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.

Online music is about to experience another MySpace moment

An emerging void signals new opportunity for innovation in digital music.

The benefit of writing thoughts down is that you get to revisit them. Six years ago, I penned a piece for Hypebot called The Next MySpace. At that time, people in the music business were desperate to for another MySpace to emerge: the site had been a ray of hope, but as it collapsed, online music was scattered across an immature ecosystem of rapidly growing startups like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, and many others that were eventually acquired or perished and forgotten. I argued:

The closest we will ever get to a “next MySpace” will be either a music network or a social network that manages to gather, organise and integrate the fragments in spectacular fashion.

Defining the MySpace moment

What I call a MySpace moment is not when everything was going well for MySpace: it’s when decline set in. People started replacing MySpace’s music players, which sucked, with Soundcloud’s beautiful waveform players. People started moving much of their social lives to Facebook (for friends) and Twitter (to connect to strangers). Up until then, the dominant social network had been music-driven — people, especially teenagers, expressed their identities by making long lists of bands they liked.

From the ashes of MySpace, which never managed to recover, rose a new ecosystem of music startups. They’ve managed to make it easy for artists to connect to fans, get paid for online playback, let fans know about new shows, and be able to very specifically target people with ads.

That moment, that void, was a massive opportunity and many companies benefited from it.

That moment is here once again.

The new MySpace moment

There are two main factors contributing to a new emerging void for entrepreneurs to leap in. One has to do with product adoption life cycles, which I’ll explain below. The other has to do with the important position Soundcloud claimed in the online music ecosystem.

Soundcloud came closer to being the ‘next MySpace’ than any startup has. And let’s be blunt: the company is not doing well. After years of legal pressure to tackle the problem of works being uploaded to the service without rights holders’ permission, they were forced to adopt a service model that does not make sense for Soundcloud. The typical $10 a month subscription doesn’t make sense. People are on Soundcloud for the fresh content, the mixtapes, remixes, unreleased stuff: the things that will not be on Spotify for weeks or months (or ever!). Why inject the catalogue with music of long deceased people?

There have been reports that Soundcloud would consider any bids higher than the total amount of money invested into the company to date. That’s not a good sign. The road they’ve been forced into is a dead-end street, and the only end game is a quick acquisition.

I don’t think Soundcloud will die, but it is hard for the company to focus on what they’ve always been good at. Now that they’ve been forced into the Spotify model, those are the types of metrics that are going to matter. Subscriber numbers, conversion, retention. So it may struggle to do as good a job serving the audience they’ve traditionally serviced so well. (small note: I love Soundcloud, and the people there: prove me wrong!)

This leaves a vacuum.

Adding to that vacuum, is the fact that Spotify (and other streaming services) are looking beyond early adopters. To understand the phenomenon, have a look at the below graph:

Product Life Cycle & Innovation Adoption Curve

The top part of the graph details the product life cycle. The bottom part explains the type of audience you address during the steps of that life cycle. As we’ve all noticed from the jubilant press reports on streaming’s expansion, we’re in the growth part of the cycle. This means services like Spotify and Apple Music have to get really good at targeting Early Majority and Late Majority type consumers.

If you’re reading this, you’re in the Innovator or Early Adopter segment. Startups typically start off by targeting those segments. So when Spotify moves on from Early Adopters (their de-emphasizing of user generated playlists is a big hint!), it leaves room for new startups to target and better serve those types of users.

Filling the new void

What happens then? Well, we’re going to get to the next phase of the digital music ecosystem – which is mobile-driven, and flirting with augmented reality, VR, and artificial intelligence. Early adopters are likely to keep paying for their Spotify subscriptions – it’s too big a convenience to give up… So entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to monetize new behaviours.

Now is a great time to look at very specific problems in music. Don’t try to build the next Spotify or the next Soundcloud. For a while, everyone was trying to build the next MySpace — all those startups are dead now. Instead, take a specific problem, research it, build a solution for someone, test it, try it again for a broader group, and if it works: double down and scale up.

Personally, I’m very curious to see where startup accelerator Techstars Music’s current batch will be five years from now.

Google Glass

When augmented reality converges with AI and the Internet of Things

The confluence of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things is rapidly giving rise to a new digital reality.

Remember when people said mobile was going to take over?

Well, we’re there. Some of the biggest brands in our world are totally mobile: Instagram, Snapchat, Uber. 84% (!) of Facebook’s ad revenue now comes from mobile.

And mobile will, sooner or later, be replaced by augmented reality devices, and it will look nothing like Google Glass.

Google Glass
Not the future of augmented reality.

Why some predictions fail

When viewing trends in technology in isolation, it’s inevitable you end up misunderstanding them. What happens is that we freeze time, take a trend and project the trend’s future into a society that looks almost exactly like today’s society.

Past predictions about the future
Almost.

This drains topics of substance and replaces it with hype. It causes smart people to ignore it, while easily excited entrepreneurs jump on the perceived opportunity with little to no understanding of it. Three of these domains right now are blockchain, messaging bots, and virtual reality, although I count myself lucky to know a lot of brilliant people in these areas, too.

What I’m trying to say is: just because it’s hyped, doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve your attention. Don’t believe the hype, and dig deeper.

The great convergence

In order to understand the significance of a lot of today’s hype-surrounded topics, you have to link them. Artificial intelligence, smart homes & the ‘Internet of Things’, and augmented reality will all click together seamlessly a decade from now.

And that shift is already well underway.

Artificial intelligence

The first time I heard about AI was as a kid in the 90s. The context: video games. I heard that non-playable characters (NPCs) or ‘bots’ would have scripts that learned from my behaviour, so that they’d get better at defeating me. That seemed amazing, but their behaviour remained predictable.

In recent years, there have been big advances in artificial intelligence. This has a lot to do with the availability of large data sets that can be used to train AI. A connected world is a quantified world and data sets are continuously updated. This is useful for training algorithms that are capable of learning.

This is also what has given rise to the whole chatbot explosion right now. Our user interfaces are changing: instead of doing things ourselves, explicitly, AI can be trained to interpret our requests or even predict and anticipate them.

Conversational interfaces sucked 15 years ago. They came with a booklet. You had to memorize all the voice commands. You had to train the interface to get used to your voice… Why not just use a remote control? Or a mouse & keyboard? But in the future, getting things done by tapping on our screens may look as archaic as it would be to do everything from a command-line interface (think MS-DOS).

XKCD Sudo make me a sandwich
There are certain benefits to command-line interfaces… (xkcd)

So, right now we see all the tech giants diving into conversational interfaces (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Messenger, and Microsoft, err… Tay?) and in many cases opening up APIs to let external developers build apps for them. That’s right: chatbots are APPS that live inside or on top of conversational platforms.

So we get new design disciplines: conversational interfaces, and ‘zero UI’ which refers to voice-based interfaces. Besides developing logical conversation structures, integrating AI, and anticipating users’ actions, a lot of design effort also goes into the personality of these interfaces.

But conversational interfaces are awkward, right? It’s one of the things that made people uncomfortable with Google Glass: issuing voice commands in public. Optimists argued it would become normalized, just like talking to a bluetooth headset. Yet currently only 6% of of people who use voice assistants ever do so in public… But where we’re going, we won’t need voice commands. At least not as many.

The Internet of Things

There are still a lot of security concerns around littering our lives with smart devices: from vending machines in our offices, to refrigerators in our homes, to self-driving cars… But it seems to be an unstoppable march, with Amazon (Alexa) and Google (Home) intensifying the battle for the living room last year:

Let’s converge with the trend of artificial intelligence and the advances made in that domain. Instead of having the 2016 version of voice-controlled devices in our homes and work environments, these devices’ software will develop to the point where they get a great feeling of context. Through understanding acoustics, they can gain spacial awareness. If that doesn’t do it, they could use WiFi signals like radar to understand what’s going on. Let’s not forget cameras, too.

Your smart device knows what’s in the fridge before you do, what the weather is before you even wake up, it may even see warning signs about your health before you perceive them yourself (smart toilets are real). And it can use really large data sets to help us with decision-making.

And that’s the big thing: our connected devices are always plugged into the digital layer of our reality, even when we’re not interacting with them. While we may think we’re ‘offline’ when not near our laptops, we have started to look at the world through the lens of our digital realities. We’re acutely aware of the fact that we can photograph things and share them to Instagram or Facebook, even if we haven’t used the apps in the last 24 hours. Similarly, we go places without familiarizing ourselves with the layout of the area, because we know we can just open Google Maps any time. We are online, even when we’re offline.

Your connected home will be excellent at anticipating your desires andbehaviour. It’s in that context that augmented reality will reach maturity.

Google Home

Augmented reality

You’ve probably already been using AR. For a thorough take on the trend, go read my piece on how augmented reality is overtaking mobile. Two current examples of popular augmented reality apps: Snapchat and Pokémon Go. The latter is a great example of how you can design a virtual interaction layer for the physical world.

So the context in which you have to imagine augmented reality reaching maturity is a world in which our environments are smart and understand our intentions… in some cases predicting them before we even become aware of them.

Our smart environments will interact with our AR device to pull up HUDs when we most need them. So we won’t have to do awkward voice commands, because a lot of the time, it will already be taken care of.

Examples of HUDs in video games
Head-up displays (HUDs) have long been a staple of video games.

This means we don’t actually have to wear computers on our heads. Meaning that the future of augmented reality can come through contact lenses, rather than headsets.

But who actually wants to bother with that, right? What’s the point if you can already do everything you need right now? Perhaps you’re too young to remember, but that’s exactly what people said about mobile phones years ago. Even without contact lenses, all of these trends are underway now.

Augmented reality is an audiovisual medium, so if you want to prepare, spend some time learning about video game design, conversational interfaces, and get used to sticking your head in front of a camera.

There will be so many opportunities emerging on the way there, from experts on privacy and security (even political movements), to designing the experiences, to new personalities… because AR will have its own PewDiePie.

It’s why I just bought a mic and am figuring out a way to add audiovisual content to the mix of what I produce for MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Not to be the next PewDiePie, but to be able to embrace mediums that will extend into trends that will shape our digital landscapes for the next 20 years. More on that soon.

And if you’re reading this and you’re in music, then you’re in luck:
People already use music to augment their reality.

More on augmented reality by me on the Synchtank blog:
Projecting Trends: Augmented Reality is Overcoming its Hurdles to Overtake Mobile.

The benefits of being an early adopter

Exploring the value of being a first mover, connecting with founders and building a profile in a nascent community.

While reading through a Medium post a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon an email subscription form near the bottom of the article. I’m always thinking of how I can better convert readers to my newsletter, so it immediately caught my interest. Why? Because I had never seen an embedded form on Medium.

Up until then, I had been using a service called Rabbut, which embedded an image that looked like a form and when clicked, would open a new page with the actual form. The new service looked much better. I immediately signed up.

It’s called Upscribe and after signing up, I went to see how I could export collected email addresses. This service, like Rabbut, was geared at the bigger email newsletter services, like Mailchimp, but I’m an early adopter of a service called Revue. So I chose ‘Other’. I got an email from the founder:

So I told him about Revue and after a week he wrote me back, telling me he had added the integration. Super awesome.

Being an early adopter makes you a VIP

Early adopters are often services’ most important users. This may mean that you can interact directly with the service’s founders or chief product person.

Revue founder Martijn de Kuijper mentions that all the time they put into talking to their users is essential for feedback and validation of the product. A feature he says came directly out of user feedback is their recently launched Themes. “We got a lot of requests for HTML templates and customization options, so we developed a new feature that lets people add personality to their digests in an easy-to-customize theme.” 

Other examples of how the Revue team connects with their community are a Slack channel, where they ask people for occasional feedback, but also keep the community connected, and an open roadmap on Trello, where users can see what features to expect and can give input on features through comments.

This means that as an active early adopter, you can have a lot of sway in the product direction of a tool and have it tailored to your needs, with a bit of luck.

Wil Benton, who founded Chew, a livestreaming platform for DJs and other personalities in music, feels that the “first 100/500/1000 users are the most important users you’ll ever have.” In part because you can’t think about everything yourself and users help you figure out things you missed.

He adds:

“Early adopters are critical to you going from janky MVP that only you would ever use to a product a completely random person on the opposite side of the world could (and would want to) use.”

Being an early adopter makes it easy to stand out

There are benefits beyond being an important voice for founders. If you’re active in a young community, it’s easy to build a profile for yourself.

Sales can be interchanged with users, or other metrics you’re tracking.

Be active, engage with others, and if what you’re doing on the platform is really good, you’ll build a following. This will get you featured. The power of being featured is that startups usually aim for something named hockeystick growth.

If you’re featured when the growth suddenly starts accelerating, you benefit from the network effect, because new users often end up following existing accounts, since they won’t have any friends on the platform yet.

Sebastien Lintz, who does digital for Hardwell, manages Revealed Recordings and Sorted Management, recently explained on a panel at Play & Produce in Ghent, that he had had a lot of success by simply being the first with quality content and a good strategy for new platforms, mentioning Musical.ly and Live.ly.

I’ve had similar experiences with Revue, where my newsletter was featured, and if I had more time, I’d love to build a profile on DJ / remix apps like Pacemaker and 8Stem.

Check them out.

Your chance to be an early adopter

I really recommend spending about half an hour a week on Product Hunt. It’s a place where people post new products and services, so you’re among the first to hear about them. If you want to be a super early adopter, you could even sign up to Betalist, where you can get early access to beta versions of products when founders need people to test their products.

And a special opportunity:

I’m working with a startup that’s building a tool to easily message large groups of fans on Facebook Messenger. The idea is simple: you onboard your fans, ask them for a few things like location and email address (just in case Facebook changes algorithms again), and then you can push personally relevant updates to fans about new releases or shows.

I’m going to be writing a lot more about this topic once we’ve got everything set up for you to give it a go, but if you’d like to get on the list and be among the first users: use this link.

Dollars on a plate

Are donations becoming a viable part of artists’ business models?

With the rise of live streaming and new media models, donations deserve another consideration.

 

Napster, the early file sharing service, not only introduced many to piracy. The platform also exposed two competing world views. One believed that information should be free and the other believed in combating such ideas. They were both wrong.

As a teenager, and still today, my personal sympathy went out to those who saw a better world and wanted to accomplish that by facing down large corporations. Their envisioned world was never satisfactory enough for me, though. It seemed oversimplified. One of the most common tropes you’d hear would be:

“Artists should just release their work for free and let people donate. I’d love to be able to donate to my favourite artists.”

Donation request from a band
An example of a common donation request.

At that time, there were only about half a billion connected devices. Most of the world’s population wasn’t online yet. Those that were, and thought this way, were a minority projecting their own behaviour onto others. It’s common: most music startup founders do the same thing — overestimating how much people care about music. Simply put: the donation model could not scale.

The model didn’t take into consideration the complexity of the way music is made. Let’s say artists were able to make a living off of donations — this benefits the most visible artists; the singers, but not the songwriters. How should money from donations then be distributed so that it’s fair? Does the intention behind the donation matter? Questions like these are the reason why there’s so much legislation around creative work.

An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business.
An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business. Via Bemuso.

Time passed and two trends have developed. Firstly, there has been an explosion of artists who do everything by themselves. Households in many countries now no longer have just 1 family PC, and music production software is easy to attain. This has led to a rise of ‘bedroom producers’, many of which are world famous and make a good living off of music.

The second trend is that the internet has become more real-time. Ten years ago you wouldn’t consider sharing memories online that would only be visible for 24 hours. Now, two of the world’s most popular apps, Instagram and Snapchat, not only encourage, but thrive because of that behaviour.

Fast wireless connections and increasingly powerful devices have enabled livestreaming. Anyone who’s ever ‘gone live’ on Facebook or Periscope knows that it changes the creative process of making a video. Live video streams are not just a new way to broadcast, they’re a creative format.

Facebook Live creation tool

Trends mix and influence each other. If you want to understand where things are going, you have to understand how trends converge and diverge. In this case, the two highlighted trends have culminated into a particular reality: donations are becoming a viable part of artists’ business models.

Understanding how donations are becoming viable is easiest by looking outside of music. Donations are already an important part of the economy on Twitch, a platform for broadcasting gameplay, which also encourages creatives to start streaming.

Gamers use donation apps to display tip notes in the live video stream. Some apps actually automatically read out the tip notes on-stream. Tipping is done for various reasons: to actually show appreciation, to encourage the chat to discuss a certain topic (or more likely: to emote-spam), to request a song, to ask for expert feedback, to get their name or joke into a YouTube highlight reel, etc.

Twitch tip scare
And sometimes they use tips to scare streamers shitless.

For popular streamers, it’s hard to interact with the chat, because there’s just too much to read it all — and they also need to focus on their game. Tip notes provide a way for viewers or fans to rise above the noise and get the streamer’s attention.

The takeaway here is that donations do not seem to occur for altruistic reasons in most cases. The exact ratio would make for an interesting study. Much of the donation behaviour happens due to the desire to interact, stand out or to get a request fulfilled. It’s a behaviour enabled by the immediacy brought on by the rise of high quality live streaming.

DJ live streaming on Twitch
Some streamers highlight their top donators by keeping their names visible (in bottom).

Musicians that want to incorporate donations into their business model will need a clear strategy. Firstly, it’s unlikely that donations on their own are viable if the goal is to make a living off of creative work. Although if you do it all yourself, like many artists these days, you get to keep the whole cut.

Secondly, the reason why donations are becoming viable is because of live streaming. This means the artist needs to be able to consistently generate audiences and that takes time to build. One-offs are a recipe for failure, especially if they don’t sit within a broader strategy.

Live streams being a creative format of their own means that there needs to be an intrinsic motivation to work in this way. Else one won’t be able to muster the consistency and grit necessary to succeed. The question for the artist is: “is this medium compelling enough for you to spend a significant amount of your time on it?”

Whatever the answer, the trend is clear. As artists are embracing the live format, with younger ones even coming into maturity with it, we’ll see donations make a comeback. This time, not as charity, but as a well-planned part of artists’ business models.

An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.
An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.

5 Easy Ways to Stay on Top of Trends (for Busy People)

There’s a certain advantage to being ahead of the curve. In an age of constant disruption, the benefits of learning about a new tool or technology before your competitors can be immeasurable. So how do you stay aware of new trends and developments in your field or industry? Below are 5 convenient ways. They just take a minute to set up.

Newsletters

Yes, it’s 2016. Yes, newsletters are one of the best ways to stay up to date on trends. Browse for great newsletters on NewsletterStash or Revue. If you’re using Gmail, you can add a +tag behind your name in your email address, so that incoming newsletters all get tagged the same way. Like so: name+newsletters@gmail.com. This helps you filter them into separate folders so they don’t clutter up your inbox. It’s called subaddressing and many email providers besides Gmail support it too.

Facebook Groups

For every topic you can think of, there’s a Facebook community. Members share relevant links relating to the topic and you may find the discussions useful too. Also, it can be a good way to connect to other professionals in your domain.

Reddit

Like Facebook, Reddit has a ‘subreddit’ for all kinds of topics, like privacy, transhumanism, freediving, the list goes on. Search for some interesting ones, subscribe to them, unsubscribe from the default ones, and return to Reddit regularly. You now have a curated page with links and discussions relevant to your interests.

Twitter

You probably already know the name of some thought leaders and interesting publications or blogs in your domain. Follow them on Twitter. See who they retweet. Follow them if relevant. See what recommendations you get to follow accounts. Soon you’ll have a constant flow of, more or less, relevant content.

You can also build lists of people who’ve posted tweets with a specific hashtag. Lists are a useful way to build more tailored streams.

You might even get to know more about the people you follow, where they get their information from, and perhaps discover a new newsletter, Facebook group or subreddit. Don’t forget about the unfollow button when someone keeps cluttering your feed.

Audible

Ever busy with your hands, but not that busy with your mind? Amazon’s audiobook service, Audible, offers audiobooks on every topic. It recently also incorporated podcasts in its app, so you can learn while you cook, workout, cycle, or shower. For a $15/mo membership, you get 1 free audiobook a month. You can actually try Audible for free and get two free audiobooks.

Here are some top notch audiobooks about the future and how to study it:

Got more? Ping me on Twitter.

Now that you’re all set up, why not learn how to efficiently share what you know on social media?


Disclaimer: yes, those are affiliate links. They help me keep the blog and newsletter running.