✘ Let’s stop talking about emerging technologies

And: Labelling AI music; Lucian Grainge's 2025 memo; The strategic acquisitions of 2024; Spotify and UMG rigged the game a long time ago

In the music & tech community, the music industry more broadly, and the wider tech ecosystem, we love to talk about emerging technologies and their impact on existing structures. The problem with the word ‘emerging’ however is that it doesn’t take into account the long history of development of these technologies. Take the blockchain, where we can trace development back to 1970s work on cryptography. Or take artificial intelligence, where can trace the development back to the 1950s computer innovations. Where these technologies hit a certain networked impact is when most of us start to pay attention. Even when a piece of tech is in the public eye, surprises can still come to those outside of the actual nerd communities (hi DeepSeek). While it might sound like I’m arguing a semantic point here, I want us to move away from the word emerging and towards the word advanced. By thinking about these technologies as advanced, it helps us to think about how they can push our ecosystem forward instead of disrupting it. What’s more, we can begin to build a music and advanced tech path which can help us see a different kind of artist. This artist isn’t emerging, but one who adapts their artistic qualities with technical proficiencies and who puts together multidisciplinary teams to explore how we can use advances technologies as media of expression. All of this is based on long-term experimentation and iterative work. One part of this infrastructure is a kind of patient capital to support the infrastructure. The art and communities that emerge (yes) from these experiments will have a lasting impact on society more widely by providing different approaches to a society that is reliant on the technologies it puts out into the world.

Primitives

In the early stages of growth the form gets determined. Once this form is settled, it’s hard to reimagine it into something else, or something new again. On a global level, this is what happened with technology more broadly - we developed an understanding that technologies are the solution to our problems. This, as opposed to the technologies perhaps being a problem or exacerbating a problem. Even when we look at technology as merely a tool, we tend not to see beyond its direct capabilities. Yet, we can imagine many different uses for a technology, for a tool. All we need to do is go back to the primitives. One way to achieve this, is to squint - to accept that we don’t understand the full scope and thus accept that there is a dark, or grey, area that could open up new possibilities.

Of course, the foremost piece of technology on everyone’s mind right now is AI. It’s also the perfect example of a technology that might be a lot of things, but it’s not emerging. Just look at the long list of Geoffrey Hinton’s publications which goes back decades. Throughout those publications you can trace how the idea of the neural network took over from different methods of machine learning, mostly based on logical reasoning. What we see in action here, is the notion propagated beautifully by James Bridle that technologies also produce metaphors. At different stages of a technology’s development and adoption, these metaphors come into being and shape the way we engage with them. In a way, this even goes back to Marshall McLuhan’s construct that we first interpret and grasp new technologies through something we already know.

A neural network is basically our brain and so we think of AI as a brain. It’s also definitely not a brain, but how do you make that point if we all think of it as a brain? What’s more, we’re now at the stage that our techno-solutionist thinking leads us to put AI forward as the solution for AI-generated music flooding our DSPs. While this may work, there’s an underlying question that’s not addressed here. What if we imagine the technology differently? One way of doing this is through research, like AIxDesign is doing. They’ve recently released a zine on Esoteric AI where they reclaim ‘the predictive potential of AI to envision multiple futures.’ Put differently, we shouldn’t let go of the primitives, but stick with them as we develop potential futures so we can go back and reimagine the starting points over and over again. That way, we don’t get stuck.

Punk Technology

Back in October 2023, I wrote about crypto music as punk technology. There was, and is, a way to imagine crypto music as a punk technology that resists the way we’ve gotten used to thinking about music as a business. Now, we all know this still hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean we have to see crypto music in the same vein as the next memecoin. To quote Penny Rafferty in her book Radical Friends:

“What blockchain does have to offer is to relearn, retool, and re-educate ourselves in small test sites.”

For a lot of artists engaging with crypto and the blockchain meant to do exactly that. They tried to build something outside of existing ecosystems. They reimagined the value of music, they reimagined what it means to have a team versus a community, and they reimagined what matters to them as creatives. None of these experiments took off into a large mainstream consciousness. However, the primitives are still simmering. It’s this form of creative R&D that we need to see a lot more of, and that we need to make sure can exist. Just as Lucian Grange put forth in his memo that UMG is the best place for music, we definitely need to fight to position different alternatives. Universal won’t do the kind of creative R&D that the artists featured in Network Archives chased.

Now that blockchain and crypto culture is currently usurped by degens, we need to continue creating other punk technologies. One route to reimagination is to accept the errors in the machine. I just witnessed a performance by Jandroid Modaal, who embodies this punk attitude towards tech.

The artist is part of a cohort of musicians working with Thunderboom Records to explore how indie artists can do what big-budget, major label artists do with tech. All of this work ends up as open source, available to everyone else who wants to play with it.

Prospects

Going back to that quote by Penny Rafferty, the value of these experiments is exactly in their small scale. They are test sites that allow us to reassess, reshape, and conceive of the sociotechnical ecosystems we operate in through different modalities. If we want to establish a music and advanced technology ecosystem, there will need to be routes towards developing the technology through music, or creative expressions more generally. One thing we’ve learned from blockchain and crypto-based music experiments is that tokenization and co-ownership aren’t necessarily valid models to create markets for music. It worked in some of the test sites and it allowed, if for a brief moment, artists to determine the value of their music together with those willing to pay it. It hasn’t, however, changed the grander structures of the music industry.

We haven’t, for example, reimagined the metaphors around the artist team through community experiments, but the notion of a fluid squad still exists in certain sites. What needs to happen is for a broader creative R&D to establish the potential value that the process of experiment and development itself produces. There’s plenty of raw information and plenty of potential for creative and tech IP to arise from the artistic and creative R&D around advanced tech in music.

If we look at where the elements on the left of this image sit we need to look at indie music organizations and music-tech startups. Quickly iterating experiments need to lead to tooling, resources, and knowledge that will be shared and is as interoperable as possible. What’s there on the other side? It’s the place where the experiment turns into the art. Any framework that comes out of this convergence is basically a network of independent artists, most likely fluent in a specific technology, perhaps a commercial business, and sometimes a creative technologist.

The prospect here is a reconfiguration of how we engage with tech more broadly. To understand it within its history and context. Also, to reimagine valuation - hopefully at the ecosystem level.

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LINKS

As AI fakes proliferate, we need to draw a clear distinction between human-made music and AI-generated content (Clovis McEvoy)

“We will soon arrive at a place where AI-generated music can match the catchy-ness, complexity, and audio fidelity of what human creators can do. Before we reach this parity, governments and industry must work together to put clear labelling rules in place and empower music consumers to make an informed choice regarding what kind of music they want to patronise.”

✘ AI slop is here and labelling sounds like a sensible solution. There’s a few good surveys referenced in the piece, too.

Read Sir Lucian Grainge’s 2025 memo to Universal Music Group staff: ‘Streaming 2.0 will represent a new age of innovation, consumer segmentation, geographic expansion, greater consumer value and ARPU growth.’ (Murray Stassen)

“Some will try to disrupt our business or criticize us. That we know. It comes with being in the most competitive market that music and music-based entertainment has ever seen, and it comes with being the industry’s leader and primary driving force. But our vision and our ability to consistently execute gives us the momentum to continue to succeed and grow. Our global worldview and the internal competition fueled by our entrepreneurial spirit breeds innovation.” (Lucian Grainge)

✘ I beg to differ. Not much innovation comes from the behemoth that is UMG. Instead, they buy it up. What we need is to instigate new funds to actually foster innovation where it happens - at the indie level.

Catalogs, indies, and emerging markets: The strategic acquisitions of 2024 (Kristin Westcott Grant)

“In 2024, the world’s three dominant labels—Sony Music Entertainment (SME), Universal Music Group (UMG), and Warner Music Group (WMG)—revealed their hand. The majority of these acquisitions fall into three distinct categories that include: independent music, legacy catalogs, and emerging markets. Each category tells a story not just of growth but of survival, as the industry shifts under the weight of streaming, changing consumption habits, and global competition.”

✘ Great overview and analysis here. Like Kristin, I’m interested to see how market share competition in fast-growing markets will shake out this year.

Spotify and UMG rigged the game a long time ago (Ari Herstand)

“See, one UMG stream is going to earn more than one indie artist stream. From the identical listener. Why? Because every label and distributor negotiates their rates directly with Spotify. And with strict NDAs included in every licensing deal, we may never know what these rates are and which label or distributor gets paid the most.”

✘ So much truth in this piece, you should read it twice.

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MUSIC

Peter Rehberg’s latest composition Liminal States is a beautiful piece of ambient music that forever simmers. You can sense there’s something there, and it’s unclear whether its terror or beauty. It’s a captivating listen.