Image Line CEO Constantin Koehncke says he keeps one eye on the people actually using FL Studio by reading the company’s forums and Reddit every day, according to an interview with The Verge published July 11.
That habit matters because FL Studio is no longer the scrappy Windows beatmaking app many producers first met under its old Fruity Loops name. Image Line has added AI-assisted tools to the digital audio workstation, including stem separation and a Gopher chatbot, and Koehncke is the executive now responsible for deciding how far that kind of automation should go.
Koehncke became CEO of Image Line in 2022, The Verge reported. Before that, he led Native Instruments, worked in marketing, and spent about five years as a freelance music journalist. At Image Line, he is overseeing a product with a long memory among musicians, including users who remember Fruity Loops as both a gateway into production and, in many cases, software they first encountered through piracy.
In the interview, Koehncke said his pinned browser tabs include internal dashboards, product documents, analytics, the FL Studio forums, and Reddit. He described checking them each morning as part of his routine. He also said he had 34 tabs open across two browser windows at the time, split between work and everything else, and that he tries to end each day with no tabs left open.
Reddit appears to be more than a customer-service weather vane for Koehncke. He told The Verge it is the social platform he still uses most willingly, describing it as imperfect but closer to the older web, where people argue about narrow subjects because they care. He also said he spends time on YouTube and Substack for learning and keeping current, while LinkedIn comes with the CEO role.
AI, but not as a creativity replacement
Koehncke’s comments on technology were pointed for someone running a music software company adding AI features. Asked which tech trend he wanted gone, he said the pursuit of replacing human creativity misunderstands why people make things. His view, as stated to The Verge, is that tools should expand how people express themselves rather than remove the act of writing, painting, or making music.
That position is useful context for Image Line’s recent direction. Stem separation can split parts of an existing track, such as vocals or drums, while a chatbot can assist inside the software. Those features can save time, but they also sit inside the messy fight over whether music software is helping creators or training them to accept canned output with a nicer interface.
Koehncke did not present himself as the inventor of FL Studio. He pointed to Didier “Gol” Dambrin, whom he credited with creating the software, and said music owes him a lot. Koehncke’s own answer about what he is most proud of was managerial rather than mythic: building settings where skilled people can focus on products users want and like.
The rest of the interview was lighter, but still revealing about his operating system as a person. Koehncke named AirPods Pro as his most indispensable tool, complained about Apple’s newer Contacts interface on iOS, picked a Teenage Engineering OB-4 speaker as a current favorite gadget, and said the tagline for his biopic would describe a failed DJ who turned helping other people make music into a career.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
