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Author – Matej Jovanovic | PianoWorldWide | September 2025
Photo – Z.J.Maccak
In the heart of Vienna, within the iconic Bösendorfer Salon, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting Dorian Marko – a virtuoso pianist, visionary entrepreneur, and AI innovator whose influence resonates across the global music landscape. With over 20 billion streams worldwide, his rendition of Cornfield Chase has become globally famous, captivating audiences with its emotional depth. Beyond his musical prowess, he is the founder and CEO of Auddict, a leading audio technology company renowned for its groundbreaking virtual instruments and sample libraries. His commitment to innovation is further exemplified through the development of AI systems that streamline audio workflows, enhancing efficiency and creativity in the industry. Join us as we delve into an exclusive conversation with Dorian Marko, exploring his journey, inspirations, and the future of music technology.
You’re a successful pianist and also a CEO of several tech companies. How do you manage to stay organized on top of everything, and would you consider yourself a workaholic?
No. I think everyone else would probably say I am, though. The reason I work this much is because I understand that the world is moving in a direction where it’s increasingly difficult to build a career or accumulate any real wealth in business. Because of that, I’ve more or less put music aside; I haven’t done much in the past three years.
AI is exploding – much more than most people realize. What the public sees is only about one percent of what’s really happening. So for me, it’s not just a choice but a responsibility and an obligation. This is a wave that’s happening, and I’ve decided to ride it.
I believe you started in business long before AI became widely available?
Yes. My oldest company, which I still own, is a sample library company. We make virtual instruments – programs you load on your computer, connect to a keyboard, and suddenly you can play an orchestra, a trumpet, anything.
Most people don’t realize that much of the music they hear on the radio or in films is produced this way. Years ago, creating a good virtual instrument product could take two or three years. Today, thanks to in-house AI tools, we can reduce that to two or three days if we had to.
We’ve built a system that understands recordings almost fully. It includes, to my knowledge, the most advanced pitch detection and tuning algorithm that exists – and it’s completely lossless. The system can now even fill in gaps, meaning we don’t have to record everything as before. We record only what’s necessary, and the AI generates the rest flawlessly.
Is it still connected to music?
No, not entirely. Some of my current projects are outside music, particularly in video and other content-related areas. Normally, I wouldn’t have worried about competitors catching up, but with AI, things move so quickly. A team of 200 people could replicate your work in a week.
That said, I’m still developing AI plugins for music production – things like reverbs or smaller tools that handle the tedious, mechanical tasks. I like AI when it eliminates the “busywork,” the kind of jobs no one enjoys.
What I don’t like is when AI tries to replace human creativity. That feels pointless. But if AI can remove the repetitive, draining parts of the process, then it frees people up to focus on what actually matters.
I never liked hiring someone just to do spreadsheets. Even if the person was content with the job, it always felt wrong to me – asking a human being to spend day after day copying numbers from one column to another. It seemed almost insulting to human potential.
Left to Right - Sabine Grubmüller CEO of Bösendorfer, Vladimir Bulzan Marketing Manager, Matej Jovanovic, Tobin C. Carlin, Dorian Marko
Could we expect soon to have an opportunity to listen to you live at some venue?
Soon, probably not. Maybe in a few years.
I have to mention your rendition of Interstellar, which reached a staggering 20 billion streams. After such success – essentially, with almost no person in the world who hasn’t heard it – how did that affect your point of view and understanding of the piano and the music industry itself?
I would say it solidified what I already thought, rather than showing me anything new. People know the Cornfield Chase cover, but what they don’t know is that it was part of a series of experiments.
If you watch that video closely, the tuning is about half a semitone off. I did that to make sure it used different notes from everything else people had been listening to all day. I even put a cup of coffee on the piano in that clip. There were about twenty or thirty little things like that – each of them adding a few extra percentage points of engagement.
Of course, you can take that to extremes, where it becomes less about the music and more about provocation. The coffee cup, in a sense, was “rage baiting.” I discovered it because once I put a coffee on my piano, people reacted strongly: “How dare you put that coffee there!” My response was, “Mate, I could throw it off a bridge if I want – it’s mine.” But that reaction alone made people watch longer, comment more, and push the video higher.
So there’s this strange balance between passion, creativity, and business. Many musicians have the idea: “I should just do what I love, and everyone should pay attention and give me money for it.” I think that’s completely selfish. You are entitled to do what fulfills you, but the moment you ask for someone’s time – or money, which in many ways is the same thing – you have to convince them. They’re not obliged to give you anything.
That’s where social media becomes a business. You try to keep your dignity, you follow your moral compass, and you work within that. Some people take all their clothes off – and that works too. But it’s a spectrum of self-representation: what you consider acceptable and what you don’t. For me, it’s about staying on the side I can respect while still playing the game.
At just nineteen years old, Dorian took on one of the greatest challenges in the piano repertoire — the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. From the very beginning, his ambition went beyond simply performing it: he set out to record the fastest rendition of the famous Ossia cadenza, notorious for its relentless double chords. You can hear these blazing fast double chords in the video starting at 14:19, where his goal of pushing this passage to its technical limits ultimately became reality.
Do you enjoy more composing or performing music?
I enjoy writing and producing more. If I’m performing something I wrote myself, that’s part of the process, and I like it, but playing other people’s music – not as much.
I would always choose writing and producing first. Performing my own work is enjoyable, but it’s tied to the end of the creative process.
I don’t think I’ll ever give a recital of Liszt, for example. I might play Rachmaninoff concertos because I have certain ideas I want to explore with them, but I’m not particularly interested in classical-style performances. One or two concerts here and there can be nice, but it’s not my main focus.
What is the meaning behind your tattoo, or at least the main one?
I like wolves and music, basically. That’s more or less it. I even have “wolk” on my card – that means wolf in Croatian.
It’s not some deep family story or anything like that. But there is a reason I like wolves. The first recognition I ever got for a project, when I was younger, came from a book called Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver. It’s a children’s novel.
When I was around 18, studying at the conservatory and trying to break into film music, I had no film to write a score for. So I took that book, wrote a kind of soundtrack to it, and even paid an artist with the little money I had to create drawings for the scenes. That project very slightly got me into the circles of people working around Hollywood, and I received my first acknowledgment from someone in the industry who told me, “You know what you’re doing.” That gave the wolf a special place in my heart.
Some people even got the same tattoo after seeing mine. They sent me pictures. One guy asked me if I’d be okay with it, and I said, “Well, I can’t stop you, but at least change it – it’s going to be on you forever.” The next thing I know, he sends me a photo: “I did it already.” I thought, why ask me then? It’s your skin. Don’t you want something unique? And he was a pianist as well, which made it even stranger.
Where do you seek inspiration? And what drives you when it comes to music, and what when it comes to business?
With music, it’s completely random. I might wake up in the middle of the night with a tune, usually when I’m doing something entirely unrelated. If I sit down and try to write music intentionally – it doesn’t work. The ideas always come when I’m focused on a different task.
Meditation helps because it clears the mind. Being tired helps too, because the part of your brain that judges your work – the part that tells you it’s “bad” – goes to sleep, and creativity can flow.
In business, I wouldn’t call it inspiration exactly. Ideas usually come from a product I personally need. Sometimes I create something for myself because it’s necessary, and if it works for me, it often works for others too. If you’re successful in something and you create a product that improves your life, that’s the recipe. The remaining part is just marketing, and those two components together make it fly.
You have devoted a lot of energy and work in modern technologies, including AI. In your opinion, how will the rapid developments on a global scale affect live music performances? Could we see concerts without live performance in the future?
We already do. For example, there’s ABBA live in London.
Hopefully not at all, but probably yes. I’m not interested in it. I don’t understand the concept of tens of thousands of people watching a light show or a digital recreation instead of a live artist. People come home thinking, “It was like seeing Michael Jackson,” but it wasn’t. You just paid money to trick your brain.
Concerts are concerts. I never leave a show thinking, “It would be better if the technology was improved.” Back in the day, I might have understood, when TV was black and white and people couldn’t see the details. But now, with all the high-end visuals and pyrotechnics, the tech is already incredible. Performer-less shows just feel strange to me – they seem like a big sheep pit.
Do you think AI is a threat to live performance?
Oh, I think it is. I just don’t like it. I think it will inevitably happen. Imagine an artist with millions of fans who dies. A company will see that gap – a money vacuum – and someone will fill it. It’s inevitable. But I’m not interested in that kind of thing.
Do you believe musicians can still grow and reach a wider audience through social media, or do you feel we're approaching a point where people will lose interest in social media and phone usage in the near future?
There are two answers: yes and no.
On the no side, we’ve basically desensitized ourselves, or we’re very close to it. Look at the evolution: the first YouTube videos were just people jumping around with sticks or bikes. Fast-forward, and you get long operas, silent films, and eventually modern platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, all shortening content and increasing consumption speed. TikTok even added a fast-forward button to watch in double speed. The constant bombardment makes everyone increasingly numb.
On the yes side, there’s always a way to stand out. Imagine a grid of 100 purple squares and one turned orange – you’ll naturally look at the orange. In content and business, the principle is the same: see what everyone else is doing and do the opposite. Cornfield Chase is a prime example. Many try to follow trends, but creating a trend is harder and more rewarding.
So musicians can still grow and reach audiences, but it’s becoming more difficult. The future doesn’t look perfect, but as long as there are people willing to be different, it’s possible. Global abandonment of devices will never happen, sadly.
I often joke with friends that one day I’ll just buy a farm, leave all the technology, and disappear. Not enough people think that way today; most are swallowed by content consumerism. Hyper-stimulation leads to desensitization, and eventually, some kind of reset will be needed – but how that will happen remains to be seen.
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