Loudly is a company that enables users to generate AI music for their digital projects in seconds, 100% royalty-free. And you can discover music fast with AI-assisted recommendations based on your video concept. Plus, you can customize music directly to your video in a couple of taps. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Loudly co-founder and CEO Rory Kenny to learn more.
Rory Kenny’s Background
Kenny grew up in Montreal, Canada and earned an MBA in Strategy and Marketing from Cambridge University’s Judge Business School in the UK. I’ve always been passionate about music from a young age and played professionally while releasing several albums when I was younger. This really fueled me in my professional life to connect my passions with my work. So in 2020, when I was seeing some really exciting advancements of AI, I knew it was the right time to start Loudly.
Formation Of Loudly
How did the idea for the company come together? Kenny shared:
“I was the Managing Director of Loudly’s predecessor, JAM (Just Add Music) from 2016-2020.”
“My time at JAM was really eye opening to just how time consuming it was to complete a song. JAM was designed for easy music creation, yet I remember watching people work on one song for sometimes days at a time. Granted in the grand scheme it’s not like that’s an absurdly long amount of time, but I knew there had to be a more efficient way. The goal was really to make music creation more accessible, as well as faster, so that’s when AI came into the picture and JAM became Loudly. Now, Loudly can generate a full song in 5 seconds with a simple set of inputs. That’s quite a difference from a full day’s work.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Kenny shared:
“We had been working on an AI tool for about 2 years which was for internal use only – enabling our music producers to generate catalog faster than their previous manual process. When we finally decided to launch the public beta version of Loudly AI Music Generator, I knew we had a good basic quality product – but what I didn’t expect was the huge uptake and positive response from creators everywhere. Suddenly everyone was creating, experimenting and giving us feedback in real-time via our web portal.”
“It’s a magical moment to see creators enjoy the AI music creation experience as much as we do and feel that electric enthusiasm from our audiences – it’s the reason why we come to work everyday!”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have you faced in building the company? Kenny acknowledged:
“One the biggest challenges is building a new service which is 100% pure innovation but without precedence in the market – i.e we need to figure out everything from how to build AI infrastructure, how to make the AI actually work, new kinds of music production processes and finally – the biggest hurdle of all – is delivering really interesting high-quality music results! Another immense challenge associated with 100% pure innovation is figuring out how the market i.e creators, labels, music industry will use AI – it is still early stages and I see my job now as primarily educating the music industry on how we can provide new value into the ecosystem. So a lot of internal and external hustle is required!”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kenny explained:
“While we are serving a mix of musicians and general creators, the common theme is that everyone wants to create something unique that is specific to their song or digital project. To deliver this, we offer a range of products:
Generate: over one billion variations across genres, energy, duration, and more
Discover: explore the music catalog and find the perfect soundtrack for your digital projects
Recommend: describe your video scene, receive suggestions, and add it to your video
Customize: download the stems of your AI tracks to your DAW to customize further”
Evolution Of Loudly’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Kenny noted:
“The most rapid improvements are user-centric features requested by our audiences to deliver our unique ‘song formula’ approach, which empowers creators to generate something fundamentally unique to them. Initially, a user could simply request a song in a genre – now, they can specify instrumentation, genre-blends, BPM, length, energy and soon – song structures!”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Kenny cited:
“During our beta release phase, we accumulated over 50K registered users within a 2 month period. After announcing our official launch on August 7th, we are now gaining 1K new registered users per day and growing fast. Our goal is to be the #1 AI music generator in the world.”
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking Kenny about customer success stories, he replied:
“One of the common themes we hear from our customers is the huge amount of time and money they are saving while getting high quality music they actually want to use. As the DIY phenomena continues, we see that creators at all levels of skill enjoy generating their own unique music, to match their vibe.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Kenny affirmed:
“With over 200K human-crafted audio sounds in our library, we have potentially the world’s largest AI-powered catalog of music which can be combined into over 1 billion combinations of musical song variants. And since we only use human-made audio, Loudly’s AI music compositions are Spotify-level quality. Music quality that is specific to genre has been our mantra since day 1.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Kenny concluded:
“There are two big goals we are now pursuing: firstly, we believe that AI should be developed to primarily empower and assist creators. To achieve this, we are investing heavily into more customization options which are simple, fun yet powerful in what they can achieve – giving users that wonderful ‘creative’ moment when they generate a unique song. Secondly, we fundamentally support an artist-centric vision for the evolution of AI and in this area we are actively working with the music labels and rights-owners on a product which will further benefit the whole ecosystem of artists, labels and fans. It’s an incredibly exciting time for Loudly to bring AI innovations into the market while respecting the true value of creation.”
