Splice Studio Shutting Down Forever?
The music production world received sad news this week with an announcement from Splice (www.splice.com). Splice is a cloud-based music creation and collaboration platform which includes a massive sample library, audio plug-ins on a subscription basis, a hub for storage/collaboration, and integrates with several digital audio workstations (DAWs).
This week, users of Splice received the following email announcing the impending shutdown of their flagship platform, Splice Studio:
Splice Studio allows users to save their DAW project files on a cloud, and also allows users to share and collaborate on those projects with other users without having to export and send stems back and forth each time.
Splice Studio was the first feature of Splice.com, which is now primarily known for its large sample and plugin library. Originally launched as a beta in October 2013, and released to the public in September 2014, Splice Studio has been a staple in the studio of many producers for nearly 10 years. Looking back on old projects is fun, nostalgic, and often times necessary for completing a project or settling disputes.
Splice released a full statement from CEO Kakul Srivastava on their website about the shut down. and included a timeline of what will be shut down and when. The statement reads:
"We’ve made the decision to shut down Studio, the free collaboration feature we launched in 2014. Although the potential of Studio to help music creators collaborate was core to our founding ideology, this feature hasn’t been a focus for us since 2017. 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. We also know our users have many great alternatives for file sharing available to them.
Today, March 9th, we’re removing the ability to add stems, bounces, and collaborators, and turning off the feature to create new Studio projects on the Splice website. We’re also redirecting our Community tab to our thriving Discord community, where Splice creators can meet, mix, connect, and share.
On April 7, 2023, we’ll turn off the ability to add new Studio projects in our Desktop App. At this time, your projects will still be available. Then, on May 31, 2023, we will remove the ‘Studio’ item from the web menu, and remove the Projects tab from Desktop completely, meaning your sessions and revisions will no longer automatically sync and Studio projects will no longer be available."
Read the full statement here
This begs the question, why? Why would Splice shut down such a valuable and beloved feature? Is it related to server/storage costs? Has it become unmanageable with support and feature requests? WE NEED ANSWERS SPLICE!!
So, what does this mean for users? Splice users now have until May 31st, 2023 to get all of their projects off of Splice and find another place to store them. This could pose a challenge for many users, some of which may have thousands of projects saved over the years. Many producers use Dropbox or similar services for cloud-storage, but none are nearly as musician-friendly as Splice.
What does the future of cloud-based storage for musicians look like? Will we see a similar platform take Splice's place? What alternatives are out there for storage and collaboration for musicians?
Share your thoughts with a comment.