AI music editor Riff launches to make music creation easier

Y Combinator-backed AI music editor Riff has officially launched on Tuesday. Riff, which describes itself as a “cursor for music,” uses artificial intelligence to make music creation easier while letting the artist remain in charge.

Founders Adith Reddi and Kenny Jinlin Zhang, who met at Berkeley through a music collective they started which is now over 1,200 artists large, have noticed that legacy music production software is clunky and weighed down by archaic user experience. Musicians sometimes end up spending hours making changes that should realistically happen in minutes.

READ: Spotify paid over $10 billion to the music industry (March 13, 2025)

Legacy software often makes it difficult for artists to get their creativity down. The difficulty of existing tools also blocks people with musical interest but no patience to learn complex audio engineering.

Riff allows artists to add sounds in their style using AI. They can also use it to arrange sounds the way they want.

Riff states that in the short run, the startup is targeting aspiring musicians who are between entry level music software like GarageBand and BandLab. The company also states that soon it would have enough features to directly compete with FL, Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools and get experienced producers onboard.

Reddi and Zhang bring in their own experience with music creation. Reddi — who’s also the founder of Recko records — has been making music for around five years, has over one million streams on Spotify, and is deep into audio AI. Zhang, who has also worked at Tencent and Amazon, has been making music for around eight years. He regularly releases his work on Spotify.

Another recent music-related startup is Smash, launched by pop singer Kesha. Described as a “community-based platform to connect and protect music creators,” this startup has been created to allow artists and music makers to find community. Kesha described Smash as “LinkedIn for music creators,” or a “Fiverr-style marketplace” but with artist’s rights being given priority at every point.

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