The outdated maxim that change is the one fixed feels tailor made for the twenty first century music enterprise. No sooner does the business get its head round one paradigm shift then one other one comes alongside. First piracy, then downloads, then streaming, then the rise of the unbiased artist and now…properly, simply what’s ‘now’? AI would be the phrase on everybody’s lips, however as transformational as will probably be, it’s going to be an enabler of a wider shift, one that may see a forking from at the moment’s LISTEN-focused ecosystem, ensuing within the emergence of a brand new, parallel PLAY-focused one.

Streaming has achieved a lot and can obtain extra. However it’s turning into more and more obvious that it’s hitting limits, as illustrated by slowing development in mature markets and the rising variety of cracks within the system:

•       Fragmentation of consumption and the decline of the celebrity

•       The continued rise of unbiased creators and development of the lengthy tail

•       Fandom’s near-absence from streaming and the decline of the superfan

•       A misfiring remuneration mannequin with all stakeholders complaining about one thing 

•       The commodification of consumption

•       Creators feeling unable to maintain up with the calls for of the ‘always-on artist’ mannequin

•       The all the things, all over the place strategy decimating shortage and specialness

These fracture strains are usually not solely not going to go away, they’re concurrently creating the circumstances for what comes subsequent. Many of those second-order penalties are already established, whereas others are but to come back to fruition:

•       Scenes are flourishing as social algorithms push us ever nearer to our niches

•       The music creator economic system is more and more rising exterior of streaming

•       Fandom and identification are discovering new locations and voices

•       Artists need fanbases they will join with relatively than nameless audiences

•       Consumer centric and artist centric are nonetheless each rightsholder-centric fashions, creators need remuneration fashions that put then on the centre

•       From personal social teams to Discord servers, creators are realising the worth of gated communities and conditional entry to their music

Streaming has turn into extra lean again at simply the time that buyers, throughout the remainder of their digital lives, have turn into extra lean in. The excellent news is that this has enabled music to soundtrack to these lives, turning into the background exercise. The much less optimistic information, aside from the additional commodification of consumption, is that as a result of subscription royalty pots are finite, this implies decrease per-stream charges and placing much more distance between passive consumption and music fandom. As paradoxical as it could sound, the worth of extra listening can truly be much less fandom. 

Change, although, wants not solely circumstances however a change agent additionally. That is the place AI steps in. AI itself is not going to create the following chapter of the music enterprise, however it’ll assist bridge the hole between at the moment’s ache factors and tomorrow’s development dynamics.

In fact, speaking about AI as a factor, might be about as helpful as speaking about the web twenty years in the past. And similar to then, even essentially the most educated guesses about what it’ll turn into will fall far quick. It’s in all probability most secure to consider AI as a foundational set of applied sciences that may type a number of the spine of tomorrow’s web. And if we translate that pervasive impression to music, then we must always anticipate it to form composition, creation, advertising and marketing, distribution…mainly all the things, in a roundabout way, most frequently enhancing workflows relatively than changing them.

The results of all this would be the forking of the music panorama into two lanes:

1.     LISTEN: at the moment’s lean-back mannequin that has turn into the long-term successor of radio (solely significantly better monetised)

2.     PLAY: platforms that utilise AI instruments to offer end-to-end, creation-to-consumption, bypassing the standard DSP provide chain, and subsequently, probably sidestepping a lot of the rights world additionally. (TikTok’s negotiating conflict with UMG could also be a primary step on this route). The largest distinction that buyers will discover is that they will lean in and take part, each with artists’ content material and by creating themselves. 

The nineteenth century composer John Philip Sousa stated of Eddison’s phonograph (the prime mover of at the moment’s music enterprise): “it’s a horrible machine for bringing useless sounds again to life”. Think about that for a second. At this time’s recorded music and streaming companies are constructed round useless sounds. Till recordings turned songs into artistic full stops, music by no means ever sounded the identical twice. PLAY providers will assist take music again to these pre-recorded days, making it one thing that’s at all times evolving, usually ephemeral and, crucially, one thing that everybody can participate in. 

This may sound like a licensing quagmire, as a result of it’s. Music licensing hasn’t even but found out the right way to license the enter part of generative AI (i.e., the educational). It has actually not began addressing what kind of rights framework ought to be put across the output (i.e., the music that individuals, together with customers, make with AI). The rights frameworks that may work for the PLAY period will want designing from scratch. 

PLAY will turn into music’s cultural playground, the house the place music will probably be an expressive, ever-changing medium and the standard confines (style, monitor size, construction, and so forth.) needn’t apply.

LISTEN is not going to go away, after all. Streaming will stay the bedrock of consumption. However alongside it, music can have a brand new lane. Streaming redefined the way forward for the music enterprise, and though it additionally helped reshape music, it was by no means meant to. PLAY is completely different. The very essence of it’s to reshape the way forward for each the enterprise and tradition of music. PLAY will redefine the way forward for music itself.

MIDiA purchasers: we’ll be exploring these concepts in way more element and presenting a framework for the way this can work, in a forthcoming report.