Join Dmitri and Tristra as they dive into the big headlines of the month. Just some of the subjects discussed; the concept of the "connection economy," the shift towards content like podcasts and audiobooks and what this may mean for the future of audio engagement, as well as whether or not the streaming market is reaching a saturation point, and what's next for audience engagement. So. Many. Topics.
Shownotes
Listen wherever you pod your casts:
Looking for Rock Paper Scanner, the newsletter of music tech news curated by the Rock Paper Scissors PR team? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday!
Join the Music Tectonics team and top music innovators by the beach for the best music tech event of the year:
6th Annual Music Tectonics Conference October 22-24, 2024 Santa Monica, California
Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
0:00:06 - Dmitri
The Big Now with Trista and Dmitri. Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dimitri Vitsa, the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors and the founding director of the Music Tectomics Conference.
0:00:29 - Tristra
And I am Trista Newyear-Yeager, chief Strategy Officer at Rock Paper Scissors, and not Dimitri Vitsa, and I'm not Trista.
0:00:35 - Dmitri
Hey, it is time for the big now. What is that? Well, that's when we look at some really recent headlines and talk a bit about what this means for the music business and music tech. So that's yeah. What is that?
0:00:42 - Tristra
What is that? Well, that's when we look at some really recent headlines and talk a bit about what this means for the music business and music tech.
0:00:49 - Dmitri
We do a lot of horizon scanning for our clients and what that means is we're looking out at the industry news as well as news beyond the industry to sort of keep an eye on like what's popping, what's hopping, what's changing, what should we be paying attention to, not only in music but maybe in social media or gaming or industries we don't even normally talk about.
That's why you hear Trista doing interviews with people about audiobooks or you know topics coming up around Roblox and things like that because we think it's important to see what's happening outside of our industry and we put that together Now. We decided we used to just do it for our clients, but we decided that it would be useful for our music tectonics and larger community. So we now do this thing called the Rock Paper Scanner, which comes out every Friday morning and you can sign up for it at bit. I are looking at every week to sort of see like what's emerging in the music industry and so forth. And about once a month we do one of these big now episodes on the Music Tectonics podcast where we get to dive in and talk through a few of the articles of the last week that kind of interested us.
0:01:59 - Tristra
Yeah, let's go for it. How do we want to start out? Well, one interesting thing that's been discussed widely recently in the music business is the maturity of the streaming market, and Chris Thakkar from Media Research has an interesting piece on streaming's growth plan in the connection economy bit more about what we can expect now that there's in some markets, because streaming is pretty mature and there's going to be a big shift in emphasis.
0:02:31 - Dmitri
Yeah, I love it when media puts something out and it could be Chris. Sometimes it's Tatiana Sirisano, sometimes it's Mark Mulligan, hannah. They all have like interesting perspectives. They're doing their own scanning and then they also do their own research, whether it's, you know, listening to what labels are up to, or actually going out and interviewing folks for focus groups or surveying people and so forth. So this I love that Chris is talking about this concept of a connection economy. I mean, I feel like I've thought of that idea, but I like that. You know they come up with these great terms that are simple and you're like, oh, that's cool.
And so he brought up in the article that there's this slowing growth of the streaming industry, that according to the latest RIAA figures, three and a half million paid subscribers were added year on year, compared to 6.6 million the previous year, and that universal music group just had a whatever a call about what was going on with their whole business.
And we're reporting that free streaming revenue is declining year on year in Q2 2024, while subscriber revenue remained unchanged. So that sort of shows that you know maybe subscribers are kind of moving over and picking up, but then there's other revenue streams that aren't filling in the gap and that Spotify is also seeing this slower growth, adding 24 million users in the first half of 2024, compared to 52 million in the prior six months. So you know there's that larger picture of sort of like streaming kind of plateauing. At least growth levels are um, not not that there's a decline in listeners or subscribers, but just that that the growth is slowing down, which is that comes before the decline. But then media's own data shows that consumers on average are spending more time on things other than music, like watching television, using social media and listening to other audio podcasts and audio books.
0:04:23 - Tristra
Yeah, and you have a really interesting article. You picked out about younger listeners, dimitri, that nearly 25% of audio listening time among 13 to 34 year olds in spoken word content, so it is not music, and this is a group and this has grown apparently from 11% a decade ago, which I don't know exactly how they measure that. But you know, podcasts really weren't out there as a mainstream thing, they were kind of a specialized niche product and though, audio books were still pretty available. Anyway, it's interesting to see that younger people are trending kind of moving towards this, wanting more spoken word, and in some ways, that is one of the beautiful things about podcasts, right listeners is that you feel connected to the people who are speaking.
Yeah, as opposed to feeling aversion, and I think younger folks are looking for an authentic voice et cetera, which maybe they don't find as easily in music or maybe they're finding more in other places. It's pretty interesting.
0:05:24 - Dmitri
Right and that's the kind of scanning we like to see. That came from the Edison Research Share of the Ear report, which is a great title popped onto my radar because of Digital Music News. So there's some data that backs what Chris Thakrar at Media Research is talking about with this, some of the shifts happening. But I want to go a little deeper into what he's saying because that's just really setting up kind of like the context of some of the things that are happening. He's really saying that as a result of some of these shifts and sort of the way that music streaming has gained adoption, it's become more of a passive, background listening approach to music and that there's less of this real engagement part. And this is consistent with some other things that many researchers put out.
He said the convenience of music has pushed it into the background and passive consumption has not translated into deeper connections to artists and and so you know, as a result of this like pushing towards streaming and this kind of low friction approach to listening, then you know artists and labels and their teams are really pushing towards success metrics that have to do with the number of streams and the listeners and putting this kind of focus on high velocity of new, putting out more tracks, right, and that seems to be creating a dynamic of passive listening, according to Chris, and that all of this is set up to talk about this connection economy, that the next phase of growth for the music industry is about prioritizing artist to fan connections and the quality of consumption.
So that's kind of an interesting. I mean we're seeing, you know like we hear the chatter in the industry of sort of like fan engagement and direct to fan and you know merch and you know unique experiences. People want more from artists, the rise of fandom, super fans, all that kind of stuff. But I love the way he kind of contextualizes it from sort of it's almost like an obvious outcome from this sort of technological and business shift.
0:07:17 - Tristra
Yeah, and I love the idea of quality of consumption, that there's somehow going to be a shift in the way people relate to music and the people who make music.
0:07:27 - Dmitri
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, I think media research has been talking about this for a while, ever since the 2019 Music Tectonics Conference, when Mark Mulligan came and talked about the kind of the shifts of how people are getting their music and all the kind of the competition of attention. I think it was back then, when he was talking about people basically competing with sleep.
The music industry is competing with sleep. And then at a certain point people ran out. There was no more sleep to take up, and at one point he even said one of the things that got lost after sleep was window gaze like looking out the window staring out the window.
And so that's the kind of stuff that music's been competing with and that trend just is going further and further. And so the question is does the music industry have the opportunity to kind of offer the quality experiences that Trista was mentioning? To kind of offer the quality experiences that Trista was mentioning? And, you know, could this be like a super fan club model, establishing some sort of hub that only subscribers have access to? Can you host live experiences, concerts, maybe podcasts? What other kinds of merch or brand collaborations can happen? You know what are the cross-entertainment experiences? We've talked on the podcast in the past, talking to people like Jimmy Stonemy stone about trans media engagement, which is a very expensive proposition for for labels and artists, like how do you get stuff everywhere?
0:08:53 - Tristra
well, it, but it is. It is at the moment, but you know, ai could actually make a big dent in the budget and and allow people to produce multiple kinds of content using the same basic core creativity.
0:09:08 - Dmitri
I love that, yeah, and we're going to get some of our other articles are kind of about AI and kind of its impact and what's going on there.
But yeah, so we've talked about gaming and video and that sort of thing. So those things could become more accessible because of tools that allow people to do that and that might be the expectation of fans. Like I mean, we've, you know, we've had, like, gaming companies come to the conference and talk about their experiences where they actually want to use music to build out their gaming community. So music becomes a point of engagement, a point of fandom for gamers. So it's almost like wait, why are gaming companies kind of now directing new forms of music when the traditional industry is struggling to get people to pay attention and have that level of quality engagement? So I don't know, I don't know the article overall. I just felt like it was a nice way of painting a picture of like we've talked about what comes for the post-streaming economy and it's sort of acknowledging yes, there's this dip of things, dip of kind of growth there, and that there's a sense of people wanting more and it points to a direction of what labels could be doing.
0:10:12 - Tristra
Yeah, and your next article kind of points to that pretty directly. Yeah, direct to family. So Universal's direct to fan business has been growing at a whopping 33% rate. And three other things we learned at UMG's Capital Markets Day and Music Business Worldwide. So there was a lot of reporting in the last week or so about Universal's. You know what they were seeing in terms of predicting in terms of future streaming growth, which is still pretty aggressive if you think about it. However, this was a really interesting piece that you picked up on, dimitri that basically, direct-to-fan is growing pretty significantly, though you know, 33% doesn't. It's like not, I mean, it's significant, but where was it originally? And I think the article has some interesting points, like the attempt on the part of majors to raise the average revenue per user and to try to, which is, I guess, the business or financial way of thinking about how to find and cultivate super fans. So what did you get?
0:11:18 - Dmitri
from this piece. Yeah, I mean, you're right, like I think what UMG was putting forward was that their goal is to have half the revenue come from that increased engagement, which means from growth around that, which means it's not just like let's take the regular rates that we're getting from streaming, but come figure out what are other ways to monetize existing users, rather than just, oh, streaming is going to grow more. You know what I mean. Rather than just, oh, streaming is going to grow more, you know what.
0:11:44 - Tristra
I mean yeah.
0:11:44 - Dmitri
Like they're sort of acknowledging. Well, maybe we're going to table out on what is the total addressable market for monthly subscription fees and even ad generated fees. How do we get those listeners to do more with music that then, you know, pays rights holders as a result of that?
0:11:59 - Tristra
And the contrast between the streaming model which prioritizes sort of wholesale selling, so you're basically like wholesale getting music to all these different retailers and I guess that predates streaming actually Go back to iTunes and other sort of MP3 stores and, frankly, physical right and now labels are like we just want to take over a certain amount of the fulfillment of getting music directly to people, which I'm wondering. I'm really interested to think how they're going to do that. I mean running a retail business is a different kettle of fish than a wholesale business.
0:12:39 - Dmitri
And I think that's true, and we'll talk a little bit in this article about some of the examples of the direct to fan stuff that's happening. That may or may not be merchant and retail, but one of the points was that this means a shift from the one size fits all model of music subscriptions, the idea of you either pay your 10 or whatever 11, $12 a month, or you have a family subscription whatever, or you have a free service with ad generation. You know ad revenue generation from ads. That's kind of what you would think of as the one size fits all. You either pay or you don't, but either way there's like a certain rate that you know labels and artists and publishers are getting paid.
But what about these additional tiers? And so we're starting to see some more talk about, sure, there's the you know the higher quality listening, but then there's the you know the higher quality listening. But then there's this other concept of like what else could be built into a subscription model that's for bigger fans. Um umg's executive vice president, uh boyd mere, said super fans, the most avid, 20 to 30 percent of all music listeners once drove more than 70 percent of recorded music spending, but today, with everyone paying the same fee for a streaming subscription. The revenue generated by the music audience has been flattened out, which is a really interesting way of thinking about it.
It's like wait, we took, you know we had some. We took some of the icing and literally took it off the daily, the monthly streaming cake, you know. And so there's all this other money that's being left on the table. And that leads to this. What you were talking about, trisha, about you know like, okay, so what would direct-to-consumer look like? And the examples in the article, I'm like I don't know if that's exactly where the growth areas are because they talk about, but I mean, some of them are Like the Billie Eilish had listening parties and theaters in the past spring, which they mentioned, which is a new in-person opportunity, which is interesting.
0:14:30 - Ad
She doesn't have to go on tour, but yet people are having in-person experiences that have a ticket associated, right like, not different from when we worked with you know, um bringing vr headsets into movie theaters.
0:14:35 - Dmitri
There's like this interesting new trend not huge trend, but it's starting to bubble of, like those in-theater experiences yeah, and and that I mean.
0:14:42 - Tristra
I think that points to this interesting world of fan to fan relationships in that, you know, if you look at something like Stationhead, like Fave these platforms where fans basically drive the bus and they are the artist might chime in, the artist might appear and do a little little thing just to relate, you know, connect with people. But really it's about people connecting to other people around this world of an artist or a bunch of music. So, you know, billie Eilish's listening parties were probably really, really fun for the fans, even if they didn't, you know, get to see Billie as, like a tiny, you know, if you go to an arena show, it's like watching a little colorful ant, right.
0:15:21 - Dmitri
Right, yeah, sure, so. So, relating to the other people, you might have a worse experience in person than with a virtual world or something.
0:15:27 - Tristra
Yeah, yeah, so you can relate to the people around you too and have you know, make those connections. So maybe the connection economy isn't just about the parasocial relationship of fans to artists, but also fans to fans. Great point.
0:15:47 - Dmitri
And you know some of the other examples they put in the article were UMG launched something called Beat Galaxy, which is a music hub on roblox, the gaming platform, and uh that that way, you know, uh, gamers could interact with virtual versions of those artists, including artists like young blood, may stevens, kid cuddy, and. And there's other umg artists that have been on roblox, um, olivia rodrigo, imagine dragons, post malone, etc. Um, so that's, I don't know if I don't know how, what the revenue generation, I mean if there's we. There's another article in the scanner about, um, you know fashion, you know virtual fashion in roblox that actually adults it's not just for kids, adults are getting involved with creating their own, uh, virtual avatars and and trying on clothes and all that kind of stuff, just for kind of like social fun.
0:16:26 - Tristra
Yeah, and Charlie XCX, for example, really really killed it when it came to virtual merch in Roblox. And I think it was one of the more successful music campaigns in that particular aspect, because everything sort of matched the whole brat theme. People got really, really into it. It didn't feel like, oh, this is just cookie cutter, you're just going to do the usual but put a slightly different skin on it. It was like very, very much from Brat the Brativerse Right yeah.
Yeah, so I think there's going to be a lot. There are going to be some artists who are really going to crack that and figure out how to get people excited about these virtual experiences and yeah, it's pretty interesting and this may be the response to the challenge.
0:17:08 - Dmitri
These virtual experiences and, yeah, it's pretty interesting and this may be the response to the challenge. This may be the response to the challenge that you were talking about earlier, trisha, with a record label getting back into physical retail or something like that as well. If it happens virtually, if it happens at scale, then it's easier to probably to scale. Basically, so, if you have virtual goods or virtual or online interactions, whether it's with artists or fan to fan, like you were talking about, then there's an opportunity there. So, anyway, an interesting kind of going from media's top level people looking for connection to universal reporting out we're moving towards more direct to fan engaging ways to monetize, towards more direct to fan engaging ways to monetize. It kind of goes from like the top level philosophical, like what are we seeing? Where things going to sort of like yeah, this is what labels are actually doing.
We have to take a quick break, but when we come back I want to jump into the AI music honeymoon phases over an article that Kristin Robinson put out in Billboard magazine. She's been doing really cool new music tech newsletter for Billboard called Machine Learnings, and this is one of her latest pieces. We'll be right back.
0:18:15 - Ad
Eleanor, here You're listening to this podcast. So the Music Tectonics Conference was made for you. Music and tech's top innovators, investors and thinkers are gathering in Santa Monica, california, on October 22nd through 24th 2024. You can join them to share ideas and get business done by the beach. This year, a creator fair brings instruments, creator tools and artists into the mix. It's just one month away and I really want to see you there, so I'm giving you a chance to win a free ticket to join us. Enter at musictectonicscom slash giveaway Plus. You can earn more entries by sharing and following, and you can find that link in the episode summary too. Just tap read more. The deadline to enter is 1159 pm, pacific time, on september 30th 2024. Even if you're not one of the lucky winners, I will hook you up with a sweet discount.
0:19:16 - Dmitri
So will I see you in santa monica okay, we are back and before we get to the article about ai, music honeymoon phase is over. I just wanted to mention you know we talked all about this new perspective from Media Research At the Music Tectonics Conference this October 22nd to 24th, Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Sirisano from Media Research are going to be doing a presidential debate style conversation about listen versus play. So it's related to that Chris Thakrar article about connection, in the sense that a while back Tatiana put out an article about this bifurcation, this forking of music, that there's going to be a space for traditional commercial music, for listening kind of what Chris called background listening in a sense, and a separate space for sort of like the more engaged piece of the world. And some of the types of examples she gave were, you know, streaming services that feel a little bit more like user-generated content, so maybe like the SoundClouds and the AudioMax of the world or BandLab even, where people are creating music and uploading and sharing and collaborating, as opposed to just like, oh, I'm waiting to hear for the next release or the next summer hit or whatever.
So some of those would go over to traditional Spotify, Apple, Amazon music listening service and some of them would go over to these other services where people are sharing stuff that's still in the work and, you know, having sort of a different type of almost social music engagement side. So I just wanted to mention that before we move on to this Billboard article, just that you can come and check out this conversation in person. We were just talking about connection. Yeah, At the Music Tectonics Conference you can go beyond just listening to our voices on the podcast, but come and meet Mark Mulligan, Tatiana Sarasano, people like that, and listen to what's on their mind, what's the latest research in the conversation.
0:21:07 - Tristra
I was going to joke about Mark Mulligan's merch in Roblox, but maybe that's a bad idea.
0:21:13 - Dmitri
Well, Mark's an artist too.
0:21:15 - Tristra
That's true. So researcher as creator too.
0:21:16 - Dmitri
You can check out his electronic music as well.
0:21:19 - Tristra
That's true, he needs a Roblox experience. All right. I was wrong. Mark, get on it.
0:21:24 - Dmitri
So I wanted to bring up this article. Like I said, Kristen Robinson at Billboard has been doing some really cool stuff in this new newsletter that she's doing. The latest article is the AI music honeymoon phase is over.
0:21:38 - Tristra
No, I find that title. That title is great, Don't get me wrong that header. But, man, if that was a honeymoon that sucked I mean not because generative AI sucked or anything. I mean there's lots of fun, people making really cool things and there have been, for you know, a decade more using this new paradigm but it felt like it was like hey, honeymoon where you sue each other or like where you try to like block each other. Yeah, it wasn't as much fun as maybe a honeymoon should be.
0:22:10 - Dmitri
Yeah, I mean, I think church, you've probably been tracking on the kind of the, the conflict of it, as soon as people start time. I mean, I remember like there was a half a second where, oh, look at all the cool stuff. Now, hey, I can finally make cool music. And oh, by the way, we're releasing fake drake and all these things that, um, haven't been licensed yeah and all that kind of stuff.
Um, so yeah, in a sense, it like is almost like immediate, but I think, specifically, uh, you know, she, she kind of broke a story around this north carolina based musician, mike smith, who, um, who generated 10 million dollars of stream royalties using bots to artificially inflate streaming numbers for hundreds of thousands of mostly AI-generated songs. So you know, she kind of did some research into who was involved with that and actually, you know, pointed out that Boomi was one of the companies that was involved there, somebody who we've had on the podcast in the past, who's kind of walked this line of sort of like, you know, like new tools for creators and, you know, trying not to just inherently flood the market, but then you have something like this that opened up. So I think that probably pushed her to write the article, along with some of the lawsuits, and she refers to some of the slow adoption of some AI tools, but I think there's a lot of them out there and it just sometimes it takes time as well. So she said, though there have always been naysayers about AI in the music business, the industry's top leaders have been largely optimistic about it, provided AI tools were used ethically and responsibly. And then she points out that all the major label groups had established their own partnerships to get in on the AI gold rush since late 2022. Partnerships to get in on the AI gold rush since late 2022. She points to UMG coupling with YouTube for an AI incubator program and sound labs for responsible AI plugins, and Sony music started collaborating with Vermilio for an AI remix project around Dave Gilmore and the orbs latest article, I'm sorry album and Warner music. Uh, ada striking that deal with boomy, which was distributing tracks, um tracks from you know AI stuff there. And then she also talked about some artists and producers that jumped in, which I think is going to continue to happen.
That's, I think, one of the reasons I'm not sure about calling this the end of the honeymoon is, like you said, Trista, was it really a honeymoon? It seemed like it was always kind of a little bit contentious, even though you do see labels and artists diving in, but it feels like that's going to keep happening too. It's really not the honeymoon of AI music over. For me, it's more just the fact that there's going to be some stipulations around it and there's going to be people continuing to use it as well and they might choose which pieces they use. So maybe that creates some friction. That says the honeymoon's over.
0:24:49 - Tristra
Well, and maybe the honeymoon is over, because you start to see that it's not like not all AI is the same when it comes to music, that certain generative processes might be very different from, say, ai, mastering and mixing, and there's a lot of great examples, and I think Kristen gives some in her article of translation Also. And there's a lot of great examples, and I think Kristen gives some in her article of translation Also. The things that really weren't possible weren't easily possible before. I mean, that would have been early 80s. That's a crazy investment. Now you could do it, you know, on a computer in a few minutes more or less. So it's pretty, pretty interesting. The whole, you know, generating whole hog, you know. I'm wondering if that's going to start, if we're going to start seeing more terminology or like a taxonomy of different AI that lets labels and different stakeholders make some clear differentiation between, like this is cool and this is something that we can use, or this is something that we, you know we're neutral on and artists should just go to town versus users, beware.
0:26:04 - Dmitri
Yeah, yeah. I mean I think the way I've heard it talked about is sort of a lot of times like anything that's first off trained on unlicensed material, you know that's a category, yeah. That's kind of like a big divider between sort of like oh just go and, do you know, scrape all of the musical intellectual property of the world and build shit on it and then you know like it'll all work out in the end. That's kind of like one perspective.
0:26:29 - Tristra
Yeah, yeah. And the thing that's so rough is that a lot of open source models and things like that have been trained that way, and so if you want to be truly ethical, you have to dig all the way down and make sure that you've got ethics kind of all the way down, as opposed to just grabbing an open source model that's been trained a certain way. I mean, we just don't know how the legal landscape is going to sort out. So you know there's a lot of strange risks and mysteries still yeah, yeah.
0:26:56 - Dmitri
So I mean, I think part of what she's saying is, like you know, Sony Music released the statement warning 700 AI companies to not scrape, Basically saying we're drawing a line in the sand Just in case you want to wait to see if you get sued. You cannot use our stuff.
0:27:12 - Tristra
Yeah, there's no. I mean maybe please listeners write in, correct me if I'm wrong, but there is, for instance, for websites and for media outlets there is a robot dot text, I guess, extension kind of thing that tells ai crawlers, hey, don't crawl here.
Um, if I'm probably not getting all the terminology right, so forgive me, but I don't know of anything quite like that for music and so I guess that was sony's way of just like drawing that line in the sand and being like do not do this, yeah, um, but there are, there are media companies that have done the same thing and say you cannot use our stuff for training.
0:27:44 - Dmitri
Yeah, and the majors then filed their copyright infringement suit against Suno and Udio. So that was another thing she brought up in the article too. So you know, these are some of the things about why the honeymoon might be over. But I think and, by the way, kristen's newsletter Machine Learnings you should sign up for it. She recently did another article Music AI Facts. Faqs. Experts Answer the Most Asked Questions About the Growing Sector.
If you're just getting caught up on some of these things like how does this work or what's okay and what's not okay, how should we think about those things? That's a great article to start with as well, and Kristen will be at the Music Tech Thomas conference. She's going to be moderating a panel. There's probably one on AI. I'm not sure if we've fully confirmed all that yet, but she'll be there as well. So again, midia is going to be there, billboard is going to be there as well, so you can scan on our newsletter and on our podcast and then you can come meet the writers and researchers behind some of this stuff.
But I do want to push back a little bit on this concept in another way, trish. Yeah, a couple of other articles came out this week and this goes under this horizon, scanning a little deeper outside of music. One of them was from the Conversation, that's an outlet. It was called Side Job Self-Employed, high Paid, behind the AI Slop Flooding TikTok and Facebook. And the other one was from Business Insider. It was called Google is pushing AI hard. A top YouTube exec explains what that means for creators. So the reason I'm bringing these up is because, as industry, you know insiders, we you know. We probably know, like, what's going on with record labels and rights holders in a way that I think maybe you know other folks don't Normal, people don't know Might not right, and so we're kind of in the same category as Kristen in a sense.
So you can see some of what's happening with this tension in music. But if you look at the creator side, including the musical creator side, the question is are most mainstream consumers or creators, people who are becoming musical creators with these AI tools, do they care about a honeymoon? Are they actually just looking for more and better tools to make music without having to study instruments, practice, become masters?
0:30:12 - Tristra
And it's interesting because the tools AI, you know, image generation tools have kind of been around for a bit longer. You know, if we look back to some of Google's early experiments that were public, so maybe we can see a canary in the coal mine or where music might head eventually. But let's get. I want to talk for a second about AI slop. Yeah, because it's not all the same. You know, some slop is not all slop is the same slop.
0:30:35 - Dmitri
So Well, before let's let me read a little bit of this article, because I think that'll put it in context and then you can tell us what's slop and what's creativity. So the article goes TikTok. Facebook and other social media platforms are being flooded with uncanny and bizarre content generated with artificial intelligence, from fake videos of the US government capturing vampires to images of Shrimp.
0:30:56 - Tristra
Jesus. Hey, that was real. That was real. What about Shrimp Jesus?
0:30:58 - Ad
Shrimp Jesus, it depends.
0:31:02 - Tristra
If you pray hard enough and you have the right crustacean faith, you might see Shrimp Jesus. Why?
0:31:06 - Dmitri
not. Given its outlandish nature and tenuous relationship with reality, you might think this so-called AI slop would quickly disappear. However, it shows no sign of abating. In fact, our research suggests this kind of low-quality AI-generated content is becoming a lucrative venture for the people who make it, the platforms that host it and even a growing industry of middlemen teaching others how to get in on the AI gold rush.
0:31:30 - Tristra
Now that is where it gets really interesting and that may be you know a lot. There there's a whole industry it's almost like a pyramid scheme structured industry often in countries like India, in some parts of Africa, in other places, where people really really are looking for extra income and where sometimes the pennies that a platform can hand out can be life changing. And I don't mean this in any sort of derogatory sense, but this is a pathway that a lot of creators in non-Western countries are pursuing because it is profitable and there's some really good reporting. That went back a couple months in an outlet called 404 Media, which I recommend highly. They were one of the first people to really report in depth on shrimp Jesus and trying to figure out where these images are coming from. If you haven't seen them, they're basically like these interesting quasi-religious things that are like a Jesus made out of shrimp or a kid who has made a car out of water bottles, and they almost always have something like the caption is something like nobody appreciates my art or you know pray or something like that, so something that's like pretty generic and it gets a lot of engagement, especially on platforms like Facebook, where maybe the user base is a little bit older or has a different expectations about what they're going to be seeing and interacting with.
And you know, there's a lot of questions at first like what is this for? And now we see it's for monetization. But then there are also some really interesting experiments with AI on platforms like, say, instagram. I can think of a couple that I have seen where they are making AI-generated videos that have a very unified aesthetic. Some of them are creepy as Mountain, but like as a TikTok reel, or as I mean as an Instagram reel excuse me, as a TikTok. So there's a lot of interesting stuff that people can do that's super creative and some people are doing that. And then some people are making stuff that is meant to just engage just enough to be monetizable to just engage just enough to be monetizable. The other interesting thing I want to point out, dimitri, is there was a lot of concern about AI slop kind of killing the Internet or that deep fakes would be a serious election issue, for example in the US or in India, for example.
there was a lot of concern about AI fakes. However, they don't seem to really sway the election. It's kind of a myth that there's this, but there was a lot of concern around that a legitimate concern. It made a lot of sense, but it didn't really play out. So how people are reacting to AI slop is kind of hard to say at this point.
0:34:22 - Dmitri
Yeah Well, I think that's kind of why I brought this article up, especially in light of both the media listen versus play, this bifurcation of music. The AI's honeymoon is over. From Kristen Robinson, there's this other world, and so the question is and you mentioned it as a global, you know, regionally distinct and different. There's different cultural norms around what is creative or what should be created, or why you're creating things. You know, if you don't have to make as much money off of it, the content could be lower value, but very prolific, yes, which leads to things like the fraud that Kristen talked about and has written about.
But also it means that there's this tidal wave of creation that doesn't follow, I don't mean the legal rules of the music industry, but sort of the aesthetic norms, the aesthetic norms, the yeah, the format and the form. I mean, like what you're saying, what the things you're talking about are new forms, they're new mediums, right, they're not. They're not films, they're not TV, they're short. You're not even sure whether they're trying to tell a story or just trying to present an aesthetic, aesthetic, or maybe someone's just screwing around. They're experiments, like you said. But those experiments lead to. They're not just. I mean, you said they're for monetization. They're not just for monetization. You can't monetize them unless they're entertaining, right. You can't monetize them unless somebody's paying in some form, whether it's ad, eyeballs or subscriptions or something like that. If they find it, it has to be entertaining, right. And so my question is if this is happening in social video and social media platforms, on the YouTubes and the TikToks and the Instagrams of the world, why do we think it's not going to happen with music?
Yeah, how is the honeymoon over, if and again. Kristen, I'm not picking on you. I love what you, I love what you write. You're raising questions for me, which makes it more thought-provoking for me. I just want to run it through this lens of sort of like if we take it outside of the music industry and we take what media research is saying about this forking of music, there's the stuff we call music and then there's the rest of the stuff that's musical. You know that aren't by artists but by fans, and it's like this blurring of like musical fan fiction, totally yeah. So that's why I brought those two articles into the mix and I just don't know whether they'll. I mean, part of what I'm wondering is like yeah, maybe it'll be a flash in the pan, you know workflows and just part of a tool, a bigger toolkit, and you know.
0:36:49 - Tristra
But then there's also the question of it is novel right now. Will people get sick of it in six months? And then you know, then where are we. It's an interesting question.
0:36:56 - Dmitri
Before we move on beyond this and we just have a couple more articles to talk about today I do want to mention this this article about Google pushing into AI from Business Insider, because it's sort of like what we just described. If you look at, oh, there's people who are just trying to script to get by and they're trying these experiments and posting lots of stuff, and then they figured out how to make viral content and all of a sudden they're making a living and they don't have to do other really hard, awful work. But YouTube is not like you know. Youtube is not like some, some brand new, like we're just experimenting with stuff. But the point of this article is that they've unleashed what this article says a flurry of new generative AI tools for creators and that they're using AI to take on this bigger role in content creation and distribution in the YouTube world.
So, from this article from Business Insider, youtubers, youtube creators, can now use generative AI to come up with the future video ideas, add background images or AI-generated video clips to their shorts, automatically dub their videos into new languages something you were just talking about and come up with relevant replies to user comments. The company is integrating technology from Google DeepMind to power some of its features, including its video generation tool, veo. And then they give examples. The singer and songwriter David, who we've talked about as a band lab artist that's done some great stuff musically, showed how he used AI to create visuals for a YouTube short featuring his song here With Me, oh, go ahead.
0:38:21 - Tristra
I was just going to say. We're getting to that point where it's going to be easier and easier to create across media, so that David may be specialized as a songwriter or performer, but then he can make all these visuals, or his team can make all these visuals, and generate text and he could have a graphic novel that springs from that. So a lot of these iterations of the same core creative expression could happen very easily or relatively easily, thanks to AI.
0:38:47 - Dmitri
Right, and so some of these things are like edge cases of like what is this musical giphy, meany kind of thing, or what is this? You know, aesthetically designed asset, that a legit artist that's risen from the grassroots but now is like charting and things like that can do more of that tool kind of stuff. They also talk about things like a fashion designer using YouTube's image generator to kind of go even more innovative with dress designs or something for their videos and stuff like that. And I just wanted to point that article out too, because again it's like is the use of AI music? I mean, I guess the honeymoon part is really about the record labels and the rights holders.
But in terms of the users. If people are going to keep generating this stuff and doing this stuff, then we're going to have to figure out a way to address it, Right?
0:39:34 - Tristra
Absolutely.
0:39:36 - Dmitri
And see what it means for the music industry, for monetizing, for artists and labels and publishers and so forth. We're going to take one more quick break when we come back. There's one last article from Music Ally I want to share about a new type of right that can solve some of these problems. We'll be right back.
0:39:54 - Ad
Listen. There is not much time left to get a regular price ticket to the Music Tectonics Conference. It is coming up fast on October 22nd through 24th 2024 in Santa Monica, california. Speakers, partners and attendees will be there from TikTok, sony Music, universal Music, warner Music, wasserman, crush Management, bandlab, bands in Town, epic Games, raya Games, media Research, roland Lyric, fine, beatdepth, leading investment firms and so many more. So I want to make sure you get your ticket before the regular price tickets expire on October 8th. Right now, tickets are $350 for three days of kick-ass keynotes, scintillating sessions and noteworthy networking with music innovators, but after October 8th you'll pay the walk-up rate, $450. So claim your spot at the conference, grab your ticket and check out our speakers and session topics at musictectonicscom. Let's map out the future of the music industry together by the beach.
0:40:59 - Dmitri
Okay, we're back. This has been fun, trisha, I'm having a blast.
0:41:02 - Ad
I love talking to you.
0:41:03 - Dmitri
I mean we kind of banter in the office and in Slack and things like that about some of the stuff, but to actually sit down for a half hour with you and go through it is always a blast.
0:41:11 - Tristra
I mean and I'll talk about Shrimp Jesus anytime, just tap me Actually, anybody, just hit me up. I'll talk about Shrimp Jesus.
0:41:18 - Dmitri
Shrimpjesus at rockpaperscissorsbiz to shoot us an email for all your Shrimp Jesus questions and fan fiction?
0:41:25 - Tristra
Yeah, exactly.
0:41:29 - Dmitri
So Music Ally, love Music Ally. They do a great newsletter. Sign up to it if you can. Comes out daily, which is insane. I don't know how you do it, Stu and Joe.
0:41:40 - Tristra
Yeah, you guys are amazing.
0:41:42 - Dmitri
So this article was could a new remuneration right be the key to AI music licensing? And it goes. The music industry has been clear on its views about training musical AIs. Licensing deals are required. But what should those licensing deals look like?
And so he's writing about a new white paper by Professor Daniel Gervais of Vanderbilt Law School. It's been published by Fair Trade Music International. It's a nonprofit and its key recommendation is the creation of a new remuneration right. And I quote the best way for creators to generate a decent stream of ongoing revenue for the use of their copyrighted works by Gen AI applications is to be paid when the datasets used to train Gen AI containing their works are used to create new content. This should take the form of a license, explains the executive summary. The important thing here is that this right would be applied to the output of AI models rather than the input, although Gervais suggests that it could sit alongside a licensing regime for the inputs. That's the training process as well, and I just think it's you know, it's just as we're talking about all this stuff, this idea.
0:42:45 - Tristra
This sounds like such a simple solution in a lot of ways, right, simple, and yet to actually implement it would be very complicated but not impossible.
0:42:54 - Dmitri
Yeah, and we've seen some interesting music tech startups who are trying to solve this. Yeah.
0:42:59 - Tristra
Yeah, in fact I'm thinking of Musicalai and their big focus and some focus of some other people who want to license content for generative AI, is attribution remunerate the rights holders appropriately, based on actual usage, instead of having to basically cold sell an entire huge catalog of very valuable music ahead of time. So when you hear about people getting quotes in the billions of dollars, it's because I think a label's thinking of this as just like we're just selling the rights in perpetuity more or less right, we can't sunset them, we can't do anything with this. Once this is in the black box, these tracks have been ground up, this IP is there and we can't take it back out. But there are ways to do this differently and instead of just throwing all this stuff into the big AI meat grinder, you can have a more direct understanding of what input led to what output and then reward people accordingly.
0:44:07 - Dmitri
Yeah, amazing. So I mean, come out to the Music Tectonics Conference and you'll probably find several other startups that are working in this very space, and I think a lot of the people in the music tech and innovation field want to figure out solutions that are ethical, that acknowledge the intellectual property, the rights and the royalties, and the solutions that are ethical that acknowledge the intellectual property, the rights and the royalties and the careers that are behind the music, that are being used to create AI platforms.
0:44:31 - Tristra
And there's also a need to recognize the interests of AI companies in that they need really quality data, they need good songs, they need good music and not that. You know, certain, you know, quote unquote, royalty free or special training sets are quote unquote, are bad music. But they need a real big variety of very robust, human generated stuff. And you know, without attribution or without licensing, it's just hard to get your hands on it.
0:45:01 - Dmitri
Trisha this has been super fun. Yeah, I've had a blast. Yeah, thanks for working with me on this. Trisha's always got her mind out in the future of this horizon scanning business, maybe before we wrap up real quickly. Why do we do horizon scanning? Why are we sending these articles to our clients and our community?
0:45:21 - Tristra
Well, I really love to urge everyone, and myself included, to sort of break out of the cliches and the really kind of tired jargon that we all sometimes fall into, just because we're trying to quickly explain what we're doing and I think it's really hard to do that if you're not sampling from the other buffets in the room. So, you know otherwise you're just going to end up with a big.
I mean, the music industry is obviously the dessert buffet, or maybe it's the Sunday bar but you know sometimes you got to go over to the salad bar and get a few cucumbers and chew on them and be like all right, what does this mean for my Sunday here?
0:45:54 - Dmitri
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think there's some of that is like getting the language, having the thoughts, but I also think it's like sometimes things shift outside of music that are going to impact music.
0:46:02 - Tristra
Absolutely or have been impacted by music.
0:46:05 - Dmitri
Right, yeah, it goes both directions and so it's kind of widening out, gives you a perspective not only on how you can talk about and do storytelling when you do PR with rock paper scissors, for example, but also like just thinking about, like I think people sometimes underestimate the impact that working with a solid PR firm can help you with your business model, can help you like think through not just the storytelling but the logic, like get it out of your brain and out into the air, get the words out there, get them on paper and start to look them and arrange them in such a way that not only does it make sense to somebody reading the story but it makes sense to your potential customer and your user, so that you're actually shifting business model thinking based on this wider view of what's happening in the world.
0:46:53 - Tristra
And I think there's another service we can render, with horizon scanning as well, which is to help you be realistic. Their idea is wonderfully unique and gifted and fantastic, and it may be. But you also may need to know how the rest of the industry might see your idea, even if they may not understand the differentiation and the specialness right out of the gate. So having that realistic perspective can help you engage people in a really important way.
0:47:20 - Dmitri
One of the most challenging things of your work as our chief strategy officer, Trisha, I think is sometimes telling a client that ain't going to fly.
0:47:26 - Tristra
Yeah, it's not fun to say sometimes it's not fun to have them react.
0:47:31 - Dmitri
But journalists who are studying everything are the most sensitive BS detectors in the music industry?
0:47:38 - Tristra
Absolutely yeah, and they're, and they're also have. But they have their own structures that they need to use, their own sort of mental framework, because they just have to absorb so much information. So if you're not helping them by framing it in a way that might fit into their framework but maybe break out of the frame just a little bit, it's really tough for them to even absorb what you're talking about.
0:48:00 - Dmitri
Yeah, and so you know, sometimes a PR firm can be the filter to say it to you from a friend, not in public, not in print, to let you know. I mean, that's the worst thing is having a journalist kind of rip you apart before you even know what's going to happen. The next thing you know 10,000 of your favorite client targets, customer targets, are reading about something that you hadn't yet kind of run through the run the hoops. So anyway, um, I would love, podcast listener, if I could see you in person in santa monica, october 22nd, 24th, like I said, mark mulligan, tatiana sirisano will be there from media research, kristin robinson from billboard will be there.
These are the types of conversations you can have in person with other people who care as much as you, people who are thinking through this as deeply as you. Sure, you can sign up for the Rock Paper Scanner at bitly slash, rpscanner, but you can have that connection, that in-person experience on the beach at a very affordable price, which, by the way, the tickets are only $350 for a three-day conference. You won't find a better conference in LA for three days for twice, three times that price. And ticket prices are going up soon, october 8th. Hotel rooms are selling out. You can stay wherever you want, but we've got some really cool hotels right near the ocean as well.
0:49:14 - Tristra
And you know who's also by the ocean, who Shrimp Jesus.
0:49:18 - Dmitri
Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. Check out musictectonicscom. Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week. Did you know we do free monthly online events that you, our lovely podcast listeners, can join? Find out more at musictectonics.com and, while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. Everything we Do explores the seismic shifts that shake up music and technology, the way the Earth's tectonic plates cause quakes and make mountains. Connect with Music Tectonics on Twitter, instagram and LinkedIn. That's my favorite platform. Connect with me. Dmitri Vietze, if you can spell it, we'll be back again next week, if not sooner.
Let us know what you think! Tweet @MusicTectonics, find us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
Comments