At his startup Splice, Steve Martocci said he’s aiming to build “the creative hub for the modern musician.” And with the latest addition to the service, he’s looking to work with sound designers and sound editors, too.
Splice offers both collaboration tools and a library of royalty-free music samples, which it calls Splice Sounds. More recently, it’s expanded that library beyond music, to include sound effects.
The company says there are already almost 100,000 effects in Splice Sounds, sourced from independent producers like Ric Viers of Blastwave FX, J.R. Fountain of Big Room Sound and Coll Anderson of C.A. Sound. The dashboard currently highlights things like animal sounds, household noises and even more science fictional sounds like lasers and aliens.
The new sound effects are included in a Splice Sounds subscription, where pricing starts at $7.99 per month. The startup says that Splice Sounds are already generating significant revenue for musicians and independent labels — it’s making payments totaling $1 million each quarter.
And while Martocci (who previously co-founded GroupMe) told me he’s hoping that this will help Splice reach new customers, he also said the move was inspired by the musicians who already work with the startup.
“They put their hands into a lot of different things,” he said. “They might be doing some film scoring or podcasting or game audio … There is just this huge additional need for audio.”
For example, the company sent me a quote from Paul Hammer of the band Savoir Adore, who praised Splice’s ability to help him find music in a certain genre or mood.
“I do quite a bit of sound design work as well, and often the hardest part of this is finding the right sound quickly. i.e. – a specific sound or a specific type of emotion or feeling attached to that sound,” Hammer added. “With a splice database, I imagine finding sound effects will be as easy and accurate as the sample library, and that would be super helpful working on sound design projects.”