Music's New Velocity

PLUS: A new home for songs, onchain music, RIAA comes for AI & more

Author

Rob Abelow
June 24, 2023

Welcome, artists & builders.

Each week, we navigate music 2.0 → 3.0 together. Today, a thought experiment on tapping the benefits of generative AI while protecting originators. And originality.

Inside Issue #12

  • 💡Context: Creative Lineage

  • 🛠️ Tools: A new home for your songs

  • 🗞️ What You Missed: AI, web3 & fan-building

Music is entering a new age of velocity.

We need a creative lineage.

Here’s how I see it:

I. We want songs to have velocity.

We want them to replicate & iterate.

→ Played around the world
→ Covered a million times
→ Used in TV & film

The best ideas last, becoming part of our culture.

They are the original memes (in the original sense of the word).

II. But we want to maintain control.

Or originators won’t receive the benefits.

→ Royalties
→ Protection
→ Attribution

Control incentivizes creation.

III. There is always a tradeoff between velocity & control.

→ Give room to let an idea travel.
→ Not enough to have it co-opted.

Any artist can cover a song, but they can't make material changes without permission.

When our powers of iteration grow, we adjust the controls.

TikTok is one version.

We allow users to sync unapproved videos to songs.

Because the potential for velocity is worth it.

We want our songs to become memes.

AI is next.

Iteration on a whole new scale. In a whole new way.

If an artist’s work enters an AI model, the velocity of new works explodes. But control vanishes, along with benefit to the originator.

How can we harness this power of iteration without losing control?

We trace it.
We license it.
We make it opt-in.

We form a Creative Lineage

I borrow your ideas. I build on them.

  • My worthy contributions live on

  • You share in the rewards & attribution

  • Others find the ideas & build new threads

and onward

I call this Traced-AI

Early forms of this idea are springing up:

  • Grimes is licensing her voice.

  • Pixelynx lets you create with artist “DNA”.

  • More are being built - many in stealth

They are experiments in a new mode of collaboration.

One that benefits both the originator & user of generative AI.

A new tradeoff.

— Rob

We are AI heavy this week. Let’s go.

🛠️ NEW TOOLS

Track to Table

Myxt is a new place for storing, sharing & managing your recordings.

It consolidates many post-recording actions into 1 workspace, flexing AI-powered automation to reduce time, energy & back-and-forth.

🌱 Separate stems
✍️ Transcribe lyrics
✔️ Master to any reference track
🔍 Detect chords, BPM, key & beats
💬 Discuss with time-stamped comments
📱 Promote w/ lyric videos & visualizers fitted for social

Just like Soundcloud, you can share & embed your tracks.

Why I like it: It’s multi-player. It’s automated. It’s pretty. It’s an all-in-one suite for the creator who wears multiple hats.

🧠 AI for reduced workload + reduced context switching.

🧰 3 More Tools Like This

  1. Disco: Ideal for pitching from catalogs to sync.

  2. Audioshake: AI stem & instrumental separation (Myxt integrates for this tool).

  3. Stemport: Identifies, labels & organizes stems in ways that play nice with your DAW (very new).

🗞️ What You Missed

Songs can have AI vocals, songwriting or instrumentation, but must have proof of meaningful human authorship in the nominated category.

Banned from nomination:

It’s difficult to draw a line when so much music uses *some* element of AI.

💨 Quick Hits:

  • Music NFT rebrand: Cooper Turley makes a great case for rebranding as on-chain music.

  • Motown metaverse: Motown opens a virtual venue featuring in-world appearances by classic Motown artists.

  • Spotify’s Supremium: HiFi audio may finally arrive as part of a $19.99 tier (Apple & Amazon include in basic).

  • Web3 ≠ Blockchain: Is crypto a necessary building block for Web3?

  • Whack-a-mole: RIAA comes after AI Hub - largest home of voice deepfakes - with infringement subpoena.

  • Not gonna make it: AI deepfake streaming directory WAVs AI raise $20m. It should use it to start hiring lawyers.

  • More channels: Instagram opens Channels to all users to share messages with your followers - how to use it.

  • Digital Merch: Snoop Dogg’s passport series offers ongoing BTS content, plus curated works from other artists.

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That’s all this week. See you on Twitter or LinkedIn.

- Rob