✘ Navigating the future through music and tech
And: How AI can help reshape the music industry; Where You At raises £2.5m for nightlife security; Timbaland x Suno; Brands after Vibes; Latent communities in artificial internet
“The future of music” - this phrase is frequently discussed, whether in conference panels, blog posts, news articles, or LinkedIn posts. But what does it really mean when we discuss the future of music? Moreover, do we consider how to achieve or strategise for this future? Where do emerging trends in technology point to?
It’s easy to say every company must adopt an AI strategy nowadays; it’s much harder to put one together. Moreover, making such a statement may suggest a lack of understanding about what an AI strategy is and the essence of AI itself. But there’s not just a lot more to AI; there’s also a lot more than AI when it comes to those emerging trends.
How can we shape emerging tech?
Over the past decades, the most significant determinant of new tech trends has been venture capital, the Power Law, and Moore’s Law. The first point is the massive influx of money based on the expectation that some of that investment will yield high returns. The idea is rooted in the second concept - the Power Law: a large proportion of results or outcomes often come from only a tiny amount of the overall components at play. And then there’s Moore’s Law - now often pronounced dead - which tells us that growth in technology accelerates exponentially. All of this is based on building the product first and then finding the market for it. I’ve previously called this method into question, calling for something I called market-product fit. The central notion here is that artists, especially indie artists, have the best ideas, and they are often the “market” for which new products aim.
Let’s be clear: in today’s world, artists need to be involved from the start. They need to be the ones guiding innovation and informing developers of what they are looking for. This involves the entire production-to-distribution chain. Whether you're developing a new plugin, a DAW, or exploring direct-to-fan solutions, the new approach should be driven by the artist's vision. However, not all artists can take on this role. It requires not just an artistic vision but also an ability to communicate it clearly. Additionally, these artists must understand both the limitations and the opportunities presented by technology.
Shifting focus from tech start-ups, indie culture already shapes new tech trends. As Dan Dewar recently wrote:
“This is the industry where you will find the early traces of the next great leap in consumption models. It’s where you will find repeated innovations on artist business models and operating structures.”
As such, we need to get creative on how to fund these early seeds of change. In many countries around Europe, and in Canada, a lot of this culture is dependent on public funding. In other countries, it’s based on local economies or private grants. This situation presents a unique opportunity for investors, particularly Angel investors, to support these innovations by providing the necessary financial resources. One possible route is that a seed of change could lead to a much broader market, creating an early success story for whichever start-up develops the technology behind that change.
Besides this focus on artists and the indie music industry, there’s another factor that plays a role in shaping emerging tech - licensing. Traditional licensing structures prevent innovations from advancing towards product development and/or scale. Special licences should be created to enable start-ups and small businesses to experiment with new monetization, distribution, and creation models. Solving this requires conversations at the policy level, but it also requires a willingness amongst CMOs and other institutions to support these changes.
ML algorithms have existed long before Gen AI. Let’s not overlook this fact!
We’re struck by the power of Generative AI, but there’s a tendency to forget the power that Machine Learning already exudes into our lives. Before Gen AI, an endless amount of data was processed by ML systems, which fundamentally shaped the outputs of Generative AI, as well as Large Language (and Music) models. Such machine learning was once a part of the developments of AI, but since the late 1970s, it has developed as its own strand of research. It has invaded our lives. On the one hand, it does useful jobs like separating our emails between inbox and spam. On the other hand, the algorithms that shape our daily online interactions are based on data inputs. We’ve moved way beyond the Travelling Salesman Problem and into our For You Pages.
ML has had an oversized influence on our current socio-cultural state, where mono-culture reigns over micro-communities. There are various perspectives to consider in understanding this. Consider Yancey Strickler’s notion of the post-individual:
“Computers and the internet have changed how we see and understand who we are, how we socialize, and inspired humans to act in ways closer to how algorithms and machines see us: segmenting the micro-personas and qualities within us into distinct alts and platform-specific identities that can take on lives of their own.”
From these micro-personas, micro-communities can emerge, driven by virality (think Y3K) or by passion, often forming out of various scenes. This fragmentation is especially apparent in electronic music, where there are countless genres and subgenres. At the same time, EDM is a monoculture. It bleeds into all aspects of life because it’s continuously pushed through the algorithm. Try to play with Gen AI music tools, and you’ll quickly learn that it constantly reverts back to a mean. It’s aiming for the most common next sonic part. To break away from this norm, it’s essential to focus on what distinctly deviates from it. This alternative sound should be allowed to grow and evolve. Currently, the support structures for such diversity are weak, presenting a clear opportunity for development.
A function of the algorithm in our social internet world is that it prioritises reach and popularity. The support structures that exist for musicians have accordingly moved from artist development to audience development. Growth comes not from honing skills but from increasing reach and connecting with a broader audience. Here lies the opportunity to create factions that diverge from mainstream culture, yet can establish their own self-sustaining economies, potentially tapping into revenue streams generated by algorithms.
Where does innovation sit in our music ecosystem?
This year has been all about the “superfan”. Direct-to-fan is presented as a solution to the monetization issue that exists through the current dominance of streaming. However, these approaches require a lot of work with the onus for content creation, which often falls heavily on the artist. Moreover, the concept of a superfan is not a new innovation; it reflects our existing understanding of what it means to be a "fan." Right now, it mostly feels like squeezing more money out of fans. But when done right, the direct-to-fan connection can bring the fans what they want for the value they place on that experience. Water & Music put it well:
“Against this backdrop of existing infrastructure falling short, artists are increasingly demanding tools to communicate directly with and rally their greatest supporters. Central to this demand is data — information about who is most engaged with an artist’s work, where and how they are engaging, and, most importantly, why.”
From that ‘why’, we can learn what the fan wants and cater our approach accordingly all the while presenting the work as the artist intended.
All of this dynamic about the artist-fan relationship showcases how existing dynamics don’t call for innovation. Instead, they tend to allow those in power to pick up and integrate anything moderately successful. This also highlights that our current system is fundamentally structured around record labels negotiating the best deal from recorded music. Furthermore, this demonstrates how our legacy systems proliferate while new formats have a hard time getting off the ground. Although new formats do exist and can emerge from our algorithm-driven and generative-content timelines, they face challenges in becoming widely adopted. Like Tristra asked last week:
“What if fragments are the units of expression of our times, not a problem, but a solution that reflects how we experience our internet- and tech-mediated worlds?”
Innovation sits at the point of monetization. Who and what gets monetized are questions that require thoughtful answers. However, the fact that monetization remains the point of innovation allows us to rethink the monetization pyramid. Figure out how money can flow through that pyramid when it’s flipped on its head, and you’ve got a winning formula.
The above piece stems from a roundtable at the Amsterdam Dance Event last Friday co-hosted by AFEM (Association for Electronic Music) and Music Tech Netherlands. Both champion a focus on emerging technologies through the lens of the artist and the music. Both also look for vibrant communities to push our industry forward. If you want to join AFEM, drop them a line here. If you want to join MTNL, just drop me a line!
LINKS
🤏 How AI can help reshape the music industry by doing more of the little things (Drew Thurlow & Rufy Anam Ghazi)
“Music marketing has continued to evolve and become increasingly data-driven. A natural next step after creation and distribution, marketing involves creating assets for a campaign to effectively engage with the right audience. Traditionally, this has been a resource-intensive task, but now, AI-driven startups are providing efficiencies by automating much of this process.”
✘ This is an excellent piece on how to make all these AI tools actually work for you. We need more common-sense approaches to AI and how we can make tools driven by it work for us.
🦺 Where You At app raises £2.5M to boost nightlife safety (Lewis Mulligan)
“WYA’s main feature is real-time location sharing, allowing users to track where their group is in busy venues. This ensures that even if friends wander off or lose signal, they can easily reconnect. The app also includes safety alerts and can be a lifeline when you’re feeling unsafe or need to find your friends quickly.”
✘ It’s great to see investments also keep flowing into the kind of developments I’m sure we all want to see happen and support.
😎 Brands after Vibes (Nemesis)
“When it's a vibe, it gives you a feeling and a fleeting sense of coherence and possibly of belonging, the sense of fitting with something, a flash of recognition. But the set of things that constitutes a vibe field also has open edges and borders. It's blurry and can be expanded. (This is why dupe culture relies on vibes.) The vibes bleed into content – more and more messily – till the original signal ceases to exist or to make any sense at all… Eventually, it all dissolves into an amorphous, vibey puddle. At this point, everything is kind of like everything else.”
✘ Nemesis is always on point with their blogs, and this one hits close to home. Vibes seem to be the prevailing measure for a lot of things right now. But what this means only becomes clear if we place that into a longer context and try to imagine what could come next. Something that Nemesis does really well here.
⁉️ Timbaland joins AI music creation tool Suno as a strategic advisor and releases an exclusive single (Shacamree Gowdy)
“So it’s like, let’s embrace it [artificial intelligence] now and figure out the way to make it cool,” Timbaland explained, per AFROTECH™. “And if we take it, it will be at the forefront because, guess what, we, as the culture, are the coolest people. If we figure something out, I think it can be very lucrative.”
✘ I do support this sentiment and definitely agree with the point about the culture leading the masses. However, the cynic in me only sees Suno splashing their VC cash to make people talk about anything but flagrant copyright abuse.
👩👩👦 Latent communities in an artificial internet (Leo Nasskau)
“These two limitations, the priorities of a group and its size, relatively, are key in identifying which default communities are likeliest to succeed. Relative priorities refer to how much a group’s members value the cause compared to other priorities they have, like career progression and sharing funny TikToks. Relative size refers to how influential a group is, compared to the group from which it seeks to extract concessions (such as more stringent or more loose moderation).”
✘ As someone who talks about building and nurturing communities around artists from scratch a lot, this is a healthy reminder that there are many different types and styles of community. Moreover, this means there are many different ways to understand and nurture a community.
MUSIC
One of my favourite moments at ADE was an interview with Ron Trent, where he talked about the need to learn and understand the tools we use to get creative with them. This makes sense when thinking about mixers, DAWs, synths, etc. But it also concerns music more broadly. I’ve been listening to a lot of Bar Kokhba, a sextet led by John Zorn. This group of musicians has truly mastered their respective instruments.