✘ Creative R&D is a culture
And: Music City Report Bangalore & Kochi; Neural fingerprinting for anti-copyright theft; GEMA vs OpenAI update; Living with the discomfort of learning; Are you high-agency or an NPC
Last week, I wrote about how we need better infrastructure for Creative R&D in music. Since then, I’ve been thinking about how we need a better culture for R&D in music, too. The course I highlighted earlier this week aims to help participants build sustainable business models. As Sound of Fractures pointed out in a comment to that piece, we need to get better at defining what sustainable means. Where this starts, I think, is with culture.
Culture
Remember how Creative R&D isn’t part of the regular way of thinking about R&D in, for example, tech companies. Google’s Moonshot is awesome, but it’s ultimately product focused. What’s more, it’s overarching vision is to ‘solve the world’s hardest problems.’ Creative R&D can be said to have a similar vision, but not necessarily so. It’s mission, the way I listen to it, is to engage in much broader public value creation. This thus moves beyond both artistic practices and societal and technological progress.
It’s culture that defines how we shape the future and this culture can be captured in artefacts. The things we make shape the way we understand the world they were created in. Moving way beyond common tropes such as design thinking what I’m asking for is to adopt completely different ways to imagine. Evgeny Morozov’s podcast A Sense of Rebellion is all about this. Set up to find what was termed responsive technologies, a group of researchers, scientists, artists, and designers worked together in a lab in the 1960s. They called this Environmental Ecology and it almost led the western world down the opposite path than the technodeterministic one we ended up with.
Behaviour
The podcast is a bit soap opera when it comes to all the human relationships. In other words, the culture at the Environmental Ecology Lab was less than perfect. What it did do, however, is to encourage the kind of artistically driven work that Creative R&D also calls for. Morozov sometimes refers to the work done in the lab as ‘avant-garde’ something that resonates with what I wrote last week about the experimental side of music as a fertile ground for Creative R&D. There’s a long history of scientists also being musicians - just think of Einstein or Heisenberg. This also goes the other way around. A lot of experimental musicians are also scientists.
Sometimes you want to filter out the noisy elements, and other times you want to enhance them. This choice is a behavioural one. Both on the side of the creator as on the side of the listener. There’s always a behavioural interplay. If you listen to A Sense of Rebellion you’ll hear how this interplay is hard to control. In other words, it’s difficult to influence behaviour. When it comes to Creative R&D, the culture needs to influence the behaviour towards a kind of expansion of collective imaginations, as per Future Art Ecosystems. First within the group doing the research and then in the groups who will engage with what has been developed.
Doing
Just to get back to that word sustainable and what it stands for. There’s an element of precariousness to the kind of long-term thinking that’s needed for Creative R&D to flourish. If there’s one thing that we can learn from Google’s Moonshot it’s that projects need time, space, and money. This is something that doesn’t match the usual way of funding the arts, let alone music. Is sustainability, then, something that focuses on public engagement, a notion of critical thinking around advanced technologies, or simply to preserve space for experimentation? To answer this question is to define the metrics of success for each project.
It’s possible to set up Creative R&D projects within hybrid infrastructures and interdisciplinary partnerships. Some of these projects can be led by artists and their needs and ideas. Others could be led by technologists with artistic input. Either way, both will need to balance the need for evolving and exploratory work with a kind of calcification of insitutional rigidity. To break this balance into the favour of the former, it’s good to work in quick iterations. This could be in short agile-style sprints with a focus on adding value on weekly basis. Without the need for a result-driven culture, the focus can be on the iterative nature. Exploration will be valued over everything else.
Funding
Arts or tech led will most likely have very different funding structures. What we’ve seen in the UK is publicly-funded organizations taking the lead - The Serpentine Gallery or the Royal Shakespeare Company as examples. There’s a territorial bias here and Creative R&D projects will have different structures in, for example, Brazil, The USA, or India. This is also the point originally raised by Nesta when they began to argue for Creative R&D. One of their goals was to make Creative R&D eligible for the kind of funding traditionally provided to ‘hard sciences.’
The argument is strong, especially with the focus on the creation of public goods and public engagement. However, there should be ways to develop long-term funding outside of this kind of government-led grant system. One of these would be through private funding - something Nesta was also sensitive to as it argued for tax breaks. So who would fund this? First, risk takers who see a potential upside if something developed becomes a productized success. Second, a long-term ARR of around 15% could be enough to attract those people with a desire to diversify their portfolios. Third, this can be combined with a broader filanthropic arm and, fourth, public funding.
This mix isn’t new, of course, but it shows the need for high-level ecosystem visions of futures. These can then be taken into project-by-project parts and pieces to find the right teams of people to push them forward.
Sustainable
There’s the nub of the argument and the need to be able to define what sustainable means. In this case of Creative R&D, it’s very much about sustainability in the sense of a maintaining of critical creative capacities for advanced technologies. Music is ideally positioned to take advantage here, because it traditionally likes to ask questions of technology - from production all the way through to distribution.
✘ Sustainable business models in the music industry
A reminder that this course starts on 17 October, and you can still register to take part. You’ll learn all about how to let financial innovation catch up with cultural innovation as you build out your business plan throughout the 9 weeks of the course.
LINKS
🏙️ Music city report: Bangalore & Kochi (Prarthana Sen, Nitya Menon, Arav Saraff)
“In the ongoing discourse about superfans in the music industry, we decided to dig deeper into their prevalence at the city level. Although 57% of respondents reported that they do not consider themselves superfans, a sizeable 42% agreed or strongly agreed to being superfans of a few local artists. However, this is not supported by common superfan behaviours which we asked about next, such as subscribing to artist newsletters (about 70% of respondents strongly disagree or disagree), paying for exclusive access (85% of respondents do not do this) or buying music directly from the artists rather than streaming (another 85% of respondents do not do this either).”
✘ If you’re at all interested or curious about how music works in India, this report brings some great insights. What’s more, it also digs into the more global issue of how cities benefit from strong policy around music.
Universal and Sony Music partner with new platform to detect AI music copyright theft using ‘groundbreaking neural fingerprinting’ technology (Daniel Tencer)
“A “neural embedding” is a way of turning elements of music (or words or other data) into numbers. Musical elements like chords or melodies are given a numerical representation that makes it easier to recognize similarities between them.”
✘ This feels like an upgrade on the way Content ID has worked so far. I’m also curious what kind of new sounds will come out of this - similar to how YouTube’s Content ID led to ‘like beats’
⚖️ OpenAI on losing track in German copyright case brought by music rights collecting society over song lyrics; injunction looms large (Florian Mueller)
“The presiding judge left no doubt in her introductory outline of the issues in the case that the panel deems OpenAI liable for copyright infringement. She noted that the facts (which OpenAI addressed in apparently voluminous pleadings) were actually “not complicated” given that OpenAI does not dispute the use of the copyrighted works at issue in the training of its ChatGPT model. The judges are furthermore unpersuaded that users, not OpenAI, bear the responsibility for ChatGPT’s outputs.”
✘ Results will come pretty soon - in about 4 to 8 weeks. I’ll be curious to see what kind of licensing this results in and whether we see a push for payments on input and/or output. I still feel music copyright should be uniquely positioned to go hard on both sides - with the structures around sampling and derivates, for example. Whether any music created by GenAI can ever be cleared if it holds 1000s of inputs is another matter!
😳 how to live with the discomfort of learning (instead of running from it) (Ayushi Thakkar)
“but the discomfort is not proof that you’re failing; it’s proof that you’re present in the process. when you feel that itch of inadequacy, that awkwardness of not being fluent yet, that is the body’s way of recording: something new is happening here. neurons are straining to connect. muscles are memorizing movements. patterns are being written. the discomfort is the scaffolding, and you can’t build without it.”
✘ This hits close to my heart as it’s a feeling I have a lot. It’s in these moments of awkwardness that I often need to work hardest to get myself to act and do. It’s helpful to read Ayushi’s perspective on this, I feel.
🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC? (Jasmine Sun)
“Then there’s the fact that we’ve never had consumer products this cheap and addictive before—Nozick’s experience machine is real and it looks like TikTok. I think of Zuckerberg’s comment that “The average American has fewer than three friends, but demand for something like 15.” The nightmare goes like this: as digital relationships become more accessible, partying/marriage/fertility rates will continue to drop—making in-person socialization a rarefied luxury good. The permanent underclass will be sedated and dopamine-hacked by hyperpersonalized AI lovers, too wireheaded to have agency in the post-AGI age.”
✘ So many narratives around AI, it’s useful to think about framing them. Jasmine helps capture various modes of thinking and containers that exist at the moment - and then deconstructs it all.
MUSIC
I’ve been listening to Smith & Cohen’s new record Half Life a lot since it was released a few weeks ago. It’s a gorgeous record full of intimate songs. It does a strange job of making me feel melancholy but then kind of revealing to me how I need to be nice to myself. Perhaps that sounds grandiose, but it’s a record I’m grateful for.