Boomy

A button that makes songs

Here is a fact that sounds made up but isn't: people have created more than 20 million songs on Boomy, and a large share of those people would tell you, flatly, that they are not musicians. That is the whole pitch, really. Boomy is a web app where you choose a style, click a button, and about 30 seconds later a fully arranged, production-ready track exists that did not exist before. You can then nudge the tempo, mute an instrument, generate lyrics, swap the vocal tone, and - if you're paying - send the thing off to Spotify and Apple Music and 40 or so other platforms, where it will, in theory, earn you royalties.

The reason this is interesting is not that the technology is impressive, though it is. It's that Boomy is quietly running an enormous experiment on a belief most people hold about themselves, which is that they aren't musical. Boomy's answer, delivered at the scale of tens of millions of tracks, is: you might be wrong about that. When you remove years of practice as the price of admission, it turns out a lot of people have something they want to make.

The Spotify saga

If you only heard about Boomy once, it was probably in May 2023, when Spotify removed a large batch of Boomy-linked tracks - reportedly around 7% of the songs Boomy had published - amid a crackdown on "artificial streaming," the practice of using bots to fake plays and skim royalties. The story got told, understandably, as "AI music company caught up in streaming fraud." Boomy denied any role, saying it is categorically against manipulation and that there was no evidence it was involved in the fake streams Spotify detected.

The more useful lesson is buried under the headline. The hard part of AI music, it turns out, isn't generating the music. Generating music is easy - that's why 20 million songs exist. The hard part is proving that the economic ecosystem around all that music is honest, because when you make creation nearly free, you also make abuse nearly free. When the marginal cost of a new song is basically zero, the incentive to flood a royalty pool with junk is not zero. Every platform in this space eventually collides with that math.

Boomy's response is the part that should get more attention than the takedown did. It reestablished its Spotify pipeline, put limits on free accounts, and then went and did the unglamorous infrastructure work: it partnered with the streaming-fraud detection firm Beatdapp to verify the authenticity of every stream, signed a first-of-its-kind global distribution deal with Warner Music Group's ADA Worldwide, and earned "Fairly Trained" certification confirming it doesn't train its models on copyrighted music without permission. The flashy demo is what gets you press. The trust infrastructure is what lets you keep a distribution deal with a major label.

Who built it

Boomy's founders came from inside the music industry, not from outside it looking to disrupt. That origin shows in the company's insistence that humans stay in the creative loop.

What Boomy is really arguing

Every disruptive creative tool gets the same objection, and it always sounds like a question about quality but is really a question about permission. Photography got it. Sampling got it. Drum machines got it. Boomy is getting it now: is a song you made by clicking a button really yours, and is it really music? You can argue that either way. The more interesting thing to watch is what tens of millions of first-time creators actually do once nobody is standing at the door deciding who's allowed in.

Boomy's stated ambition reaches past streaming charts. Mitchell has talked about "functional music" - the background scores, the content soundtracks, the utility uses that don't live or die on a Spotify playlist - and about clarifying licensing standards for all the ways AI music might get used. That's a company betting that the demand for made-to-order music is far larger than the demand to become a charting artist, and that most of it has never been served because making music was too hard, too slow, or too expensive.

Whether Boomy ends up the winner in consumer AI music - it competes with Suno, Udio, Soundful, Mubert and others - is genuinely unsettled. But it got somewhere early that matters: it made the responsible path and the growth path the same road. Clean training data, fraud detection, a major-label distribution deal. Demos fade. Trust compounds. In a category where the easy move is to generate as much as possible and ask questions later, choosing to answer the questions first is the interesting bet.

Interviews & demos

Hear the founder make the case in his own words, and see the tool in action.