Mark Ethier is helping shape the future of music. Cracking the top 10 of SPIN<\/em>\u2019s Most Influential People in Music of 2026 list, Ethier now stands at the center of the conversation around creativity, technology, and artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Ethier was building technological tools for musicians\u2019 everyday creative workflows long before AI became a flashpoint in music culture. After graduating from MIT with degrees in music and computer science, he cofounded iZotope in 2001, helping lead the company as its audio software became foundational to modern music production. Under his leadership as CEO, iZotope earned multiple NAMM TEC Awards, two Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards, and an Academy Award for Scientific and Engineering Achievement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Currently serving as the executive director of Berklee\u2019s Emerging Artistic Technology Lab (BEATL)<\/a>, he champions an artist-first approach to innovation\u2014one that emphasizes intention, agency, and human creativity. Today, that work directly impacts students, faculty, and the broader music community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He will deliver the keynote address at Berklee Onsite<\/a>, where he says he plans to focus on the practical applications of AI for music making and creativity, featuring live demonstrations that students can immediately apply to their own creative work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than positioning AI as something that replaces artists, Ethier encourages musicians to decide where they want to be most creative\u2014and then use technology to support the rest of the process, from workshopping lyrics and producing music to building marketing campaigns, managing tours, and shaping sustainable careers on their own terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this candid conversation, he reflects on entrepreneurship, family, student idealism, AI skepticism, and finding a middle ground where creativity and technology can coexist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mark Ethier:<\/strong>\nI\u2019ll just start by saying that BEATL is a pan-Berklee group, so I report to Jim Lucchese<\/a>, and I\u2019m not specific to Berklee College of Music or to Berklee Online. One of the reasons why I\u2019m excited that we\u2019re 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<\/a> from Online, it has faculty from campus, we have representation from the Conservatory in there, because they\u2019re thinking about generative video and how that will impact acting, and people from Valencia<\/a> and New York<\/a>, so I\u2019m 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\u2019ll put it in a couple of categories. One is that we are preparing for the AI Music Summit<\/a> in June.\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Mark Ethier:<\/strong>\nYeah, I think intentionally, because there aren\u2019t many windows when campus is free. So that\u2019s a lot of work, and our goal there is to essentially \u201crerun\u201d a conference which happened two years ago in collaboration with the Audio Engineering Society<\/a>, 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\u2019d say so far the response has been very positive, as we try to program it.\n\n
\nWhat\u2019s the day-to-day like with BEATL?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nRight! Just a few days after Berklee Onsite, too!<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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\nAnother big part of what I\u2019ve been focused on at BEATL is the belief that no one really knows what\u2019s going to happen: how AI is going to change education, how it\u2019s going to change music, from creation through distribution, consumption, whatever monetization is, even live performance. So, instead of trying to say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to put all our eggs in this basket,\u201d my goal instead is to make Berklee the center of the conversation. So we are bringing in the practitioners, whether they\u2019re 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\u2019re getting people from industry to come in and speak to individual classes. We\u2019ve started up what we\u2019re 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\u2019re 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.\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n Berklee Online students can subscribe to email updates from BEATL.\n <\/h2>\n\n