GoRiff Wants to Be Cursor for Music, and the DAW Industry Should Be Nervous

The Macro: The DAW Market Is Frozen in Time, and Everyone Knows It

I have been producing music on and off for fifteen years, and the tools have barely changed. FL Studio looks the same as it did in 2015. Ableton added some features but the core workflow is identical. Logic Pro got a few AI assists that feel bolted on. Pro Tools is still Pro Tools, which is both a compliment and an insult. The entire digital audio workstation market is dominated by products that were designed before smartphones existed and have been incrementally updated ever since.

This is a $6 billion market that is growing, mostly driven by the explosion of bedroom producers, podcast creators, and content musicians who need to make audio but were never trained on professional tools. GarageBand and BandLab sit at the bottom of the ladder, free and simple but limited. FL Studio, Ableton, Logic, and Pro Tools sit at the top, powerful but with learning curves measured in months. The middle of that ladder is almost entirely empty.

That gap is where AI should be useful. Code editors got Cursor and Copilot, and the productivity gains were real and measurable. Design tools got Figma’s AI features and a wave of generative design startups. Writing got a dozen AI assistants that actually work. Music production has gotten… Suno and Udio for full song generation, which is a different product category entirely. Those tools generate music for you. They do not help you make music. The distinction matters enormously if you are a producer who wants to maintain creative control but work faster.

The “Cursor for X” framing gets thrown around too loosely, but in music production it actually makes sense. What Cursor did for coding was not replace the developer. It kept the developer in the loop while handling the tedious parts. A music production tool that could do the same thing, suggest chord progressions, generate stems that match your vibe, handle the mixing busywork, would be genuinely useful to a massive number of people.

The Micro: Two Berkeley Producers with 1M+ Streams and a Music Collective of 1,200

GoRiff is a music editor with AI superpowers. The product uses AI to assist with sound generation and arrangement while keeping the artist in creative control. The pitch to experienced producers is speed. Work 10x faster. The pitch to hobbyists is accessibility. Create music without needing to understand compression ratios and sidechain routing.

Adith Reddi is a founder. Berkeley CS graduate, music producer with over a million streams on Spotify, and an AI specialist. Kenny Zhang is the other founder. Also a Berkeley CS graduate and music producer, previously at a major cloud company and a social media giant. They met at Berkeley through a music collective they started, which now has over 1,200 artists. That background matters. These are not just engineers who think music is cool. They are active producers who have actually shipped music that people listened to. The collective gives them a built-in user base and feedback loop that most music startups would kill for. They came through Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch.

The product is live on both iOS and Android, which is an unusual choice for a music production tool. Most DAWs are desktop-first, with mobile apps as afterthoughts. GoRiff appears to be going mobile-first, which makes sense if you are targeting the casual-to-intermediate producer who works on a phone or tablet more than a laptop. The consumer-facing angle right now is AI-generated personalized songs about you and your friends, which feels like a viral growth play rather than the core product vision. The YC listing describes the product as targeting aspiring musicians between GarageBand and professional DAWs, which is the more interesting long-term market.

The competitive positioning is deliberately in the space between entry-level tools and professional DAWs. BandLab has over 100 million registered users but limited production capabilities. Splice does samples and collaboration but is not a DAW. Soundtrap by Spotify is online and collaborative but basic. None of them are doing what GoRiff is attempting, which is using AI to compress the skill gap rather than just lower the price point.

I am curious about how they handle the tension between the personalized song generator, which is a fun consumer product, and the serious music production tool, which is a very different business. Those are two different user bases with two different willingness-to-pay profiles. The consumer app gets downloads. The production tool gets revenue. Figuring out which one leads is a strategic decision that will define the company.

The Verdict

I think GoRiff is chasing the right gap in the market. The middle tier of music production, more capable than GarageBand, less intimidating than Ableton, has been empty for years and the AI tooling to fill it finally exists. The founder-market fit is unusually strong. Most music tech startups are built by engineers who do not make music. This one is built by producers who also happen to be engineers.

The question at 30 days is whether the mobile-first approach attracts serious creators or just casual users who churn quickly. At 60 days, I would want to see whether the AI-generated sounds are good enough that producers actually use them, or whether they feel like novelty features. The bar here is high. Producers are opinionated about their tools and resistant to anything that sounds generic or synthetic.

At 90 days, the big question is whether GoRiff is building a consumer app or a creative tool company. Suno went consumer and grew fast but faces skepticism from the music community. Splice went tools-first and built a durable business. GoRiff needs to pick a lane, or at least be very intentional about serving both. The 1,200-artist collective is a real asset. If even 10 percent of those producers adopt GoRiff as part of their workflow, the product feedback loop alone is worth more than any amount of market research.