✘ Sustainable business models in the music industry

Addressing the fact that financial innovation lags cultural innovation

It’s a commonly heard tune that the law lags technology. We are living through it right now as the legislation around AI is playing catch up. A less commonly heard tune is that financial innovation lags behind the speed of cultural innovation - something we learned from Julie Knibbe back in 2021. To work with advanced technologies means to confront this dual challenge:

1. How to position advanced technologies in the music copyright industrial complex

2. How to create the business models to support the creative work that arises through interaction with advanced technologies

There’s plenty of knowledge-sharing around the first challenge, but the second one is less well documented. A group of people that I support and like a lot are trying to address this through a new course they’re launching right now. It’s called Sustainable business models in the music industry. It’s been put together by Thunderboom, Ristband and the International Music Industry Lab via the InHolland University of Applied Sciences. Partly funded by the EIT Culture & Creativity fund from the European Union.

The program takes place online over the course of 9 weeks. You bring your own business model and move through the Double Diamond design process to move from research to concept to prototype. Like I mentioned in my Creative R&D piece last week, this is all about testing and iterating. You can find out more here or immediately register here. By the end, you’ll not just have a developed business model, but also receive a post-graduate certificate from the InHolland university.

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LINKS

🥱Future-bored: Why we need New Future Archetypes (N O R M A L S)

“In contrast, whenever we aim to shape something new—be it a strategy, a product, a social vision, or a policy—new futures become essential. Not because novelty is a virtue in itself, but because thinking creatively about what could be is a way to break out of inherited constraints. It’s the difference between preparing for what might happen and preparing to make something happen.”

✘ Great vision towards a future that, again, straddles that line between innovation in technology, finance, and culture.

👷🏻‍♀️ how to build a world: a cyclical guide (Kening Zhu)

“At the end of the day, world-building is a creative practice — a way of inhabiting the internet as a creative practice. rather than consuming and performing, world-building is the practice of being, existing — through what we create. this means that like all creative practices, it requires living attuned to the seasons of your psyche, and knowing when to ride the momentum, when to unstuck yourself, and when to rest.”

✘ Such a useful and on the nose guide towards building a world and occupying it. World’s breathe so let them.

🪼 Create things that come alive (Linus Lee)

“If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everything they touch into the realm of the living. And once in a while, if you are so lucky, may you create not just technology, but art — not only giving us life, but elevating us beyond.”

✘ ‘Create things that come alive’ is a great mantra alongside the world-building spirit.

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MUSIC

Kelly Moran’s new record Don’t Trust Mirrors has been on high rotation since it came out last Wednesday - what a way to start October! It’s a beautiful coming together of synths and prepared piano all meandering along as if they’re building their own rivers through rough landscapes of stone, ice, and more.