It feels like it is fairly well understood that the Internet enables unprecedented sharing of information, ideas and content. At USV we have participated in a bunch of services that make it easier to share – such as Twitter, Behance, Skillshare, Tumblr, YouNow, Foursquare, and others.
At the same time, as sharing has become more widespread, we are now seeing the emergence and growth of services aimed initially at creators themselves. Tools, intertwined with communities, to enable, assist, produce and support the act of creation itself. Services that help people create media fearlessly, and to do without costly distribution or other intermediaries. Wattpad, for creating and telling stories, is an example of this.
Today we are announcing our investment in another such service, Splice, which is designed to enhance the musical creation process.
Matt Aimonetti, Steve Martocci and team are developing a platform that is comprised of both creation and collaboration components. And just as artists today are unprecedentedly collaborative – remix culture being just one example – Splice will assist people with a set of tools inserted into the very creation process that can take music, iterate it, break it down, and fork it, as developers might do with code. After the creation process, they can then collaborate by sharing sounds, stems, components with others.
Using Splice, someone with a specific point of view about a certain genre, a certain sound, an instrument, can more easily create and share arrangements, mixes and remixes. It will give people a chance to allocate more time to that part of music creation. In this way, Splice may even expand the notion of who and what a creator is, even who a musician is. That’s something we are thrilled to support.