From Chords, to Code, to Chords Again: The Story Behind Boombox.io

From Chords, to Code, to Chords Again: The Story Behind Boombox.io

Last week we announced  the seed round on boombox.io, a collaboration platform for musicians that radically reimagines how music making happens. It would be easy to say that we started building this company 15 months ago but the truth is a little richer than that. 

It all started in my early 20s. I decided I’d had it with all the math and science and ditched grad school to be a musician. While playing a wedding in Marin like a poor man’s Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer, a sudden but very clear realization washed over me: "This is not the dream." I returned to grad school, finished up, started working, and from there built a career as a software/data/AI guy.

Still, in a parallel universe, I’m headlining at stadiums and massive clubs. I'm not going to lie: it's pretty awesome.

Back in this version of the multiverse, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to bring my current passion for company-building to music. I wanted to serve the unique needs of musicians and creators, in a way that elevates and enriches their craft.

I’ve had ideas for three internet music companies. I even raised the money but ultimately sent it all back because I just couldn’t crack the code.

About a year and half ago, I was sitting in the studio, poking through endless Dropbox folders and Google drives with my musician friends. I returned to my day job the following morning and saw all my software engineers logging on to GitHub and collaborating seamlessly there. I saw designers and front-end engineers logging onto Figma. Why weren't these collaborative patterns working their way into music creation? We decided to take this into our own hands. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way while building boombox. 

Solve for your first hand frustrations. 

At super{set} we like to say that the best problems to solve are the ones you’ve experienced yourself. It reminds me a bit of the admonition to writers to “write what you know.” If you’re immersed in a space or a community or a problem, you’re probably uniquely positioned to understand the nuances and figure out the best possible solution. If nobody else was going to make software to make my life and the lives of countless musicians easier, why shouldn’t we roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves? 

We assembled a kickass team of engineers with one very specific hiring requirement i mind. Not only did they have to be top-tier software assassins, they also had to have sensibility and passion for music. Most of our engineers, in fact, are active performing, producing musicians themselves. This is how Boombox, the tool for music collaboration, was born. 

The pandemic was devastating for musicians, but it created a flourishing of prosumers. 

By almost all accounts, the pandemic caused utter devastation for musicians. The electronic music industry shrank by 54 percent in 2020. 70 percent of DJs have retrained to new fields. In spite of that, DJ software sales were up 34 percent. What gives? Hobbyists. 

I was one of those hobbyists – stuck at home, I got busy collaborating remotely with other music makers. We tried things we probably otherwise wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the pandemic’s extenuating circumstances. Established creators followed suit. As Declan McGlynn wrote in a piece for DJ Mag, “As these new music makers emerge into an industry decimated by COVID, it’s an opportunity to rewrite the rulebook on how artists, songwriters, DJs, producers and engineers exist online.” If we can throw out the rule book, we can create music making experiences that work better for more people. Boombox is very much a response to that opportunity. 

An industry long on hype and short on creator tools was overdue for disruption.

How do you know when something is ready for disruption? When it’s not working as well as it could for its intended users. It seemed to me that the creator economy was long on hype and short on tools for creators. We aspired to build a platform that gives music makers an all-in-one platform to collaborate like GitHub, connect like LinkedIn, and earn revenue from music. There are a lot of tools that solve little pain points in the creative process, but ours is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end solution to enable musical creators to collaborate, connect, and earn revenue from their art.

We built-in AI to enhance human creativity, not to replace it.

After the launch of ChatGPT in Nov 2022, the entire ecosystem was reconstituted around GenAI. For us, the question was, “how do we integrate AI in a way that augments and enriches human creativity rather than replacing it?” At first, we had some trepidations - the Hollywood writer's strike shows just how careful we have to tread on the man versus machine line in the creative arts. But we believed that AI could be a helpful partner for creators, not a replacement. 

Our solution was Boombot. Boombot is a tool to help users spitball lyrics and song titles. It suggests chord progressions. It turns chords into MIDI files that creators can pull directly into their digital audio workstation. In other words, we turned AI into a productive though partner with no qualms about doing the housekeeping or scutwork of music creation. You can rely on boombot to help you creatively or just use it as a workhorse to get things done. AI isn’t a replacement for creative or critical thought: it simply augments the human workflow to amplify human creativity.

I’ve launched many companies, but using software engineering to improve the creative and artistic experience of music-making has given my software-self the ability to delight the musician in me. It's nourishing and very personal. I can’t wait for other musicians to get their hands on it. When you do, shoot me an email and let me know what you think. I’m tom@boombox.io.