The Beat: Music as Experience, the Looming AI Battle and Time
Universal’s CEO changes his tune on the role of AI in music
Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s bi-monthly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.
Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – on the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.
Stasis
HIFI Labs’ Henry Chatfield recently retweeted a graph shared by Vault’s Nigel Eccles, highlighting the global consumer trends for recorded music and gaming over the last couple decades. In 2000, both industries were generating about $40 billion in spend. Today gaming is at more than $100 billion. Music? Stuck at $40 billion.
Why? Chatfield says it’s simple: “Music tried to monetize a product; Gaming monetized the experience.”
In the subsequent thread, the point is made that it’s not a perfect 1:1 comparison, and that music has other revenue streams besides recorded music (e.g. merch and touring), but the digital product is worth exploring – today that’s how we consume music, after all, and that’s always how we’ve consumed video games.
The question is how to convert discoverers and listeners into fans, and then encourage them down the funnel toward “experience.” There’s no shortage of paths – merch and touring, of course, but those are just the basics.
“Every major artist on the planet is now a brand,” writes Maarten Walraven for Music X. “What’s more, they’re all becoming artistic agencies. They dabble in film and TV, in apparel and coffee, and in video and audio.”
“The one thing that does connect all of these efforts is that each of these artists has a very strong why,” he continues. “It allows them to rally those other creatives around them and means that everyone works towards the same goal. It has become a lot easier to communicate this mission, but it has also become a lot harder to get people to listen due to the sheer gluttony of content available.”
That’s not changing anytime soon. In a recent edition of his excellent Penny Fractions newsletter, David Turner dove into the complexities and conundrums of a world with more music than can ever be consumed. Turner cited the commentary of Water & Music’s Cherie Hu, who penned a formidable essay on the ‘celestial jukebox,’ a term used in Paul Goldstein’s 1994 book Copyright’s Highway that he used to prophesize a source of infinite music – which was first realized by file-sharing sites like Napster and then cemented by Spotify.
Turner also notes how access to tools – digital audio workstations, digital distributors, and streaming platforms – puts people within spitting distance of an audience, and not just musicians, but all the hobbyists who can suddenly live out their dreams of being a musician.
It’s the interminable row between quantity and quality. Access is great, but it isn’t great unconditionally. Attention is finite, and when all noise is treated equally, we’re doing a disservice to everyone – especially the career artists who toil to turn their art into sustainable careers. When we hear every noise at once – the playful name for a scatter plot of all of Spotify’s 6000+ “genre-shaped distinction“ created by one of the streaming platform’s genre taxonomists – we hear very little at all.
“How many years until the streaming model expires?” Turner asked during a roundtable at Water & Music’s inaugural summit two weekends ago. “So much music is streamed, so I’d like to believe something comes after that, but streaming as a form of music consumption is really pervasive. The firms behind them may change shape, but the form itself is strong.”
The inevitability of AI
Now add artificial intelligence (AI) to the fold. Spotify, Tencent, Bytedance and even Audius have rolled out AI features, and every major label has an equity stake in a music AI startup, hedging their bets amidst this sea change. And despite Universal’s forceful wrenching of the infamous AI Drake track from streaming platforms, even Universal boss Lucian Grainge is changing his tune.
“We are open to, in terms of licensing, any business solution. Obviously we have to respect our artists and the integrity of their work,” he said. “So yes, we’re open for business with [AI companies] which are legitimate, which are supportive, and [with] which we can create a partnership for growth.”
The sentiment “implicitly concede[s] that AI’s superbloom will require a more malleable response from the music industry than the rusty hammer taken to illegal downloading nearly a quarter century ago,” writes Jon Tanners in Applied Science.
“The spirit calling from deep inside Grainge’s tacit admission is so simple as to sound ridiculous: Make it easier to do an activity legally than illegally, and a majority of people will flock to the legal means,” he continues. “Consider the complexities of AI-generated creation another way—we are no longer battling the bootlegging of existing intellectual property, but rather the mass birth of new intellectual property based on the voices and styles of established artists (to say nothing of the creation of hybridized voices trained on a mixture of different inputs). The fake Drakes and Weeknd’s will erupt like hydra heads for a time—chop one off, two new ones appear in the bleeding neck’s place.”
Spotify recently addressed one small hydra head it’s ridding itself of, deleting some of the tracks generated by the AI tool Boomy over concerns of streaming fraud. “Robots creating music, streamed by other robots, as criminals bank the profits,” Music Business Worldwide founder Tim Ingham wrote in his lede. “A grimy, looping, un-Human Centipede, spewing out money towards drug gangs, people-trafficking operations, and God knows what else at the dog-end of civilization. Is that the kind of music business you signed up for? Because it’s the one you’ve got.”
It’s not entirely doom and gloom. Some folks – like Grimes – are embracing the inevitability of robots. The artist recently promised to split 50 percent of her revenue with any "successful” AI-generated song that uses [her] voice, and in partnership with Jon Tanners’ CreateSafe, she built and released Elf.Tech, a blockchain-connected platform that open sources her creative self. The possibilities for collaboration in an open-source world are exciting. The app Riff, for instance, released a tool that allows artists to upload music made with the Grimes AI, automatically generating a 50 percent split sent to the official Grimes AI wallet.
Elsewhere on-chain, in conjunction with HIFI Labs, the artist RAC announced CULT Pass, a dynamic membership that visually changes and morphs based on what’s in your wallet. The pass offers holders access to exclusive content, experiences and other benefits.
“It’s a way to take ownership of our community. It’s a layer above social networks,” RAC said in an interview with Decrypt. “It’s not always about the ‘thing.’ It's about belonging to something.”
“The music industry is broken,” he continues. “It's all about the middlemen. The labels, the distributors, and the streaming services. They take a big cut of the money, and the artists don't see much of it.”
Time
But how do we recreate that opportunity at relative scale – where all the hard-at-work artists can tap into the power of community and experience? Even with moments of progress, like SoundCloud releasing its its Fans feature – allowing the 50,000+ participating artists (i.e. the artists who subscribe to SoundCloud’s Next Pro tier) to identify their superfans through analytics and to send them direct messages – we still have a massive bottleneck at the point of discovery. If I don’t know you exist, I can’t be part of your experience.
As the bottleneck grows and AI becomes more entrenched in our day-to-day lives, will the major labels embrace some semi-palatable, “legal” version of AI in ‘Napster becomes Spotify 2.0,’ further cheapening music’s value? As gas prices soar and non-fungible token (NFT) prices drop, is web3 entering a race to the bottom that will more closely resemble the web2 bad habits it set out to revolutionize? How should artists position themselves in this age of chaos – as brands? As agencies? And amidst it all, how do we find our people?
Finding answers to these questions takes time. There are more articles on these topics than anyone could ever read. Which ones offer prescient takes and which ones are mostly noise? Which have risen to the top for good reason? Which have learned how to optimize for good search engine optimization (SEO), or paid to rise to the top? And which just have the loudest voices? In writing this one piece, I’ve peered down 15 rabbit holes, and I’ve had to pull myself back from the edge each time or this already long Beat would have been 15 times longer. There is so much, and only so much time.
In another recent edition of Music X, Wallraven talks about time as a relative phenomenon, expounding upon the variable experiences of listening to music at a club versus on the train. Time is relational. The experience of time is contingent upon how and where it’s observed.
So heeding that, try not to succumb to the lure of convenience. Explore beyond your own feedback loops. It’s time better spent to find the music and people that move you, where you care enough to journey beyond the product and expand the experience. Experience is what we’re here for, after all, and somehow experience adds flesh to the passage of time.
I’m reminded of the words spoken by the monastics at a monastery I once frequented in New York. At the end of each sit, they said the same thing in matter-of-fact monotone. To paraphrase: “Time swiftly passes by – do not squander your life.”
Coda
We’ve lost some great people again, starting with the visionary Brazilian artist Rita Lee, who co-founded the excellent psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes before becoming a massive star in her own right.
We also lost singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot. I remember the Canadian artist most for his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” about a bulk carrier sinking in the icy waters of Lake Superior – the world’s largest freshwater lake (by surface area) and the pride of my native Minnesota. Of Lightfoot, my fellow Minnesotan, Bob Dylan, said, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like.”
Dylan is also connected to another lost soul this week, Billy “The Kid” Emerson. The former has a long, well-documented history of cribbing the late R&B great and then not crediting him for his work. The latter was a great musician and songwriter who deserves more credit than he got.
That’s it for this round. Listen to some music and head outside – it’s a beautiful day.