Mark Ethier on BEATL, iZotope, and SPIN win

What’s the day-to-day like with BEATL?

Mark Ethier: I’ll just start by saying that BEATL is a pan-Berklee group, so I report to Jim Lucchese, and I’m not specific to Berklee College of Music or to Berklee Online. One of the reasons why I’m excited that we’re getting to do some of this work together is that this past Wednesday we started our first AI affinity group for faculty. And very intentionally, it has faculty like Carlos Arana from Online, it has faculty from campus, we have representation from the Conservatory in there, because they’re thinking about generative video and how that will impact acting, and people from Valencia and New York, so I’m really trying to build bridges wherever I can, so that the lessons that are learned in one place are transferable somewhere else. But the day-to-day for us right now, I’ll put it in a couple of categories. One is that we are preparing for the AI Music Summit in June.

Right! Just a few days after Berklee Onsite, too!

Mark Ethier: Yeah, I think intentionally, because there aren’t many windows when campus is free. So that’s a lot of work, and our goal there is to essentially “rerun” a conference which happened two years ago in collaboration with the Audio Engineering Society, and bring together artists, educators, people from industry, people doing research, to explore how AI is impacting music creation, careers in music, and the education of music. And I’d say so far the response has been very positive, as we try to program it.

Another big part of what I’ve been focused on at BEATL is the belief that no one really knows what’s going to happen: how AI is going to change education, how it’s going to change music, from creation through distribution, consumption, whatever monetization is, even live performance. So, instead of trying to say, “We’re going to put all our eggs in this basket,” my goal instead is to make Berklee the center of the conversation. So we are bringing in the practitioners, whether they’re artists, educators, people from industry, or people doing research, to connect with Berklee faculty and students. And that is happening in small ways, where we’re getting people from industry to come in and speak to individual classes. We’ve started up what we’re calling Industry Sessions every Friday. We just had one of the lead researchers, who is doing AI research for Splice, come in to share how they’re thinking about it and what their approach is, and that was really well attended for the first event we did like that. And we have one of those every single Friday, coming up.

You joined Berklee in the autumn of 2025, and I know that when Berklee first announced some AI-based initiatives a couple of years back and there was quite a bit of student backlash. Are you seeing students approach AI with a more open mind as time has passed?

Mark Ethier: There are three groups that I’ve experienced, and one group is really embracing AI, not only for the potential of what it could mean for them creatively, but even just like, “Wait a second, ChatGPT can plan my social media posts? That’s awesome, because I hate doing that, but I know I need to do it!” You know, it’s like that sort of side. Then I’d say there is a very vocal group of anti-AI folks, who are maybe more what you’re referring to here, who have valid concerns around the environmental impact, the way in which creators have been compensated or get attribution for some of the models that have been trained with their creative output. So that’s the loudest of the groups. And then, the biggest group that I’ve experienced, I will call apathetic. It kind of makes sense: You get someone who comes to Berklee because they want to be really awesome at guitar, so they focus on their guitar playing and practicing.

I had another faculty member say it’s similar with them thinking about their careers, where the first three semesters, they’re just focused on the craft of their instrument, and then when they start to realize, “Wait a second, what am I gonna do for my career?” And then all of a sudden, the career is the focus. And I see that there’s a lot of that. It’s not negative or positive, it’s just, “Oh, that doesn’t impact me. It’s not on my radar.” That’s probably not fair to those students, because it is likely that AI is going to impact some part of their lives. It probably already has in ways that they may not even realize.

Undergrads are at the peak of their idealistic years, which is wonderful, and I love it, and it’s important for society, and also it means the second half of the conversation, which is “I know you don’t want to use this, but what if you want to work at a video game company and all they use is this? What are you going to do?” And there’s no wrong answer, but you should be thinking about that, right?

Ethier’s Take on the 3 Most Popular Student Reactions to AI

• Anti-AI (loudest group)
• Apathetic (biggest group)
• Embracing AI (growing group)

That’s interesting that the apathetic group is the largest, because I would have guessed it was one of the other two groups; either those embracing AI wholeheartedly, or those who were vehemently against it!

Mark Ethier: We’re in a bridge moment, where I can understand why it is such a bigger shock for folks, because think about it: You spend 15 years getting your craft, refining it, and then halfway through the biggest investment you’ll make in your life—if you’re doing a four-year program—the rules just changed. I’d be pretty pissed off, too! That’s fair, right? But then I talk to a high school music teacher who’s using SUNO (which is one of the generative music tools) in the classroom, and it made me realize that in three or four years from now, the people who show up to our classes, whether it be Berklee Online or Berklee College of Music, they’re just going to be Generative AI natives! So it’s not going to be a question; it’s going to be more of a moment where they look at their faculty member and say, “What do you mean you don’t know how to use [whatever the latest thing is]?”

In the same way, I think, when we went from analog to digital, there was a lot of that where students showed up and the laptop was their instrument, and they were just trying to figure out why the faculty member didn’t know how to use the thing that most music was being created on. It’s that sort of moment. That’s the prediction I have. But I will say this: Since I’ve been here, five or six months, things are changing fast.

So now that we’ve covered the range of student views on campus, what’s been your experience with the general attitude of the faculty?

Mark Ethier: So, my biggest push is this: It’s not a requirement that you use these things, but it is a requirement that you understand them. Because I don’t really think we can be doing our job at Berklee if we’re not exposing students and making them smarter about these things.

I’m also talking about the students who are embracing it! Have they stopped to think about it? Do they have a copyright on the thing they created? Do they have a copyright for the melody that they uploaded to the system? How will the company use that? There are some where their license agreements are basically, “When you upload it, we can do anything we want with whatever your music was, in perpetuity.” So, you could imagine how that could cause some people to go, “Well, wait a second!”

I heard a version of this in the Theater Arts Collaborative, where for a production that happened last semester, some of the groups used AI, and some didn’t. And that actually caused a lot of friction. One of the things that I’ve been talking to students and faculty about is this: before you go into creative collaboration, you need to set some ground rules about AI and how you’re going to use it, if you’re going to use it. Jonathan Wyner, who’s with me in BEATL, put it very well. We did an interview with the Boston Globe recently—and I loved this—he said, “You don’t have to ask if it’s okay to use a trombone.” It’s not at the front of mind for people to do that, right? But we have to ask those questions now with AI.

I will say that as I’m speaking to peers at non-music schools, and at non-art schools, like when I talk to folks at MIT, or I just talked to someone at UMichigan, or at University of Illinois, and when I ask, “So are you getting all this pushback from students?” they’re just like, “Nope, none of it.”

The irony is that I went to an end-of-semester senior presentation last semester, and sat behind some students who had no idea who I was, and listened to them talk about how they use ChatGPT in all of their humanities classes, and one guy is like, “Oh, I write the outline with ChatGPT, and then I write the paper myself,” and the other person’s like, “oh, I have ChatGPT write it, and then I just rewrite it myself.” They’re all talking about their scheme of how they use AI. I didn’t really engage with them at that moment, but I have to imagine if I asked, “What about SUNO?” they’d probably be like, “Oh my gosh, no! I’d never touch that thing!” But it’s okay if you can make your cover art, or write your essay?

Well, I think it’s that these are sacred spaces for them, and when it comes to their unique discipline, whether it be songwriting or any instrument, they say, “Never shall AI enter here.”

Mark Ethier: I think that’s totally fair as well. I feel like we should allow that space. It’s funny, there’s a friend of mine, he used to be a bass player for Band of Horses, and he’s since left that band, but he is opening an all-analog studio in Nashville: No digital anything! At the same time, he has also started up a side business, doing fully Generative AI TV commercials for clients. And I’m like, “Okay.” So there you go.

That’s the yin and yang right there. “I’m choosing my spaces,” and that’s all it is.

Mark Ethier: Exactly.

So before we get any further, I want to talk about your placement on SPIN’s Most Influential People in Music for 2026 list. Firstly, congratulations! Secondly, you’re listed as No. 9, and the organization you started is called BEATL. Is that a coincidence?

Mark Ethier: Thank you for calling that out, yes! I’m glad you got that, too. I mean, someone there has a sense of humor, I’m sure. That’s really funny.

Now that there’s a spotlight on this program, and on Berklee, what’s the message that you’re hoping to get out into the world?

Mark Ethier: I think it’s important for Berklee’s brand to be recognized as one of firsts and one of innovation. Even though we may not always feel that way internally, and we’re trying to figure it out. It’s messy. That’s how it is. As an example, in the Globe article, we talked about how Berklee was the first to teach jazz. You go through the list, and there’s a lot of firsts. And it helps to set people up with the expectation. Of course, Berklee’s going to figure this out, because that’s what we do, right? And that’s a message I’m trying to get out in the world, that this isn’t a new thing.

It’s a new thing we’re dealing with, but the fact we’re dealing with firsts here isn’t new!

Mark Ethier: Right. And the other thing that I’d like to stress is that even though there’s a lot about me out in the world, and about iZotope, I think that the story is that iZotope used AI heavily in our products. I can’t tell you how many students I run into, and they say, “Oh my gosh, I wouldn’t let AI touch anything.” Oh, do you use Ozone, which is one of our products? “Of course, I use it on everything!” I was like, “That is filled with AI stuff, so you use AI, right?” This sort of black-and-white thinking is what we want to try to break through. But I say that because I think part of what we really focused on is that I want Berklee to be recognized, at the end of the day, as a place that enables humans to be creative, and that was the mission for iZotope as well. We were taking all of these cutting-edge technologies in service of the musician, the producer, the engineer, and the creator. And I think that’s the thing that I keep wanting to center, because the public discourse about generative AI is all about taking musicians’ jobs. I believe that there’s a whole realm of AI which is well-positioned to actually help artists, help creators. And that’s not really what’s being talked about, and I have a history and experience of navigating that successfully. That’s another piece that I’m trying to create some more nuance around, and not just the “AI=bad” sort of feelings.

Speaking of iZotope, let’s talk briefly about you selling the company you started. That must have been a difficult decision.

Mark Ethier: I had started and been running iZotope for about 20 years. Almost to the day, because we started the company in February of 2001, and I sold the company in March of 2021. It was a month and a half before my second kid was born.

It was a very hard professional decision, but also knowing that I had a new baby on the way made it easier. At that point, we had offices in Tokyo, Berlin, Boston, and we had a presence in LA. It was at a point where I knew the pandemic was going to end, and I was going to go back to being on the road all the time, so, personally, it was a very easy decision to say, “This is the right time for me to step away.” Also, once I had some space, it opened up the opportunity for me to pursue other things in my life, because when you are the founder/CEO of a company, there’s not really a lot more space in your life. So I’m really grateful for the ability to make space for my family, especially during those important times. To be able to make space and be a support to my wife, who is also an entrepreneur, where she was incredibly supportive of me during the iZotope days. Then to be able to sort of switch and be the primary parent who is doing the pickups, the drop-offs, the sick days, that was me. I think to be in a position where I could support my wife was really fulfilling, and it allowed her business and her trajectory to blossom in a way.

I was recently editing Maria Finkelmeier’s Creative Entrepreneurship Fundamentals course, and was pleasantly surprised to see you pop up in a video in lesson 7. The material in that lesson basically emphasizes an understanding that what the customer wants is different from what you might want them to want, and in your video interview, you discuss some of the products that didn’t quite take off with iZotope. If you were, in fact, the customer, what would you have wished had taken off at iZotope?

Mark Ethier: So, in software, a lot of things were moving to the cloud and we saw that trend was pretty clear. Music is always sort of behind every other industry, and so we saw that and said, “Okay, how do we get some of the benefit of that for our customers in an environment where we have to do real-time recording in response?” Because that’s one of the challenges. So we built a piece of Wi-Fi recording hardware, which if you could imagine, was sort of like SUNO in reverse. I think we were really on the edge of how recording will happen, where you have a device that brings it to the cloud, and then, because so many of the other tools that exist now are in the cloud, and it’s sort of awkward, and the idea was you could have this device with no wires. It came out of a frustration that I had, because I would want to record. I’d sit down, because I didn’t have a dedicated studio space, I’d start setting up the equipment, and then inevitably, something would not work. Then my wife would become impatient, and she wouldn’t want to sing or play guitar anymore, and then it was like, “Crap, I lost it.” So I wanted a thing I could just take out, put on the table, press record, and it would immediately start, but that would also be connected, so I wouldn’t have to then figure out how to plug it in to transfer the files and everything. So this device actually had AI built-in and when you started playing, would automatically detect the instrument and then set up the chain for you. But it was a bit of a victim of the pandemic, because we were in the midst of changing our manufacturer, which is a pretty big deal. We had manufactured a bunch of extra units, and then the pandemic happened.

Everyone started going home and recording from home. And so we thought we had nine or 10 months of inventory, and it was sold out within maybe 60 days. So, it’s one of those things where it sort of did get out to the world, but we never got to see it to its full fruition of what the plan was, and because of requirements for manufacturing during the pandemic, we just couldn’t make any more. And then the moment had passed, and we had to move on to other things, as sometimes you have to as a company.

While at MIT, you earned bachelor’s degrees: One in Computer Science and the other in Music Theory and Composition. Was there a crystallizing moment where you realized the interconnectedness of your two degrees?

Mark Ethier: Yeah, that’s a great question. To be honest, there’s a whole constellation of things that happened. I was an intern at a company called Cakewalk. And I think, for me, that the real moment was during my senior year. In my later years at MIT, I was really focused as a music composition major. And the MIT Symphony Orchestra was going to perform one of my pieces. And so, I thought I should get a recording, because how often do you get a symphony orchestra to record your music? And I went to Daddy’s Junky Music, which no longer exists, but I had my budget of something like $50 to rent equipment, and they gave me two SM57 mics. In any world, this is not the equipment you use to record an orchestra in a hall. So the recording was terrible. And that led me to this moment of, “Oh, no! Can I fix this? Can I make it better?” And so it was one of the key moments where the degree I was getting in computer science, I thought, “Wait a second, maybe I can use some of those things that we were doing in MATLAB to make this better, to apply some noise reduction and some other things,” and that actually was one of the sort of small bits that led to iZotope.

And that constellation is also just the practicality that I started the company in 2001 with some friends, and it was right when the dot-com bubble had burst. So, as a recent tech major, graduating—and maybe there’s some similarities to today: I had friends who had gotten jobs that had been signed, and then job offers were rescinded. Companies like Lycos were just going out of business. So some of the reasons we started a company was also just like a “Hey, there are not a lot of jobs out there, I wonder if we can go just start our own thing.” I give you all these examples because I don’t want to believe that it was just one thing, so when iZotope came together, it was some people I’d met at Cakewalk in that world, and it was some people I knew from MIT, because we were in computer science and music classes together, and so it was like, “Wait a second, we should talk.”

It was the moment in the world where the dot-com bubble had burst, and it was right at the beginning of MP3, and computers were fast enough that you could make your own recording at home. So we represented this new home recording musician. And we were basically just making tools for ourselves, but at that point the companies that were making recording gear were overwhelmingly making it for professionals. And so we just happened to be unable to afford or access that stuff, and so we just started making our own.