s a basic design choice that is great for stickiness, because I can sit there for hours auditioning and saving great sounds.
It’s especially powerful paired with Splice’s filter and tag system. I can sort by genre, instrument, BPM, Key. If I’m in the middle of a project and I want a trap-flavored high hat from a particular artist, Splice keeps me from losing my rhythm because I’ll be able to rapidly audition the exact criteria I need.
There’s also the killer, one of a kind feature, Splice Similar Sounds. As advertised, it analyzes a sample to find several similar sounding sounds. Finding a particular vibe to work towards can be elusive, and having similarity algorithms on your side is indispensable.
And ultimately, Splice is pretty affordable. For the price of a single al pastor burrito ($7.99 base subscription), users get 100 credits a month. With most sounds costing just 1 credit, this allows most musicians (myself included) way more freedom than they need at an accessible price point.
To capture what these features amount to, Splice just makes music easier. A huge element of what makes sampling powerful in general is that it is no longer up to a musician to generate a completely new and beautiful sound from scratch, they simply have to modify an existing one. No need to own a guitar, or play a drumset, or learn the piano, or even electronically synthesize a texture. Sampling lowers the barrier to entry, and Splice exponentiates that accessibility with the power of the internet and the cloud: an enormous database of sounds just a click away.
The Shifting Music Landscape
Splice has shifted the landscape for digital music producers in a major way, but as in any market, there’s plenty of competition. The sample-centric breakthrough that garnered enormous success and facilitated Splice’s $57M in Series C funding has a major problem with defensibility, and imitators have already arrived. The Music giant Native Instruments has the clout and weight to throw around with sounds.com (just look at the SEO on that URL). And Loopcloud has already been getting buzz for its compatibility with Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and a sample organization system that blows Splice’s out of the water.
Let’s observe how the features stack up with competing products:
The features with low defensibility are the Sample Library and the Plugin Downloads—Splice only currently has its edge because of their first-mover advantage granting a larger library and a larger user base.
Therefore, I suggest that the opportunity for Splice to improve lies in DAW Integration and Project Version Control.
Where Do We Go From Here?
DAW Integration
DAW Integration is about how the sound library interfaces with whatever DAW application the musician likes to make their music. Splice’s most optimized elements—browsing new sounds, hot announcements, community interaction—all run through the website quite fluidly. But after I download all those sounds, the most important part of the producing process—getting audio files into the DAW—gets funneled through an underdeveloped Splice App that offers very little flexibility.
As it is, the Splice App is so barebones that I prefer to do as much as possible on the website. Its filtering capabilities are actually inferior to the website’s, but the way it is set up the Splice App is still mandatory to use at some point in a music making process. So a good start would be to at least replicate the features of the Splice website within the app, to keep things modularized and workflows tight.
Unfortunately LoopCloud is far ahead with DAW synergy, because they offer a plugin that can be used directly within any DAW, rather than in a separate app. It could be ideal for Splice to develop such a feature, but something so advanced is quite far from where Splice is in that department. It could be better to focus on something that Splice has a unique advantage in…
Project Version Control
Splice didn’t begin as a sample library megacenter. The original idea, kicked off in 2015, was to create version control for music production, a Github for music. Musicians can save their projects to the cloud, easily collaborate with other production talent, and share their progress in an online community, all for free.
This was the core of the original startup concept and still exists in Splice Studio, but it’s clear that the feature has been heavily deprioritized next to the actually profitable Splice Sounds model. Half of the version control functionality is on the Desktop app and the other half is rather unsatisfactorily maintained on the website. The website on the Studio side of things is not nearly as refined as the Sounds side. For instance, Ableton LIVE 10 files are supported, but the new project page is not even updated to support it.
However while Splice Sounds has the bulk of Splice’s userbase, Studio is where the power of retention lies. Music centric version control is a unique functionality that, with enough refinement, could make Splice the go to environment for every musician. Studio has the potential to be analogous to not just Github, but, in the absence of competition, git itself: omnipresent, revolutionary, mandatory.
Splice must know this, especially since it was the original idea for the company. At the same time, many Splice Sounds users don’t seem to even register Splice Studio on their radar. I understand why the free features would fall to the wayside, especially with the booming sampling library. But, there may be a world in which Splice Studio is so advanced and seamlessly integrated with the musicians already drawn to Splice Sounds that the competition fades into irrelevancy.
This is first and foremost a love letter to Splice, who made my obsession with sampling graspable in a way I never really imagined!
