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Ivan Linn and Wavv Bring AI to the Heart of Music Creation
“It’s hard to imagine a world without AI. I almost feel like I breathe with AI.”
That is how Ivan Linn, founder and CEO of Wavv, described the essential role of artificial intelligence during his interview at the Meet Taipei Global Startup Trends Forum. Working at the heart of Silicon Valley, Linn has built Wavv with a vision to combine music and AI—not to replace creators, but to be their most powerful copilot.
Wavv’s innovation has already caught the attention of Hollywood directors and proved its value through a high-stakes, real-world challenge.
When NASA Needed Music, Wavv’s AI Delivered in Record Time
Linn shared a dramatic story that shows just how much AI can transform the creative industry. Last year, only ten days before a highly anticipated total solar eclipse, NASA approached Wavv with a challenge. They needed music for a live broadcast that was expected to reach 150 million viewers. Normally, high-level music production for such an event would take two to three months, but NASA’s team had less than two weeks.
Linn’s team accepted the impossible. Using Wavv’s AI technology, they created, generated, and delivered the full music score in just one week. When the NASA director received the tracks, he was amazed—he did not realize the music was AI-assisted. The livestream was a success, not only proving AI’s creative power under extreme time pressure but also showing the entertainment world that AI music could become a key part of the audience experience, not just background noise.
Finding Opportunity Beyond the B2C Red Ocean
While AI music is an exciting field, Linn is realistic about the challenges of monetization. Many startups try to win over everyday listeners, but Wavv chose a different path by focusing on business clients. Linn points out that most people pay a set amount for Spotify or Apple Music each month—about fifteen to twenty dollars—making the consumer market fiercely competitive.
The true scale of demand is on the business side. Linn shared eye-opening numbers: Google spends four to five billion dollars each year on music licensing, while Snapchat’s annual bill is five to six hundred million dollars. Major tech companies need massive libraries of licensed music to power content on social media features like Reels and TikTok, for video games, for the background music in shopping malls, and for setting the tone at global tech conferences.
Linn summed it up simply: wherever there is content, there is a need for music.
Wavv has positioned itself to serve these clients with fast, diverse, and legally compliant AI music solutions. Their offerings are already being used by game studios, advertising agencies, and retail companies. This business-to-business-to-consumer approach allows Wavv to scale up quickly and build a stable commercial foundation.
Building a Moat: Training AI with Music Theory Instead of Recordings
As generative AI becomes widespread, copyright issues have become a landmine for music tech companies. Several high-profile AI music platforms are now facing lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of dollars for using copyrighted recordings to train their models.
Linn, always thinking ahead as a technical founder, made a deliberate decision to avoid this risk. Wavv does not use audio files for training. Instead, their AI learns from the fundamentals of music—melodies, rhythms, and chord progressions. As Linn explained, “No one can claim ownership of D minor or a Latin beat.”
By focusing on music theory rather than recordings, Wavv avoids copyright conflicts and builds a real technical advantage.
This approach is about to make a dramatic impact. Wavv is preparing to release ten million jazz tracks, all free of copyright concerns. To put this in perspective, in the hundred years since jazz music was invented, humans have written about one million jazz songs. Wavv’s AI is ready to create ten times that amount at once. For content creators, this means music is no longer limited by expensive licensing or a small catalog—the supply side of the market is about to be transformed.
As he looks ahead to the coming year, Linn has practical advice for entrepreneurs in the AI space. “In AI right now, one day equals a month in the past. If your team is not fast, someone will copy your idea almost instantly.” But he also urges founders to avoid building “wrapper” apps—startups that simply add AI to an existing product without any real technical depth.
For example, calling a business “Coffee AI” because it uses a chatbot at a coffee shop is not enough. When companies like OpenAI or Google launch a similar feature, shallow products are quickly left behind.
Linn has seen firsthand how real technology makes the difference. From the director of Top Gun: Maverick embracing AI, to NASA relying on Wavv for a mission-critical broadcast, he believes the music industry is about to become decentralized and democratized.
In this future, music creation is not reserved for a small group of elites. With AI as a creative copilot, anyone can compose, produce, and share music at a professional level. For Lin, that is the real promise of technology—to empower every creator, everywhere.
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