✘ Creative R&D in music
And: Underrepresentation in EU music ecosystem; AI = theft; Humans as luxury goods; What happens when an AI-artist gets a record deal; AI won't make you rich
Advanced technologies can have a profound impact on our industry and society at large. This impact always starts out with the seeds sown through creative R&D projects. I wrote about these two topics back in February when I argued to stop using the term ‘emerging tech’ in favour of ‘advanced tech.’ The main take-aways from that piece were:
The music industry often gets caught up in hype around new technologies without fully understanding their practical applications or histories.
Rather than focusing on "emerging" tech, the industry should shift towards more grounded, practical R&D efforts that directly address real-world challenges.
Successful R&D initiatives in music require a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach that brings together diverse stakeholders.
The ultimate goal should be developing innovative solutions that unlock new creative and business opportunities for artists and the industry as a whole.
Future Art Ecosystems
Now, Future Art Ecosystems - a project from Serpentine Gallery - has come out with a new volume on precisely the topic of Creative R&D. They write:
“Future Art Ecosystems (FAE) is a project for building 21st century cultural infrastructure to support art and advanced technologies for the public good.”
The basic tenets from the book can be summarized as follows:
The importance of a multidisciplanary approach bringing together diverse perspectives on problems and fears as well as diverse skillsets.
There’s a need for longer term and iterative experimentation. The focus of creative R&D projects should be to prototype, test, and iterate.
Kind of combining the above two points, there’s a strong need for collaboration and community. Any thriving ecosystem is built on these two intertwining structures.
Focus on value-generation across social, cultural, and economic orbits.
Finally, the key goal of the FAE project is to provide further basis for Creative R&D more generally. There’s no official definition of R&D that includes the arts in the way FAE posits it. It’s no coincidence FAE is a part of the UK arts ecosystem. It was Nesta, a UK innovation agency for social good, who first threw the term Creative R&D into the world.
Experimental development
R&D should by nature be experimental. Music has a history of boundary pushing innovators. From Hildegard von Bingen’s monophony to Bach’s counterpoint to John Cage’s 4’33”, music has always had the ability to influence the way broader society perceives the world. What these composers have in common is that they each found, in their own worlds, the opportunity to experiment.
They also all found ways to compose their music through work. Von Bingen and Bach through the church and other patrons, Cage mostly through university affiliations. Experimentation, and research and experimental development, work better when people operate from that place of safety. This allows the constraints to fall away and new paths to be explored.
One example to come out of the UK drive for Creative R&D in the last years is DREAM, which I wrote about in March of 2021. At the time, I was mostly interested in how it represented opportunities for interactive audience behaviour and adaptive live music experiences. DREAM was as much gameplay as it was concert. It was also a fantastic example of creative R&D. The various expertises of gaming, theatre design, performance, music, composition, and technology came together to create something that can still be considered a benchmark.
Of course, the nature of experimental development is that it doesn’t have to be a success. The whole concept of R&D means that not everything that gets built or concocted will be developed into a realised form like DREAM. The point is what gets learned about various tools and cultures. Music allows culture and technology to be in the kind of creative R&D conversations that are needed to develop both.
Emergent ecosystems
Music exists on a spectrum from big industry players, such as the majors labels or large CMOs, to idealist artist-focused organizations like FUTURX or Reset! network. In between these are a vast number of festivals, incubators, labels, publishers, artist services, distro, promoters, investors, and much more. Together, they create a music ecosystem. Within this overarching ecosystem, we can trace the roots of emergent ecosystems. These tend to start on the edge of the spectrum where the idealist artist-focused organizations are. This is where the seeds of creative R&D in music get sown. This is where we need to start building the infrastructural support.
As in the Creative R&D volume from FAE, I want to reiterate that Creative R&D is relatively new. Moreover, there isn’t a strong history of R&D in music and yet music is inherently experimental in nature. Similarly, music is often seen as the canary in the coalmine for how new technologies impact media business models more broadly. Creative R&D, however, is about being ahead of that curve. To experiment and iterate on ideas before they take hold more broadly.
So can we imagine a world where the more idealist artist-focused organizations develop the kind of infrastructure that allows for emergent ecosystems to bloom? We see artist residencies, which could be starting point. We also see Music Tech Europe develop into a more robust organization - with national subdivisions. These are all positive signs towards the kind of infrastructure that supports emergent ecosystems. The next step is to make more of this, to grow it and foster more irruption into the overarching ecosystem. All this should be as mission-led as the artist-focused and idealist organizations that need the support to formulate and evolve emergent ecosystems.
Call to action
Artists, technologists, policy makers, investors, researchers, and anyone else who feels called on. Do you already feel like you’re doing Creative R&D? Do you want to fund Creative R&D? Do you want to help build the infrastructure for Creative R&D to thrive? Let’s talk, just reply to this email or in the comments sections.
LINKS
🥉 Geographical underrepresentation and diversity in the music industry within the EU music ecosystem (Ruth Koleva, Monica Petrova, Mila Georgieva)
“A significant challenge faced by South East European (SEE) artists in making their mark on the international stage stems from considerable financial and structural barriers. While artists from wealthier European regions benefit from robust support systems for touring and festival appearances, their SEE counterparts often navigate a landscape marked by a scarcity of resources and financial backing. This disparity not only affects their capacity for international exposure but also underscores a broader issue of accessibility within the global music ecosystem.”
✘ The report also has some strong recommendations so definitely check out the whole thing. What I want to highlight, however, is how much this is a global issue and one of resources. The main question to come out of this for me is to consider different venues for resource distribution - which takes us back to the practical advise in the report itself.
🐇 AI giants accused of the ‘Largest IP Theft’ in music history (James Darley)
“The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has compiled extensive evidence over the past two years, showing that songs by The Beatles, Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Bob Dylan are among those allegedly used without the consent of the artists.”
✘ In the end, everything will be licensed. Until then, it’s it highly interesting to follow along with these cases and the specific focus of each one. Input and output are very much both in play.
🗿 Humans as ‘luxury goods’ in the age of AI (Sangeet Paul Choudary)
“Unlike knowledge (or at least plausible ChatGPT-generated answers), curiosity, curation, and judgment cannot be mass produced because they are each path-dependant on an individual’s experience, taste, and ability to navigate uncertainty. They are also increasingly important under conditions of attention scarcity, where the ability to allocate limited cognitive and organizational resources determines competitive advantage.”
✘ Great piece to complement my own recent piece on music as luxury media. Here, it’s all about curation and curiosity and how important those are to find our own paths to discover, basically, our identities.
⚖️ What happens when an AI-generated artist gets a record deal? A copyright mess (Elissa Welle)
“Jones’ manager Romel Murphy claims that other record companies backed away from Jones after learning that Suno was used to create the songs. When asked about the possibility of copyright infringement, Jones’ manager, Murphy, directed the question to their lawyer, who declined The Verge’s request for comment.”
✘ The piece also goes more deeply into the specific copyright issues, but this part speaks volumes. People just don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re trying to do something and will see if it sticks. Hallwood Media - a record label - can probably write this off if it fails, but if it works they may have a hit on their hands. For the rest of us, we can watch it unfold like we did with The Velvet Sundown.
💸 AI will not make you rich (Jerry Neumann)
“Knowledge-intensive services will get cheaper, allowing consumers to buy more of them, while services that require person-to-person interaction will get more expensive, taking up a greater percentage of household spending. This points to obvious opportunities in both. But the big news is that most of the new value created by AI will be captured by consumers, who should see a wider variety of knowledge-intensive goods at reasonable prices, and wider and more affordable access to services like medical care, education, and advice.”
✘ Jerry puts the development of AI in a longer history of technological developments and compares it to two extremes of innovation and value capture - the personal computer and containerization/shipping. I love it when things get placed in a longer history and this is a good read. We’ll see about his prediction quoted above in due time.
MUSIC
Slightly odd music section this time, because I want to shout out Drowned in Sound turning 25! I’ve spent a number of years on their forums and found so much great music and like-minded music nerds through there. It’s awesome to still see them going, and applaud them for taking a strong social stance. Their recent article by Emma Wilkes on Mysogyny in music: the numbers just one example. Let me share some music I discovered throught the DiS forums back in 2010: Trouble Books.
Personally, I think we need artists to recognize that a post-streaming music ecosystem is entirely possible. For artists, this often meant less control, less value capture and that has unfortunately been the standard for the last decades.
Take artists like Valentin Hansen (Infinite AI Album) or Lychee (Tigris & Eugene Angelo). They've build projects that aren't just songs/tools but products in an era of creative technology. They point to a future where musicians are both creators and product builders.
Right now, the value of these experiments is mostly cultural-novelty, prestige, attention. What's missing are ways to measure impact beyond streams and the support structures that can turn prototypes into sustainable ecosystems.
If the industry embraces this dual role for artists, Creative R&D can shift music from being reactive to tech trends towards actively shaping them. Otherwise, we risk tech companies ( cough Suno cough) define the future of music without artists at the center.
I think working co-operatives and collectives engaged with their own research should be made as a counterpoint to the R&D done in the tech industry. However, you are quite right that "This impact always starts out with the seeds sown through creative R&D projects." This was something I learned quite a bit about when I wrote my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music. Almost all of the techniques of electronic music came about through R&D into research into speech and mass communications technology. They were only used for music as an afterthought, but it was a happy byproduct of the tech. Places like Bell Labs invited in the avantgarde luminaries of their time to play with their tools. There really isn't much of avantgarde at all anymore... even if there were, I doubt the tech bros would bring in the artist to have a look at their tools as they were being developed. At this point artists need to develop their own tools and platforms and groups outside of all that is encapsulated in the term "McGovCorp."