Before Alex Jae Mitchell learned the language of product launches, training data and streaming fraud, he learned where to sit. In an orchestra, the first chair is both geography and judgment. It places a violinist closest to the conductor and asks that player to lead the section. Mitchell remembers the competition as fierce, the seat as earned and the challenge as renewable. He kept trying for it. Sometimes he won. Sometimes he did not.
That small ritual explains a useful tension in his career. Mitchell is competitive enough to want the chair, but he has spent the past decade building a larger room. Boomy, the Berkeley company he co-founded with Matthew Cohen Santorelli in 2018, lets a person begin making music in a browser without first buying an instrument, booking a studio or mastering production software. The interface replaces the intimidating blank session with choices. Pick a direction. Generate. Listen. Reject. Adjust. Save. A first attempt can happen before the beginner has learned all the reasons it should feel difficult.
Mitchell came to that idea from inside music. He says he started performing at about four, was classically trained on violin, then went electric in high school and college. Early YouTube attention carried his performances beyond the usual recital circuit. He played Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, toured internationally, shared bills with decorated artists and spent years in more than a dozen bands and groups around New York City. His favorite performer, he once said, is Itzhak Perlman. The choice fits: virtuosity with a human voice.
Movement IThe accidental merchant
The internet gave Mitchell another education. A young performer with an audience has inventory, distribution and customer service whether he uses those words or not. He sold albums through iTunes, sheet music and tickets to shows. He busked. He has described the resulting income as accidental: people wanted the music, so he sold it. Yet the accident revealed the system around the song. Music moved through files, platforms, venues, wallets and word of mouth. The art was personal. The route to an audience was a product problem.
At Fordham University, where he studied media and music from 2008 to 2012, those strands could sit in the same course load. He also studied scoring to picture at Juilliard in 2011. His personal archive still contains the evidence: violin performances, compositions, collaborations and a scoring exercise called “Adidas.” It is less a polished museum than a workbench. You can hear someone testing formats before he began building the tools around them.
His early ventures followed the path between music and listener. He co-built hypetree, a music-discovery platform, and worked as head of product at Testing Mom. Then, in 2013, he helped start Audiokite Research. Audiokite addressed an anxious question every musician recognizes: is the song working for anyone who did not make it? The service played tracks for targeted groups of everyday listeners, collected their reactions and turned subjective responses into usable reports. Garage bands and established music companies could buy a clearer read before spending more on a release.
The recurring product loop
Audiokite won the SF MusicTech Startup Innovators Challenge in 2015. ReverbNation acquired it in 2016, and Mitchell stayed on in product management and as head of Audiokite. The sale matters, but the continuity matters more. Discovery asked how listeners find music. Audiokite asked what listeners think. Boomy would ask who gets to make it. Each company moved one step closer to the source.
Movement IIA create button with consequences
Boomy launched its platform in 2019 with a deliberately broad promise. Mitchell did not frame the prospective user as an aspiring producer with money for plug-ins. He spoke about every person being able to express themselves through music, regardless of studio time, instruments or a powerful computer. In his telling, AI was a bridge across a skills and resources gap. The song still began with a person choosing to cross.
The distinction became central as generative AI moved from a niche technical subject to a cultural argument. Mitchell calls himself a musician and a policy advocate for generative music. At US Copyright Office sessions in 2020 and 2023, he argued that technology-enabled creators form a new creative class and that human-made choices inside generative systems deserve serious treatment. He also described Boomy’s framework as designed and influenced by its musicians, rather than trained without permission on third-party musical works.
Scale sharpened every unresolved edge. By 2023, Boomy users had made millions of tracks, though only a small percentage were released to streaming services. That May, Spotify removed some Boomy-created releases after detecting suspicious streaming and new uploads were briefly paused. The episode produced an irresistible shorthand - computers making music for computers to hear - but the mechanics were more ordinary. Artificial streaming had existed long before easy song generation. Boomy said it opposed manipulation, froze suspect activity when alerted and worked with industry partners. Curated deliveries resumed within days.
The company’s next actions were more revealing than its statement. Boomy partnered with Beatdapp, which detects streaming fraud. It signed a global agreement with ADA Worldwide, Warner Music Group’s independent distribution arm, to market and distribute selected artists from Boomy’s roster. In early 2024, it became one of the first companies certified under Fairly Trained’s Licensed Model program, which requires that copyrighted training works be licensed. Access needed rails. Abundance needed filters. The creator economy could not be separated from the trust systems underneath it.
Movement IIIFrom instant song to instrument
Boomy’s recent partnerships suggest a subtle change in the company’s role. The first version was legible as a destination: visit the website, make a song. The newer version is becoming a component inside somebody else’s creative flow. In September 2025, Boomy and Google Cloud put the Lyria 2 music model into LoopMagic, adding a mode that generates 30-second audio for producers to carry into Logic Pro, Ableton Live, FL Studio or another digital audio workstation. The output was no longer necessarily the finished object. It could be raw material.
Yamaha Music Innovations pushed that idea closer to an instrument. In January 2026, it began technical verification of Boomy’s sample generation within the SEQTRAK app. At the NAMM Show, invited creators could type a description, generate a desired sound and use it directly in production and performance with Yamaha’s compact music workstation. The scene closes a satisfying loop: a violinist who went electric now helps test software that lets a prompt feed a piece of hardware.
It also answers one common fear with product design rather than rhetoric. A generated sample does not finish a musician’s work. It gives the musician something to cut, layer, reject, distort or play. Mitchell’s original consumer proposition and this professional one share the same verb: begin. For the newcomer, the system removes the fear of an empty project. For the experienced producer, it may loosen a stuck idea. Neither use guarantees a compelling song. Tools can widen entry without abolishing taste.
This has been Mitchell’s consistent territory. His career does not move cleanly from artist to executive, as if one identity replaced another. It moves back and forth across the bridge. Performance taught him attention. Busking taught him exchange. Audiokite taught him structured listening. ReverbNation taught him product at distribution scale. Boomy turned those lessons into a wager on participation, then forced him to confront what participation looks like when it arrives by the million.
CodaThe seat and the room
There is still something of first chair in Mitchell’s public style. He enters arguments, speaks at conferences and universities, submits policy comments and makes the case for his category. He describes himself as battle-tested. A former colleague’s public recommendation emphasizes tenacity, business judgment and the rare ability to work across growth and product. Those are competitive traits. They are also useful when a product sits where copyright law, platform incentives and creative identity collide.
But a browser full of create buttons proposes a different kind of orchestra. Nobody must win a blind audition before making a sound. The section can be enormous, undisciplined, surprising and occasionally exhausting. Some participants will press once and leave. Others may discover that the first generated loop makes them curious about rhythm, arrangement, a digital audio workstation or even an instrument. Mitchell’s aspiration depends on that second step: access as the beginning of practice, not its substitute.
The hard part of democratizing a creative act is that the democracy arrives with all its mess. More music means more experiments and more clutter, more new voices and more attempts to game distribution. Boomy’s history already contains both the invitation and the clean-up. Mitchell’s job is to keep them in the same frame: lower the threshold while raising confidence in what crosses it.
A first chair is scarce by design. Music does not have to be. Mitchell built his career by noticing that difference, first as a performer trying to reach an audience and then as a founder trying to widen the field of performers. The enduring question around Boomy is not whether a machine can produce sound. We know it can. The useful question is what a person does after the first sound comes back.