✘ Gender, metadata, music, and tech
And: Universal strikes AI training deal; The unauthorized repair of the world; How big can music merch get?
We all know how important metadata is. It’s the fuel of our industry and helps every part communicate with the other parts. Everything from distribution to stream counts and royalty collection is built on the same set of metadata. Since 2006, the standard for this is DDEX. On the tactile, everyday level, artists are confronted by metadata in choosing their name, song title, etc. In our streaming-dominated industry, these metadata points have become more and more important. This also means that we should continuously check in to see whether we can improve anything to our metadata. As such, the people at GenderMusicTech - a project that focuses on increasing equality in the digital music ecosystem - are undergoing research into gender bias in music metadata.
Questions around updating our metadata standards have renewed with the advent of large AI models being trained on vast amounts of data. How can we make sure everyone gets represented? What kind of solutions can we offer? To figure out the answers to these questions GenderMusicTech is currently running a survey, which I hope many of you will participate in. This is for everyone working in music.
LINKS
🤝 Universal strikes AI data training deal, still suing AI companies for using its data (Emilia David)
“Music labels see they can’t stem the creation of AI-generated songs and prevent AI models from training on publicly released music. Through these deals with AI startups, labels like UMG, which owns other record labels that host artists like Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan, can make (even more) money from their copyrights.”
✘ It’s all about money and control. We’ll keep seeing deals like this as Generative AI finds it’s way around the mould of the music industry frameworks.
👩🔧 The unauthorized repair of the world (Yifan Wang & Changwen Chen)
“The official story of Huaqiangbei and Shenzhen is a narrative of China’s economic miracle and socialist reform success. The messy, inconvenient fact that whatever is made will need, at some point, to be repaired rarely gets a mention. But things degrade just as they upgrade. That’s where the repairers come in.”
✘ This is such a great piece on how we can reshape our approach to tech and the world around us. Degrade, upgrade, repair, and continue to use your machines.
👕 How big can music merch get? MIDiA’s latest report charts the course to $16B by 2030 (Tatiana Cirisano)
“As streaming matures, labels are turning attention to monetising fandom, with merch an obvious place to start. But with superfans a niche group to begin with, the question is how much bigger the merch market can realistically grow, and where the untapped potential lies.”
✘ Growth, but one that slows down. I think Tati says it well by pointing out that we cannot squeeze more money out of the ‘superfan’ at some point. This opens up questions on how to grow music revenues outside of fandom monetization.
MUSIC
Underworld released a new record, and it’s so, so good. Strawberry Hotel will sit alongside their earlier classics for me.