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The Company That Made a Flop, Then Made It the Sound of Modern Music
Ikutaro Kakehashi built drum machines nobody wanted. Then a generation of broke producers dug them out of pawn shops - and rewrote pop music with them.
The Synth That Took Nine Years to Ship
Tangible Instruments raised $94,713 on Kickstarter in 2015 to build a pocket melody machine. It shipped to backers in November 2024. Here is what took so long, and why people still wanted it.
Splice
Splice is a cloud-based music creation platform that turned the sample pack into a streaming service. Its subscription gives producers royalty-free access to millions of human-made loops, one-shots, presets, and MIDI files, plus rent-to-own pricing on premium plugins and an expanding suite of AI tools (Create Mode, Variations, Magic Fit) that compensate the original sample creators each time their sound feeds a new track.