How the rise of Authorless Music will bring Authorful Music

Forty thousand. That’s the number of songs being added to Spotify every day. Per year, that’s nearly 15 million. With AI, we are approaching a world where we could easily create 15 million songs per day. Per hour even. What might that look like?

Can music experiences performed by robots be Authorful? (photo: Compressorhead)

The music trend we can most linearly extrapolate into the AI age is that of utilitarian music: instead of putting on an album, we put on workout music playlists, jazz for cooking, coffee time Sunday, music for long drives.

Artists have become good at creating music specifically for contexts like this. It often forms a big consideration in marketing music, but for also the creation process itself. But an artist can’t be everywhere at once. AI can and will be. Meaning that for utilitarian music, artificial intelligence will have an unfair advantage: it can work directly with the listener to shape much more gratifying, functional music experiences.

This will lead to the rise of Authorless Music. Music without a specific author, besides perhaps a company or algorithm name. It may be trained by the music of thousands of artists, but for the listener it will be hard to pinpoint the origins back to all or any of those artists.

Do we want Authorless Music? Well, not necessarily. However if you track music consumption, it becomes obvious that the author of music is not important at all for certain types of music listening. Yet we crave humanity, personality, stories, context.

Those familiar with trend watching and analysis, know to keep their eyes open for counter trends. When more of our time started being spent on social platforms and music became more anonymous due to its abundance, what happened? We started going to festivals in numbers never seen before. So what counters Authorless Music?

The counter trend to Authorless Music is Authorful Music. Although there will be a middle space, for the sake of brevity I’ll contrast the two.

Authorless MusicAuthorful Music
OriginAI-created or obscureHuman-created (ish)
FocusSpecialised in functionSpecialised in meaning
RelationLittle emotional involvementStrong emotional involvement
TraitPersonalizedSocialized

Authorless Music: primarily driven by AI or the listener is unable to tell whether the listed artist is a real person or an algorithm. The music is specifically targeted towards augmenting certain activities, moods, and environments. Due to its obscure origin, the listener has little emotional involvement with the creator (although I’m looking forward to the days where we can see AI-algorithms fan bases argue with each other about who’s the real King / Queen of AI pop). In many cases it will be personalised to the listener’s music taste, environment, weather, mood, etc.

Authorful Music: primarily created and / or performed by tangible people or personalities. It will be focused in shaping meaning, as it is driven by human intent which embeds meaning by default. This type of music will maintain a strong emotional link between artists and their fans, as well as among fans themselves. This music exists in a social way – even music without lyrics, such as rave music, exists in a social context and can communicate that meaning, context, and intention.

With the increasing abundance of music (15 million tracks per year!), the gateway to Authorless Music has been opened. What about Authorful? What experiences will we craft in a mature streaming landscape?

Two important directions to pay attention to:

Socialising music experiences

It’s so easy to make and manipulate music on our smartphones now. Whether it’s music as a standalone or accompanying something on Instagram or TikTok. One reason for this massive amount of music being added to streaming services is because it’s easier than ever to make music. With apps that make it easy for people to jam around with each other, we’ll see a space emerge which produces fun tools and basically treats music as communication. This happens on smartphones but is strongly complemented by the virtual reality and gaming space.

See: JAM, Jambl, Endlesss, Figure, Smule, Pacemaker.

Contextualising music experiences

There is a lot of information around music. What experiences can be created by exposing it? What happens when the listeners start to enter the space between creator and listener and find their own creative place in the music through interaction? (I previously explored this in a piece called The future of music, inspired by a cheap Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin)

Examples of this trend: lyrics annotation community Genius, classical music streaming service IDAGIO, and projects like Song Sommelier.

Special thanks to Data Natives, The Venue Berlin, and Rory Kenny of JAM for an inspiring discussion on AI music recently. You’ve helped inspire some of these thoughts.

New to MUSIC x? Subscribe to the free newsletter for regular updates about innovation in music. Thousands of music professionals around the world have gone before you.

What playing around with AI lyrics generation taught me about the future of music

Will AI replace human artists? What would the implications be? These questions grip many in the music business and outside of it. This weekend I decided to explore some lyric generation apps and see what I could get out of them – learning a thing or two about the future of music along the way.

Below I’ve posted the most coherent lyrics I managed to get out of one AI tool. I’m dubbing the song Purple Sun.

Image with a purple sun
What I imagine the song’s artwork to look like.

You can make the sun turn purple
You can make the sea into a turtle

You can turn wine into water
Turn sadness into laughter

Let the stars fall down
Let the leaves turn brown

Let the rainwoods die
Let wells run dry

I love the turtle line. I guess the algorithm struggled with rhyming purple.

Two lines down is a wine / water line. Initially I was impressed by having a western cultural reference. But hold up… turning wine into water? That’s just evil.

Read it over once more. Or twice. By reading it over more, I became convinced that obviously humans are the superior songwriters.

But you know what, I’ve been lying to you.

The origins of the above lyrics are actually human, from a 90s rave song called Love U More by DJ Paul Elstak.

And they carry meaning. A lot of meaning to a whole generation of people in The Netherlands and other parts of Europe. Myself included. The meaning comes not necessarily from what the intent of the lyrics is. It comes from the music, nostalgia, memories, associations.

This is listener-assigned meaning. As soon as you release music, you give over control of the narrative to an audience. Artistic intent may have a lot of sway, but sometimes a song that’s a diatribe against fame turns into something stadiums full of drunk people chant.

A few statements to consider:

  1. AI has a role as a tool to be used by people to apply their creativity.
  2. Not all successful human created art objectively requires a lot of skill.
  3. Creativity doesn’t end with the creator. The creator sets intent, the listener assigns meaning.

Let’s pair #1 and #3. In the first statement I talk about people, rather than mention specific roles as in the thrid statement. That’s because AI allows more people to be creative, either as listener, creator, or the space in between.

It’s this space in between that will be impacted and shaped by AI. Think of the dadabots projects, such as their infinite neural network generated death metal stream, apps like JAM, Jambl, and Endlesss which allow people to express themselves musically in easy ways, or technologies that turn music into something more adaptive like Bronze and FLUENT (disclaimer: I’m an advisor to the latter). Not all of the above use AI, but all cater to this space in between listener and creator.

The reason why I added statement #2 is because AI-created music doesn’t necessarily have to be objectively good. Music is subjective. Its sucess depends on how well it can involve the listener. That’s why AI is destined to be the most important force for the future of music in a more creative world.

Credits for the lyrics above: Lucia Holm / Paul Carnell. Thank you for the wondrous energy, the memories, the music.

Image via Rising Sun.

New to MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE? Subscribe to the free newsletter for weekly updates about innovation in music. Thousands of music professionals around the world have gone before you.

5 Big Ideas for the UK Association of Independent Music

The Association of Independent Music (AIM) recently put out a call for ‘big ideas’ to be discussed at their Annual General Meeting.

“The goal is to produce and publish by the end of this year a manifesto which sets out 10 big ideas to help the indie sector to thrive in the coming years.”

I’m not a member, but not shy to give a bit of unsolicited advice.

Here are my 5 big ideas:

Streaming exclusives

The indie sector needs to widely speak out against streaming exclusives. After years of hard work, we’re now sending music fans back to pirate services. Let’s keep working on sustainability, instead of sacrificing it for short-term gains.

  • Streaming exclusives may be making the music piracy problem even worse >>>
  • Why streaming exclusives are bad for the music business >>>
  • Spotify: Streaming exclusives are bad for artists and fans >>>
  • Why exclusives are terrible for fans, artists, and the streaming music business >>>

Startup license

Establish a framework which allows startups to quickly and flexibly license music from indie labels for a set duration. The prospect of spending years in licensing negotiations stops entrepreneurs and investors from supporting innovation the independent music sector desperately needs. Let’s remove the necessity to negotiate for the most common use cases.

  • The case for a startup license: why startup founders choose to ignore music copyright law >>>

Focus on dance

The Netherlands is stealing the UK’s spotlight as the centre of global dance music with events like Amsterdam Dance Event, major DJs, and a huge global dance event business. The UK has a rich history of dance music and is home to some of the best artist, clubs, and labels in the world. It needs an action plan to assert itself. With Sadiq Khan as London’s Mayor, there has never been a better time.

  • London Mayor Sadiq Khan is looking for the UK’s first night czar >>>

Refugees

Develop an initiative to help artists and aspiring musicians among the refugees arriving to the UK. They bring a unique cultural and musical perspective, which could blend into the UK’s rich multi-cultural musical tradition. They need material assistance in the form of access to equipment and instruments, as well as contacts in local radio stations, venues, etc. Besides the musical benefit, there is also the advantage of contributing to better assimilation of new arrivals.

New anti-piracy research

A research initiative looking into the return on investment of money spent on countering digital piracy. With countless anti-piracy companies popping up, it should help indie artists and labels determine whether their money’s best spent growing their fanbase and making more music. It’s important to know what anti-piracy methods pay off, and what’s just a way to use the threat of piracy to get musicians to pay up.

Foster my ideas

Since I’m not a member of AIM, I cannot officially submit these ideas. If you’re an AIM member and interested in fostering the streaming exclusives, dance music, or refugees idea, get in touch: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com