Ira Belsky made a trailer for a film about Nikola Tesla that did not exist. He said the whole exercise, from the first prompt to the final edit, took four or five hours. The trailer was a test of Artlist Studio, the production platform his company had spent years working toward. The more revealing detail was where the test followed him: into the evening, while he was putting his children to bed. A product demonstration had become difficult to put down.
In his telling, musicians had long enjoyed an advantage he envied. They could imagine something in the morning and hear a finished track that afternoon. Filmmakers usually faced a longer journey, with people, places and budgets standing between an idea and a screen. Belsky had spent a decade building tools around that problem. Now he was behaving like a customer who had just discovered them.
That is a useful place to meet Artlist’s co-founder and co-CEO. The title suggests meetings and financial forecasts. The trailer suggests someone still preoccupied with getting a shot to work. His career has become much larger than his original complaint, but the complaint remains recognizable: why should making the thing in your head require so much negotiation with everything around it?
The soundtrack that would not cooperate
Before Artlist, Belsky worked as a cinematographer and editor, making promotional films, internet commercials and music videos. He was self-taught. In the work itself, music was a persistent difficulty. The affordable tracks could feel wrong for the film; the music he wanted could come with a price and a licensing process poorly suited to a small production.
By the middle of 2014, he had arrived at the idea of an annual subscription. Artlist’s public beta followed in March 2016. His ambition was plain enough: bring good music within reach of the filmmakers who could shoot and edit a video but could not spend like a television production. “I knew that there had to be a way of providing excellent music in an affordable manner,” he said.
A subscription also changed the emotional arithmetic of choosing a soundtrack. Paying separately for each song makes every experiment another purchasing decision. Access to a catalog lets the editor listen, try, discard and try again. That matters because music is part of the film’s meaning. A bargain track that changes the mood is an expensive way to save money.
Four friends, one very specific customer
Artlist took shape in Kibbutz Afikim in northern Israel with four founders: Belsky, technologist Itzik Elbaz, and musicians Eyal Raz and Assaf Ayalon. Their backgrounds covered different pieces of the transaction. Someone needed the music. Someone understood the people making it. Someone had to build the service. The arrangement began with a practical use for each person at the table.
Belsky designed early versions of the website in Photoshop. He had expected the business might sit alongside his filmmaking work. There is something almost comic about planning a modest sideline whose eventual product will consume the evening too. The scale changed; his tendency to get involved in the making seems to have survived.
The early audience came through places he already knew as a filmmaker, including specialist blogs and video creators. By September 2026, recounting the beginning to other founders, he was still emphasizing the simplest customer test: he had wanted a service he would personally buy. His advice had grown with the company. Founders building for a profession they do not know, he argued, should bring practitioners into the team.
Four founders. Complementary skills. A service built around the person at the editing desk.
The music still needed musicians
There were two sides to making this proposition work. Filmmakers wanted access; musicians needed a reason to supply the catalog. Artlist’s original model offered annual access and unlimited downloads, with completed projects using properly licensed music remaining covered. The attraction was a repeatable relationship, rather than a separate negotiation each time a film needed a song.
For independent musicians, the company presented licensing as another route to income. A piece of music could travel into projects made far from the artist’s own audience. The catalog therefore depended on more than accumulation. Selection mattered. The customer was buying a reasonable chance of finding something worth using, and the musician was supplying work with a life beyond the download button.
Expansion followed the sequence of a filmmaker’s needs. Artgrid arrived in April 2019 with stock footage. A sound-effects library followed in 2020. The same person choosing a track might also need a convincing room tone, an impact or a transition. Artlist could meet that person again at another point in the edit.
Advertising to people who make advertisements
In June 2020, Artlist announced a $48 million investment round led by KKR, with Elephant participating. Belsky described the money as a way to speed product development and expansion into adjacent categories. The company later added Motion Array and FXhome through acquisitions, broadening its reach into assets and editing software. The original music subscription was becoming part of a larger production business.
Growth brought a particularly fussy audience. Artlist sold to people who spent their working lives judging video. An advertisement for a filmmaking tool was itself a work sample. Belsky’s answer was to combine measurable acquisition with the care usually associated with brand campaigns. The sales pitch had to hold up in front of customers who knew how the pitch was made.
He developed that argument in his writing about brand. Every customer interaction, he maintained, contributes to the promise a company makes: product quality, support and advertising all belong to the same experience. A conversion chart can tell a team that an ad worked today. It gives a less complete account of what a customer will expect when the company tries something unfamiliar tomorrow.
By 2025, his marketing discussions included experiments comparing places exposed to a campaign with places that were not. Yet he also used Porsche to explain accumulated trust: an established name carries expectations into a new category. That was a consequential argument for Artlist. It was about to ask customers to follow it into tools quite different from a music library.
When the catalog meets the generator
Generative AI made Artlist’s old strengths newly complicated. A catalog takes time to assemble. A generator offers to make something on demand. For a business built around helping creators find existing material, that change reaches into the product’s purpose. Belsky’s response has been to focus on the decisions a filmmaker still wants to make.
In July 2025, he argued that impressive generated imagery could leave a creator settling for an approximation. The missing capability was precise direction: shaping an output so it corresponded to an intention. He wanted software that respected the small decisions of production. Anyone who has accepted the least wrong version of a shot will recognize the distinction he was trying to make.
His March 2026 position on adoption was similarly practical. Rather than persuade every skeptic, he wanted to build useful tools and let creators discover their value. He acknowledged concerns about losing authorship and described creativity as a sequence of choices. That is his case for AI, and it sets a demanding test for his own products: the speed has to leave the creator with meaningful decisions to make.
The commercial results were substantial. Artlist reported $260 million in annual recurring revenue at the end of 2025 and $300 million at the start of 2026. In April it launched Studio, organized around production tasks such as casting, locations and camera angles. These are company-reported figures for the business, alongside a product ambition. Neither guarantees that the next film will be worth watching.
The cost of changing the company
The transition also changed the organization. In an August 2026 conversation, Belsky and Elbaz discussed rebuilding Artlist around AI. Around 200 of roughly 500 employees had left during the restructuring. Belsky described managers designing departments afresh, then assigning people to the new structure. He said saving money had not been the objective.
For a profile of a founder, that belongs alongside the revenue milestones. A company can expand commercially while becoming smaller as an employer. The distinction is particularly sharp here because Belsky’s product argument centers on giving people more creative agency. Organizational change imposes its own consequences on the people who helped build the tools.
He and Elbaz were also describing much shorter planning cycles. Decisions were being reconsidered monthly and work organized weekly. The co-CEO arrangement had lasted through a decade of growth; now both were discussing how much they themselves needed to change. Being the original customer offers insight into a product. Running the company requires answering for what happens beyond the editing screen.
“Concept is king.”
Ira Belsky · On creative direction
Back to the empty frame
Belsky’s practical Studio advice begins with the setting. Establish the world and its characters before becoming absorbed in individual shots. Start wide, work out where people belong, then move toward closer views. A location determines light, color and mood. His recommended workflow lets directing and editing overlap, with choices revisited as the scene develops.
One technique is to begin with an empty location and bring characters into it. It is a pleasingly literal expression of his project: make room for the idea, then work out who and what belongs there. His testing had included more than 30 hours inside Studio. The advice comes with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has been clicking the buttons himself.
Away from the product, his public answers have a more domestic scale. In 2022, asked about a worthwhile purchase, he chose Purim costumes for his children and the pleasure of seeing his daughter dressed as Ariel. He also defended young people’s ambitions to become creators. To him, the desire to make videos expressed the same creative appetite earlier generations brought to acting or music.
That makes the Tesla trailer more than a convenient demonstration. It returns Belsky to a familiar position: a person with an image in mind, trying to make it visible. He now has a company, a co-CEO and a much longer list of responsibilities. The unfinished film still gets his attention. At bedtime, apparently, it can be rather persuasive.