On the heels of boombox.io's $7M seed fundraise led by Forerunner, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya sit down with boombox co-founders India Lossman and Max Mathieu for a special episode straight from super{summit} 2023 in New Orleans! Tom, Vivek, India and Max discuss their backgrounds as musicians and techies building a platform where music producers can store, version, and track all of their music files; collect time-stamped feedback on audio files; communicate on the go with iOS/Android apps; manage splits for songwriting and recordings; and create simple legally-binding contracts for song ownership. The gang also discusses some cool generative AI features the boombox team has built into the app: boombox.io leverages Generative AI to enrich and extend a musician’s creative process with Boombot, a friendly, AI-powered collaborator that generates new ideas and fleshes out partial ones to make music creation more dynamic, faster and smarter. Boombot helps users spitball lyrics and song titles, suggests chord progressions, and turns them into MIDI files creators can pull directly into their digital audio workstation.
On the heels of boombox.io's $7M seed fundraise led by Forerunner, Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya sit down with boombox co-founders India Lossman and Max Mathieu for a special episode straight from super{summit} 2023 in New Orleans!
Tom, Vivek, India and Max discuss their backgrounds as musicians and techies building a platform where music producers can store, version, and track all of their music files; collect time-stamped feedback on audio files; communicate on the go with iOS/Android apps; manage splits for songwriting and recordings; and create simple legally-binding contracts for song ownership.
The gang also discusses some cool generative AI features the boombox team has built into the app: boombox.io leverages Generative AI to enrich and extend a musician’s creative process with Boombot, a friendly, AI-powered collaborator that generates new ideas and fleshes out partial ones to make music creation more dynamic, faster and smarter. Boombot helps users spitball lyrics and song titles, suggests chord progressions, and turns them into MIDI files creators can pull directly into their digital audio workstation.
Listen to the episode and read the transcript at superset.com
Guests: India Lossman and Max Mathieu, co-founders of boombox.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/india-lossman/; https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxencemathieu/
boombox: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boomboxapp/
TW: https://twitter.com/boomboxupdates
Super{set} Twitter:@supersetstudio, @ClosedSeshPod
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/superset-studio/
Twitter: @tommychavez, @vsvaidya
Tom Chavez:
Welcome to this special edition of The {Closed} Session from New Orleans. I'm Tom Chavez.
Vivek Vaidya:
And I'm Vivek Vaidya.
Tom Chavez:
Vivek. Here we are in New Orleans. Why are we here? What's going on?
Vivek Vaidya:
We are here for the second edition of super{set}, which is our annual event that we host for all of the techies, engineers, product people, sales engineers, whoever wants to attend, really.
Tom Chavez:
It's like techy palooza.
Vivek Vaidya:
It's techy palooza.
Tom Chavez:
For engineers who work at super{set} [inaudible 00:03:31].
Vivek Vaidya:
That's right.
Tom Chavez:
There's laughing, there's dancing.
Vivek Vaidya:
Drinking.
Tom Chavez:
There's drinking.
Vivek Vaidya:
Yes.
Tom Chavez:
Ideally a little bit of learning and comparison of notes.
Vivek Vaidya:
Yeah, a little bit.
Tom Chavez:
Just a tiny, tiny bit of learning. We try to really prioritize the drinking and the eating and the... Right?
Vivek Vaidya:
Yeah.
Tom Chavez:
Okay, first was first.
Vivek Vaidya:
Today was the first day. What was the most interesting part for you?
Tom Chavez:
Well, I don't want you to get a big head, but your interview with Brian Christian. I got a huge man crush on Brian Christian, the author of The Alignment Problem. Very insightful discussion there with him about machines and how we get them to behave and do what we human beings want them to.
Vivek Vaidya:
Yeah. One of the more insightful parts of the conversation for me was this notion that, going forward, we're going to have rate labelers.
Tom Chavez:
Yeah, right.
Vivek Vaidya:
Because this whole movement around reinforcement learning with human feedback is going to foster this era of people who are going to just sit and label
Tom Chavez:
And in the spirit of multi-layer neural networks, here's my big idea. Can I drop it on you?
Vivek Vaidya:
Please.
Tom Chavez:
I want have Raiders of the Raiders. Yeah.
Vivek Vaidya:
Yeah.
Tom Chavez:
Okay.
Vivek Vaidya:
What happens when you keep doing that, Tom?
Tom Chavez:
Then, we're going to have Raiders of the Raiders of the Raiders of the first order labelers.
Vivek Vaidya:
E-rate.
Tom Chavez:
Go ponder that for a little bit. So, speaking of machines and human beings cooperating, getting along, we're excited to have this special edition with two of our co-founders from a hot, hot company at super{set} that we're really excited about called Boombox. Max Mathieu, say hi.
Max Mathieu:
Hi. My name is Max.
Tom Chavez:
Max. How did I do on the pronunciation of your last name?
Max Mathieu:
Pretty good.
Tom Chavez:
I nailed it, right?
Max Mathieu:
Yeah.
Tom Chavez:
All right.
Vivek Vaidya:
You can say he did a shitty job, it's okay.
Tom Chavez:
Why do you have to get like that? Damn it. I really nailed it, Max.
Max Mathieu:
That was good.
Tom Chavez:
Mathieu, he's French.
Max Mathieu:
Correct.
Tom Chavez:
One more time.
Max Mathieu:
Do you want me to say it?
Tom Chavez:
Yeah, you say it now.
Max Mathieu:
So, my real first name is Maxence, and my full name is Maxence Mathieu.
Vivek Vaidya:
Maxence Mathieu.
India Lossman:
It sounds better when said it.
Tom Chavez:
You butchered it.
Vivek Vaidya:
I did not.
Tom Chavez:
His is way better.
Vivek Vaidya:
Well, of course, his is better
Max Mathieu:
It's like the whole world and the US trying to say my name.
Tom Chavez:
Can we do this real fast? So, I worked with Vivek for 20 plus years, and then there was a woman named Jen who was walking around in our last company. She would stop and say, "Well, I don't know about that. I'm going to have to talk to Vivek." She would do this little thing with an E on the Vivek. I'm like, "Why is she carrying on that?" It's Vivek. Then, I come to find out. I've been saying his name wrong for 20 plus years. You think you know somebody, you think you would tell me, "Hey man, you're saying my name wrong." Doesn't say a word.
Vivek Vaidya:
As I said earlier, I'm a very accommodating person.
Tom Chavez:
We digress. Alongside Max Mathieu, we have India Lossman. Your name is much easier to pronounce.
India Lossman:
Absolutely.
Tom Chavez:
Big ups to mom and dad. India Lossman.
India Lossman:
It's a family name.
Tom Chavez:
English is my second language, and I can say that name. I can nail that name.
Vivek Vaidya:
Oh, we're going with that now. English is your second language.
Tom Chavez:
No, it's an in-betweener. Yeah. Is English really your first language?
Vivek Vaidya:
My first language?
Tom Chavez:
Yeah.
Vivek Vaidya:
No.
Tom Chavez:
What is your first language?
Vivek Vaidya:
That's a great question.
Tom Chavez:
Is it Gujarati?
Vivek Vaidya:
No.
Tom Chavez:
Boom. Who just dropped that? Gujarati?
Vivek Vaidya:
No.
Tom Chavez:
Bengali.
Vivek Vaidya:
No.
Tom Chavez:
Hindi
Vivek Vaidya:
Kinda.
Tom Chavez:
I wish you'd make up your mind. Okay. We're really digressing in this episode. We got to focus, focus, focus.
Vivek Vaidya:
Let's focus.
Tom Chavez:
I worked with somebody-
Vivek Vaidya:
Boombox, back, back, you're background. Boombox-
Tom Chavez:
Boombox.
Vivek Vaidya:
... Max, India.
Tom Chavez:
Okay.
Vivek Vaidya:
[inaudible 00:06:57].
Tom Chavez:
So, Boombox, let me set this up. Boombox is a company that has been on the in the crockpot on slow for about 25 years. As some of you know, I used to keep it low, and now I'm just out there with it. I really like music and I don't apologize for it. I've been playing music my whole life. Once upon a time, I was going to be a huge rockstar. Max, India, I don't know if he knew that, but I was all around LA peddling my demos. Let's just say, I didn't get a record label, get a record deal, but I kept on playing music and I've been fortunate to work with a lot of great musicians over the years. I love playing, recording, producing music. I've spent a lot of time in studios. There've been two or three attempts to create a music internet company, none of whom worked.
Tom Chavez:
Actually, Vivek was a part of, at least, a couple of those. We actually raised money for a couple of those, sent the money back because we couldn't crack the code. We just couldn't figure it out. However, 25 years later, Boombox takes root because we finally think we figured it out. So, Boombox is a collaboration platform for the remote modern musician. We borrow some of the same patterns from software that have worked so well. This was the Apple banking me on the head moment where one night I'm in the studio, we are spending 25 minutes hunting through Dropbox files, trying to find, "Wait, did that one have the drums? Where did we put the guitars? I can't remember the thing with the thing." It just dawn on me like, "God, this is stupid. We're spending so much time just hunting and pecking through Dropbox." Wouldn't it...
Tom Chavez:
Then, I come to work the next morning, and of course, engineers are showing up on a system called GitHub. I just did that in the studio with scare quotes. GitHub, which is the system that all engineers use to track and manage what they're doing. Everybody knows, I'm on first. You're on second. Here's what we're doing. I'm going to roll back. That was the germ of an idea. I dwell on that for a minute because the prior conceptions of things that we tried to do in music were a little more grand. This is a super{set} theme. Sometimes, the boring but bountiful thing, hiding in plain sight that a lot of people have overlooked, has legs, right?
Vivek Vaidya:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think, the thing that struck me about Boombox... We used to call it Bananarama, the first name was Bananarama.
Tom Chavez:
[inaudible 00:09:11] super{set} companies, you had to change the name at least three times.
Vivek Vaidya:
That's right. ... was that the same problems that engineers struggled with in terms of collaborating with each other to produce software, musicians had the exact same problem. They would exchange notes on text messages, emails, share filed using Dropbox. There was no annotation anywhere. There was no record of what had changed, and collaboration was practically non-existent or primitive.
Tom Chavez:
To add to that, so what I would do with my musician friends when we're working on the track is, we'll have these long inscrutable text streams or emails where we say things like, "At minute 27, drop the snare. Bring in the bass. Hey, at two minutes, 13 seconds, the piano's a little too crunchy. Can you tone it down?" It's just the sea of gibberish. That's the way musicians do what they do. Now, again, simple, what would the world look like if we had a system wherein everybody could just show up with their stuff, see it, do it, collaborate. That brings us to the premise of Boombox here.
Tom Chavez:
India and Max, the other thing I want to say is that we have a magical team of people who are all around music. Everybody is passionate about music in some way. Some people, we have several engineers who are professional performers, producers, songwriters. I want to set you up a little bit here, India, your entree into Boombox. How did you get here? Tell us a little bit about your connection to music, because it's turned out to be really fundamental for the company now in our early paces.
India Lossman:
Yeah, absolutely. I had the good fortune of knowing Max. He called me in and I met all of you guys, and I was like, "This is my dream. I get to work in the music industry. I get to work with artists." It's in my family. Both my brother and sister musicians. My sister's professional. My brother had to go back to his day job, but I'm really passionate about-
Tom Chavez:
As many of us do.
India Lossman:
Yes. Well, Tom, we're happy-
Tom Chavez:
Has happened to me.
India Lossman:
... We're happy that it didn't work out for you or we wouldn't be here now. Yeah, it's a passion project. I get up every day and I'm, wow, so driven by what the creativity of talking to artists and them following their passion. It's amazing and motivating, and I can't believe we get to help them in the creative process.
Tom Chavez:
It's got to work. What you forget to mention, so I'll mention it for you, is that India is a very established, super seasoned product manager. What does the world look like when you bring sophisticated world class product management to the build out of an artist creator project like Boombox? Max, how about you?
Max Mathieu:
Well, I've been playing music in and out. Actually, many people don't know. When I was in college, I was in a band. I mostly, played piano, so hidden in the back. At some point I was like, we're playing in bars and whatnot in France and someone, "That's what I want to do." I want to play. I like that energy and everything. I started considering dropping out of college and do that. Well, no, I didn't. I'm glad I didn't because I don't think I was that good of a musician. Around that time, I started to write songs and I have plenty of them stored in a hard drive that will never see the light on. Maybe one day on Boombox.
Tom Chavez:
You just don't know.
Max Mathieu:
I have this passion for music, a personal passion. When I play piano, it's almost transcendental. It's my space and I need that in my life. Software engineering, well, I've been doing this forever. As far as I can remember, I studied very early, earlier than piano, actually. When I had the opportunity to leave Google where I was a bit miserable because it was too big of a company and I had the opportunity join you guys to start Boombox. I was like... At the time it was Boomjam, right? We say Bananarama, but also another one.
Tom Chavez:
Bananarama, then it was Boomjam, and now Boombox.
Max Mathieu:
And now Boombox.
Tom Chavez:
Our final resting place.
Max Mathieu:
Yeah, I think we find a good one now.
Tom Chavez:
It's a good name.
Max Mathieu:
So, when you guys, through your channel... Yeah, "I'm all for it. This is exactly what I need."
Tom Chavez:
There are a lot of people who are passionate about music. I have a lot of friends obviously, who are serious about their music, and then I have some other friends who don't quite understand why are you so manic about your music. There's a lot of us out there and in different levels and gradations, we all... Music is primal. By the way, the studies indicate now that we were playing music. We were beating on drums before we could talk, so music is really primal. It's a very fundamental human experience. So many of us have this connection to music, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to out one more person who is also playing in bands in college." Oh, wait a minute, he happens to be right here with us. People don't know Vivek. You were rocking it out in college, right?
Vivek Vaidya:
I was trying to. That was just a hobby.
Tom Chavez:
All right, so this is-
Vivek Vaidya:
My music accomplishments are best left in the shower.
Tom Chavez:
And brought to the karaoke club-
Vivek Vaidya:
Yes, I would be-
Tom Chavez:
... because I've been there
Vivek Vaidya:
Karaoke, yes.
Tom Chavez:
It's impressive.
Vivek Vaidya:
Yes.
Tom Chavez:
All right.
Vivek Vaidya:
I don't know whether the-
Tom Chavez:
Don't sell yourself short like that, dude.
Vivek Vaidya:
Okay.
Tom Chavez:
What's our karaoke song? We've done it once or twice. We have a couple, but Vivek is a hard rock guy. I think, we do a really great rendition of Ain't Talking About Love.
Vivek Vaidya:
Ain't Talking about Love. My love is right to the core. What's the rest of that lyric?
Vivek Vaidya:
(singing)
Tom Chavez:
There it is. That just happened.
Vivek Vaidya:
(singing)
Tom Chavez:
Keep it going.
Vivek Vaidya:
(singing)
Tom Chavez:
You know, I've been at the edge. Those are good lyrics, and then I stood and looked down. You know, I lost a lot of friends there, baby. Got no time to mess around. That is one of the greatest rocks on.
Vivek Vaidya:
Van Halen, actually-
Tom Chavez:
[inaudible 00:15:32]
Vivek Vaidya:
... really good lyrics.
Tom Chavez:
We are digressing are crazy people, but New Orleans has this weird effect. Yeah, there's a lot of digressing. India, Max, you got to bring us back. Help. We're stuck.
Vivek Vaidya:
Max and India are like, "Why did we agree to this?"
Tom Chavez:
Max and India are sitting here like, "Why did we do this?"
India Lossman:
No, I was just watching the power of music as you went through those lyrics and it was really powerful for you guys.
Tom Chavez:
Back to God's work here, because look, when we were establishing the business plan for Boombox, I found it illuminating when we put the numbers to it. 51% of all artists on Spotify have fewer than 500 streams. Now, to put up a song on Spotify is not easy. If you have fewer than 500 streams, you're spending many thousands of dollars to get maybe, 21 cents, whatever that amounts. It's less than 21 cents. It's less than half a penny per stream. The point here is that music is primal. So many of us do it not because we should or because our mamas want us to, it's because we must, right? That is the grand idea that that inspires us here at Boombox, is to create a platform that allows people to express themselves, to create their art, to get it out into the world.
Tom Chavez:
Listen, if Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez show up a little bit later because, we don't want them right now, but if they showed up a little bit later on Boombox and started to do their thing and they will, that's fine. What we're talking about here is the long tail of people like us who love music. We do it because we must. It's fascinating if you spend time in studios. I've also said digital signal processing that goes into what are called DAWs, digital audio workstations, like Ableton, Pro Tools and so on, it is the seventh technical wonder of the world. What they've built into those technology systems is amazing. The next layer, the software layer wherein we're just trying to do boring things like organize our files, collaborate, compare notes, connect with other musicians who might want to do the thing that we're interested in, it's astonishing that nothing is out there yet. That's the big prize for us to win over here at Boombox.
Tom Chavez:
I wanted to get your perspective for a minute on the team. We've recruited a pretty interesting team. All of the super{set} teams are remarkable in their way. Max, tell us a little bit about this incredible team that we've assembled here at Boombox. How did that happen? Obviously, there's always a little bit of luck, but there's also some chemistry and something intentional going on over here. How are we recruiting this amazing team to Boombox?
Max Mathieu:
Yeah, I think, the premise of us working in the music space attracts people that are interested. There are other tech company that don't have that sexy of a product space. It's actually, interesting because I think, interviewed around 120 candidates over the last year and a half. By the end, some of them are like, "Oh, I'm very passionate about music I play." Yeah, the 119 before you. I feel like a lot of engineers, they have that creating for building, playing music, creating music or creating software. I know one person on your team also does woodworking. You have the thing like there's nothing before. There's something after. They enjoy that creative process. I think, there's a correlation there between engineers and musicians.
Tom Chavez:
I really want to amplify that for a minute because I think a lot of people look at engineers and say, "Well, they're just these geeky guys," and ladies who code and do math, and they forget how creative engineering is. There's this kind of very beautiful braid between the creativity that goes in the engineering and the creativity that goes in the music.
Max Mathieu:
You get your best ideas in the shower or in the middle of the night. It's a lot about connecting the dots. Like coding actually, is just a small portion of it, just how you execute it the same way once the course or the lyrics, you still have to sing them. The singing may not be the hard part, right? That part of connecting like, "Oh wait, I should have done it this way." Two weeks later, "Oh wait, I have an even better idea." This is very creative because you need all your experience put together. Sometime, with other people's experiences where Boombox, being a collaborative platform, a bit like GitHub is, really allows... We hope we're going to allow even more people to find new ideas, get more inspired by other people and build even better music.
Tom Chavez:
So, India, you mentioned your sister is in music and she's a very successful Spotify artist who with over a million followers, it's a remarkable thing. Now, I was wondering if you could give us a little perspective, because we've been fortunate to get the benefit of her insights as we build the company. What are musicians looking for? What do they need? What are the urgent bread and water problems?
India Lossman:
There's nothing better than getting on the horn with a customer. I ask them, "How did you find us?" They'll say an ad or they'll say they were shopping and they just really value what we bring to the table. They're like, "Everything's in one place. I upload my files. I leave timestamp comments for my people I'm working with. They are completely across the country. Everything's there. We talk back and forth. We make progress. It's listed and efficient and there forever. No one's confused. We're all on the same page." That keep it simple. This is what people need. They value it. It's great to get on the horn. A lot of the customers, they'll tell you, "What do I need next? Help me find more collaborators that I don't need."
Tom Chavez:
It's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to ask it, anyway. Why don't more musical creators just get on LinkedIn? That's where a lot of people go to connect professionally. Vivek, what's your view?
Vivek Vaidya:
Well, I think, not a lot of musicians are on LinkedIn. That's why they don't go there.
Tom Chavez:
Why not though?
Vivek Vaidya:
Well, I think LinkedIn, if you think about the origins of LinkedIn, it was meant to be a business network. I don't think LinkedIn even considered themselves a social network when they started. It became a social network or it's being put under the bucket of social media now, but it was a business professional network. The whole interface is all geared towards essentially your resume, where did you work, where you did you go to school, et cetera, et cetera. It was not geared towards musicians building a profile. We can think of, one way to think of Boombox is a verticalized LinkedIn for musicians.
Tom Chavez:
I'm going to add to that. I do have a Persona on Spotify. You will not know who that is. We're not going to put it on blast. The last thing I want is to have my musical explorations and my musical persona manifest in my professional self. I think, there's this weird psychosocial thing where musicians just will look at LinkedIn and say, "Yeah, it's very businessy, but douchey. No musician wants to really put their musical art. It's so personal and putting it on blast in a professional setting, it feels really unnatural. That's what creates the opportunity for Boombox because we have these different persona musicians. By the way, a lot of them, many of the pioneers as we call them, have alternate egos, alternate personalities. That's part of the joy of it, right?
Vivek Vaidya:
Yep. Do you guys know his Spotify Persona?
India Lossman:
No.
Vivek Vaidya:
We should actually have a hackathon-
India Lossman:
We have to figure it out.
Vivek Vaidya:
... at Boombox to figure it out, Tom's Spotify Persona.
Tom Chavez:
Good luck with that.
India Lossman:
We totally ask-
Max Mathieu:
Have you tried asking ChatGPT?
Vivek Vaidya:
Maybe we'll figure it out. Tom has challenged us.
Tom Chavez:
Put a thumbtack in that. We're coming back-
Vivek Vaidya:
Tom has just challenged us.
Tom Chavez:
... [inaudible 00:24:15].
India Lossman:
Well, it's interesting too. We asked our pioneers, we asked our customers, "What would you actually put into a profile?" That's the other thing about LinkedIn. It's not geared towards them. It's not the things you would want to put out into the universe-
Tom Chavez:
Say more.
India Lossman:
... like, "Hey, I want to have sample tracks that people can listen to. That's how people want to connect and know this is an artist that I would want to work with." So we're asking them, "What do you want to put out there for people to find you?"
Tom Chavez:
Right.
India Lossman:
LinkedIn isn't doing that right, by the way, right?
Tom Chavez:
Yeah. All the professional pedigree stuff that people do on LinkedIn in a music, in a musical context, while I studied with so and Berkeley School, nobody cares.
India Lossman:
No one cares.
Tom Chavez:
Again, it's what creates this awesome opportunity for us to, as we like to say, first collaborate, then connect. Connection comes with collaboration, finding new people, birds of a feather who love what you do or have interest in the genre that you participate in. Finding those collaborators is a big huge opportunity. Ultimately, not this year, but soon, earn money from your musical explorations. Let's talk a little bit about... I said we're going to come back to ChatGPT. Max, you dropped it.
Max Mathieu:
Yes.
Tom Chavez:
You mentioned it. Okay, so here's what happens in company building, and this was such a beautiful moment. This thing ChatGPT was announced November, 2022. We're sitting here with a very clear, crisp product strategy that we've laid out for ourselves and that India's masterfully blueprinting for the entire company. ChatGPT happens. My initial, I'm going to come clean, my initial reaction was, "Yeah, that's adorable, but not really relevant to what we're doing." By the way, artificial intelligence for music is, I like to say, but the tech bros who drink Soylent will love computer generated music because it's algorithmic and it's weird. Nobody with good tasters sensibilities is going to listen to this stuff. Today, I have to qualify because the machines are coming fast, and there might be something interesting in it.
Vivek Vaidya:
It's a good thing you qualified it because six months later, you would've had to eat craw if you hadn't qualified it, I think.
Tom Chavez:
As Prince Humperdinch and Princess Bride said, "Unless I'm wrong and I'm never wrong." You remember that movie?
Vivek Vaidya:
I do.
Tom Chavez:
I'm totally wrong about all of this stuff all the time especially, the speed at which is happening.
Vivek Vaidya:
It's remarkable.
Tom Chavez:
So, within a couple years, I don't... All bets are off. Today, we're back to how primal music is. It's something personal. I think, we'll be fascinated by the music machines generate, but there is still something important about having humans out at the center and in front. When the gen AI happens, we are sitting around in one of our staffings and saying, "Is this relevant to us?" I'm confessing that my initial reaction was no. Then, we start to take it in further and we realize, "Oh wait a minute. No, this is an opportunity for us." As we frequently do in early stage company building, we course correct.
Tom Chavez:
I like a caveman point and grunt and I say, "Oh my gosh. I don't know what it is." There's some opportunity now for us to put the machines to work and to create new tooling that elevates and empowers musicians, again, with a musician out front and at the center, but with machines now generating ideas, enriching the experience. Max, take us to what happened here, because it's shocking. It's astonishing what Boombox has created literally within weeks from dirt to dinner, from blank whiteboard to live software. Take us-
Vivek Vaidya:
It's in production now.
Tom Chavez:
It's in production. We just announced, we just released these features this week.
India Lossman:
On Monday, yep.
Tom Chavez:
Holy guacamole.
Max Mathieu:
Yeah, those were intense. I think, six weeks total from late March to now. I think, we quickly realized that a lot of that generative AI actually center around a user entering prompts. It's not just, "Oh, the machine is generating stuff from thin hair. There's someone telling it what to do." Back to building a team full of musicians that not only have the empathy and the knowledge of the industry and the empathy for our customers, they also have the background. We were able to put a team together, team of three engineers that all have a background in music theory. I don't know how many people can claim they can do this in their company. We are able to have the three of them and we're like, "Hey, we want something that is not gimmicky, something that is useful for musicians like you guys. Something that makes sense because you know what makes sense? Something that's in integrated. By the way, you have four weeks because we want to do something first step quickly."
Tom Chavez:
[inaudible 00:29:20] free frame that because that's a company building right there.
Max Mathieu:
Right.
Tom Chavez:
Four weeks. That's insane and yet it happens.
Max Mathieu:
Yeah, this was insane. The way we actually framed it one step further, we say, one week of R&D, come up with ideas, try to do some proof of concept, a bit like a one-week hackathon, all expenses paid. After this week, we sat down with India and the team and we saw what they came up with and a lot of that were there. What we actually built the following three weeks was a lot of refinement, hardening. That we haven't thought about, but as we were seeing it happening, we started to iterate and have even more ideas. Within the next three weeks of April, essentially the team put it together, so the same team. We didn't ask more engineers to write code and we had the deadline. We're like, "By May 1st, we want be to able to record a demo. We want something."
Max Mathieu:
So, the team came together with the idea of generating MIDI files that could be reused in the DAWs. All these came together very quickly. That Slack channel was on fire, non-stop feedbacks, screenshots. Here's the incense. Everybody was so intense about it and been more hardening about the last two weeks and were released on Monday to production.
Tom Chavez:
Let's unpack a couple of the key things here because, in fact, I remember now in one of our meetings, just to baseline things, Vivek, you said you went to ChatGPT. The dream was, you talked to what we call the Boombot. That's the alien, that's the AI at Boombox. I wish, I'd come up with Boombot, but I didn't. I love it. Okay, so you talk to the Boombot and you say, "I want a U2 style anthem with a melancholic verse and a big lift into a chorus with a pulsating floor on the floor motif." You can say something like that to the Boombot. Now, if you go to ChadGPT, it will give you a very dry set of core changes and give you a thumbs up and a good luck. Now, if you're a working musician, that's adorable, but completely not useful, right?
Max Mathieu:
I mean, you cannot even do this right with GPT the way we've built it. You can just say what you want to write about and give some direction. You don't have to learn prompt engineering.
Tom Chavez:
Good. I'm backing it up now. So, first there's the in processing like, "I'm a creator. I'm not a coder. I just have this ill-formed feeling in my head that I want to express, and you don't need to know anything about the prompt engineering because we've engineered all of it." Right?
India Lossman:
Right, I don't need to know anything about it.
Tom Chavez:
"I just need to express these feelings and this vibe that I have." That's huge. Now, let's talk a little bit about on the back end, because core changes, dry core changes written out in text... Look, most modern musicians, and I mean most of the top, the billboard, top 40 players can't tell you what key anything is in. They just have this incredible sensibility. They're natural born songwriters. They feel these motifs, so they're not theoreticians. What they do, spend a lot of time doing is this incredible engineering of sound in these digital audio workstations we talked about. The ability now, there's this thing called MIDI. Let's talk about MIDI and what we do on the back end now. You're getting the output of what we built and you're translating it, because this is, I think, the 'atom-splitting' moment where we've really broken through and have created a very interesting mode for ourselves at Boombox. Let's say a little bit more about what's going on on the back end as we're taking these ideas and transporting them to MIDI.
Max Mathieu:
Sure. I think, at a high level, like ChatGPT or the API, whatever you want to call it, it's very text-based. It's not going to tell you all the details. We say, "Okay, well, give us the court progressions. We'll take it from there, because every time we try to poke further to get the notes or inversions or whatnot, this was not working. We had to layer on top of the response from GPT, like, "Oh, this is a chord, this is a key. Those are the notes we want to have." Instead of just pinning it out and, "Well, those are the notes you can play." We actually generate a MIDI file. That MIDI file, so MIDI file is not an for people that don't know, it's not file that you can play directly. It's a description of where that note comes in, that note stops. It's not a playable file, per se. You need virtual instruments to actually play it.
Tom Chavez:
Can we do a quick sidebar on MIDI for our listeners?
Vivek Vaidya:
Before we do that, the fascinating thing about this conversation, if you think about generative AI and OpenAI chat, GPT, et cetera, most of the people focus on the input part. You mentioned prompt engineering. All the research innovation, et cetera, has been how do you send the right set of prompts, how do you provide the right kind of context to OpenAI to back the output you want. The fascinating thing about this is not only do we have to be clever in the prompt engineering aspect of things, we also have to innovate and process the output that is produced by ChatGPT. So, it's both, the more it exists on both ends, the input and output. I find that fascinating.
Max Mathieu:
Yes, it's very interesting because it's far from perfect, right? People play with it. We had the discussion recently, it's either a toy or it's either a tool. It's kind of a toy, and to make it a tool, as you say, we have to package at the input side and also repackage it at the output and you have to build upon it. Yeah, that's been very interesting to iterate on that and get it to where we're at now.
Tom Chavez:
The quick sidebar on MIDI, because it deserves some props. If you think about other places... When I first got into music, when I was doing a lot of computer science and math and stuff at the time, because musicians are communal by nature... In the '80s when electronic music and digital signal processing first took root, they said, "Wait a minute. I don't want to have a Tower of Babel where your system and your device can't talk to my device." So, they just went, I don't know how it happened. Actually, we should go and study, but they went to a place and they wrote out a musical interface, digital standard MIDI, musical interface digital, da, da, da, something like that. I know there's an interface in there. It's this magical thing wherein it's this highly compact way of capturing the electronic signals that express a piece of music such that your system, your move synthesizer, if you get MIDI, I can put it into this DAW and whatever digital audio workstation I'm working with can read that device, that MIDI and we're off to the races.
Tom Chavez:
The parallel world we don't think about is one wherein you have all of these systems and they can't talk to each other and as frequently happen in software and other places. You have a whole industry of adapters and connectors and all together nonsense. MIDI is magic is the point.
Max Mathieu:
It is.
Tom Chavez:
It's the lingua franca.
Max Mathieu:
If it didn't exist today, some company will invent and patent it. Right?
Tom Chavez:
Yeah. Great.
Max Mathieu:
I'm glad this is out there. This is so pervasive now.
Tom Chavez:
So, translating the outputs here to MIDI we should put this on a... We'll have it on a demo on boombox.io soon, I'm sure. It's magic when you see the expression of these ideas in language. Now, translated into MIDI and remote modern musicians are off to the races.
Vivek Vaidya:
We can write our own [inaudible 00:37:15] song.
Tom Chavez:
We got. right?
India Lossman:
Yes.
Tom Chavez:
There has to be a theme song. Let's get on.
Vivek Vaidya:
Just saying.
Tom Chavez:
Hey, so as we close out over here, India, what's the most surprising thing that's happened? Because you came from, as I mentioned, a professional product management background, this is a very controversial, maybe contrarian thing you've done, joining this crazy band of five people, whatever it was, five or six people to jump on board, and oh my goodness, you're crushing it. You're doing it well. I'm curious. What been the most surprising, unexpected part of the journey so far for you?
India Lossman:
I think, I was afraid of going to a startup and I realized about myself like, "Oh, I like coloring outside the lines. I like making the rules. I like building up the team." I think that was all surprising, but it's the right place for me, Boombox servicing musicians. It's like the stars aligned. The surprising part was just how fun it is, how rewarding it is.
Vivek Vaidya:
You really, you're doing an amazing job and it shows the passion and the joy. The passion for the job you have and the joy you get from it is just evident every single day. It was evident, and the panel today that you were moderating as well.
Tom Chavez:
I also, we're going to do this. Vivek and I interview a lot of people to join these companies and we do have a set of questions that we like to ask people. I don't want to say the question because now, or if I say it on the mic, then everyone's going to come be expecting it, but there's one particular question that is very important to me in the back and we ask it. Just to your point just now... This is the problem with the podcast because you can't see us, but India's eyes go wide and it's just beaming joy and enthusiasm for everything that we're doing and it's infectious because that's really goes a long distance towards explaining why this little team is doing the remarkable things that they're doing. Max, why did you, so you're an Google guy-
Max Mathieu:
Correct.
Tom Chavez:
... and then joining... That was also a controversial weird thing. Why'd you do that? What's the matter with you?
Max Mathieu:
Think it was controversial for them more than it was to me.
Vivek Vaidya:
How could you leave?
Max Mathieu:
Yeah, some people are like, were like, "Why, you have kids? Why do you leave Google?" I'm like, "Because I have kids and I want them to see me happy." I've always worked in small companies and Google was, I can say it easily now, Google was for me, way to not have to pay for an MBA and have a good resume in the US because when I moved here, I didn't have that. It was hard to find anything remotely equivalent to what I used to do back in France. So, when I had the opportunity to go there, well at least I haven't been, good salary for a while. I have that on my resume. Nobody's going to ask me, "Oh, so what were you doing before?" I can put ex Google on my LinkedIn profile if I want to.
Max Mathieu:
For them, it was... The one that the people who worked with me understood. They knew like, "You can't stay at Google. This is not for you." They knew all my frustrations, but for my parents it was weird 'cause they were so happy to see me at Google and I'm like, "You don't realize this is not for me." For me it was like a no-brainer. It was, again, more control for them.
Tom Chavez:
Well shout out to Google because you learned some things.
Max Mathieu:
I did.
Tom Chavez:
All right then. It all works out. Such a pleasure to have you two with us today. Thank you.
Vivek Vaidya:
Yeah.
Tom Chavez:
Thank you. This is a fantastic.
Vivek Vaidya:
Thank you India. Thank you Max.
India Lossman:
Thanks for having us.
Vivek Vaidya:
Tom, we normally do this in the middle of the show, but you never did your unpaid-for promotion.
Tom Chavez:
We have a totally unpaid-for promotion. We have put it at the beginning and the end, once or twice. Let's get a shout-out to our sponsor.
Vivek Vaidya:
Which is?
Tom Chavez:
New Orleans Cuisine. We are here in New Orleans.
Vivek Vaidya:
New Orleans Cuisine is our sponsor.
Tom Chavez:
Is our sponsor.
Vivek Vaidya:
How much fried chicken have you had since you came here?
Tom Chavez:
I've been here about 36 hours and by my best estimate, I've inhaled about 4.9 pounds of fried oysters, fried chicken.
Vivek Vaidya:
There you go. Good for you.
Tom Chavez:
And fried crawfish.
Vivek Vaidya:
There you go. That's why at lunch I saw you have an oatmeal.
Tom Chavez:
Right. Well, I'm not going to lie to you. I am crying out for a carrot now. A vegetable or two would be just fine.
Vivek Vaidya:
Raw vegetable, not boiled.
Tom Chavez:
Raw vegetable. Yeah, right.
Vivek Vaidya:
All right.
Tom Chavez:
But while what we're here, just do it the New Orleans way and just put as many fried crawfish in your belly as you can.
Vivek Vaidya:
Well, that's a good way to end the podcast.
Tom Chavez:
On that note. Maxence Mathieu, how did I do?
Max Mathieu:
That was really good.
Tom Chavez:
That was really good. Right?
Max Mathieu:
Good.
Tom Chavez:
Maxence Mathieu, it's a pleasure to have you. India Lossman, thank you for being with us.
India Lossman:
Thank you.
Vivek Vaidya:
Thank you, guys.
Tom Chavez:
Thank you all.