Splice Studio

» see splice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Splice was founded on 9 October 2013 by Matt Aimonetti and Steve Martocci, who had sold GroupMe to Skype two years earlier. The product they founded it on was Studio: a desktop app that watched your project folder, uploaded every save to the cloud, and gave you a revision history for a song the way a developer has one for a repository. A private beta ran on macOS from that October, with Windows months behind it, and the thing opened to everyone in September 2014.

What it did was unglamorous and useful. It understood the project formats of Ableton Live, Logic Pro X, FL Studio, GarageBand and Studio One, so it could sync a session rather than a rendered file. You added a collaborator to a project and they pulled the whole session down, plugin list included. Stems and bounces attached to each revision so somebody could listen without opening a DAW at all. It cost nothing, which was the point: the money was supposed to come later from somewhere else.

Somewhere else turned out to be Sounds, the sample subscription Splice launched afterward, and that business worked. The company raised more than $150 million across five rounds and was valued near half a billion dollars in 2021. By its own admission the collaboration feature had not been a focus since 2017, which means Studio spent the last six years of its life being maintained by a company whose attention was somewhere else entirely.

~ the case file ~

~ what the letter said ~

On 9 March 2023 the CEO, Kakul Srivastava, published a note titled "Our journey to make Splice better". It is a tidy piece of corporate writing and unusually honest in one line: "Simply put, we haven't been able to provide the quality of experience of which we can be proud. In fact, keeping it functional has actually slowed us down from delivering more value, faster." The justification offered to users was that they had "many great alternatives for file sharing available to them", which is true and also a quiet admission that a session-aware sync tool had been reduced in the company's mind to a file locker.

The shutdown ran in three steps. That same day, 9 March, attaching new stems or bounces stopped working, as did adding collaborators and creating projects on the web. On 7 April 2023 the Desktop App stopped accepting new projects while keeping the old ones readable. The last step removed Studio from the menu and the Projects tab from the desktop, after which nothing synced and nothing opened.

~ the date that moved ~

Every article written about this says the last step happened on 31 May 2023, and every one of them is quoting the letter correctly. The letter changed. The capture taken on 9 March reads "Then, on May 31, 2023", and so does the capture from 10 April. By 4 June the same page reads "Then, on June 5th, 2023", and that is still what it says today. Somewhere in those seven weeks Splice gave Studio five more days and did not announce it.

So the grave takes 5 June 2023, from the page itself, and keeps 9 March in the record because that is the day the feature stopped being able to do anything new. Every article about it is quoting an older draft of a URL that was quietly edited underneath them.

~ after studio ~

The company is alive and did exactly what the letter promised: better search, similar-sounds matching, AI exploration of the sample catalog, a rent-to-own marketplace for plugins and DAWs. The Community tab was redirected to a Discord server on the day of the announcement. A company founded on collaboration infrastructure now runs its community inside somebody else's chat app.

I never made music with anyone over the internet, so Studio was not mine to lose. The part of it I can read is the part any engineer can: version control with the vocabulary swapped out, commits renamed revisions and merge conflicts politely not mentioned. Producers talked about it the way developers talk about a repo holding a year of work. When it closed, the first thing users asked for publicly was a way to bulk download everything stored in there.

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