He wanted better music for his videos. A decade after co-founding Artlist, Ira Belsky is still chasing the distance between the film in his head and the one he can actually make.

He helped turn a music-licensing problem into Artlist. Now Itzik Elbaz is betting that AI video needs more room for human decisions - even as it forces him to remake his own company.

Artlist’s CMO came up through economics, finance and user acquisition. Now he is making a more artistic wager: when machines produce endless options, human judgment becomes the scarce thing.
A filmmaker’s complaint about expensive music licensing became a $300 million recurring-revenue business. The next wager is harder: make generative AI behave less like a slot machine and more like a film set.