To me, it’s beyond a doubt that we’ll all be listening to AI-created music within a few decades, and probably much sooner. The most important way in for this type of music is mood playlists. After the first couple of songs on such playlists, most people tune the music out and get back to their main activity. Does it really matter who has created the song then? Does it matter whether they’re alive? Does it matter whether they’ve ever been alive at all?
[EDIT Aug 15: a small disclaimer since a piece linking here makes an incorrect claim. I don’t thinkĀ allĀ AI-created music needs a human narrative. I believe the future contains a lot of adaptive, and generative music. More on my point of view in this piece: Computers won’t have to be creative]
We are all creative, and therefore I think it doesn’t matter whether computers will be able to be creative. We are creative as listeners. Computers will be able to predict what we like, then test thousands of versions on playlists until they have the exact right version of the song. As a matter of fact, AI offers the prospect of personalized music, or music as precision medicine as The Sync Project calls it.
A point that’s made often is that AI-created music lacks part of the story people expect with music. People bring it up as an obstacle that can’t be overcome, but it feels like that’s just because of a decision to stop thinking as soon as the point is brought up. Let’s think further.
For one, I think AI-created music already is and will continue to be born in collaboration with people. People will increasingly take the role ofĀ curators of music created through algorithms. Secondly, why not give music a story?
Last week at IDAGIOĀ Tech Talks, the music streaming service for classical music where I’m Product Director, we had the pleasure of hearingĀ Ivan Yamshchikov talk about his neural network capable of music composition. With his colleague, Alexey Tikhonov, they fed their system 600 hours of compositions and had it compose a new work in the style of Scriabin.Ā The human narrative was added at the end: as it was performed live by acclaimed musicians (see below).
This is how you get people to knowingly listen to music by artificial intelligence. Most consumption of AI music will be through ignorance of the source of the music. Yet people will warm up to the idea of AI being involved in the music creation process, just like they warmed up to electric guitars, samplers, and computers being used as instruments.
And that’s the narrative that will make it human: artificial intelligence as an instrument which requires a whole new skill set for artists to successfully work with it, and evoke in listeners what they want to.
Last Friday, I had the pleasure of representing IDAGIO on stage at a conference for the first time since joining as Product Director one month ago. It was my first time attending a conference dedicated to classical, and since I haven’t written much about that part of the music business yet, I want to highlight some of the innovations I was introduced to at Classical:NEXT.
The classical music world has a set of specific challenges. Most discussed is how to address new audiences and how to win them as fans of orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, and get them into venues for live performances.
It’s a challenge, because you don’t want to sacrifice traditions which often go back hundreds of years. But you’re also dealing with shorter attention spans, and an enormous amount of choice when it comes to experiencing live music: classical, or not.
Another issue is the sheer number of people and instruments required to perform particular works. Or that music streaming services are designed for pop music (performer, album, song), and are not structured around all the data you get with classical (composer, work, performer, recording, instrumentation, era, soloists, etc).
I’ll be writing about these topics more in the future, because I think the wider music business has a lot to learn from classical music. For now, I want to focus on some of the innovative projects and products I met with (or shared a stage with) at Classical:NEXT.
LOLA
One of the most popular MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE articles ever, was about how the music business can become more sustainable. I mentioned developments in VR might make it easier for musicians to collaborate or practice over distance, without having to leave the home.
LOLAĀ is a piece ofĀ Ā to let performers practice with each other digitally, audio visually. For this, latency must be reduced as much as possible, to less than 30ms. For comparison, Skype has about 500ms latency.
So far, LOLA, short for low latency, has been able to get musicians and dancers from institutions around the world to practice, as well as perform with each other.
A demo of LOLAĀ (starts at 3:50):
Gigle
The on-demand economy is starting to have a real impact on the music business. There are numerous platforms that let you book bands and musicians, each with their own twist. Most are kind of like an Airbnb for music: you browse the catalogue of musicians, compare prices, and book whichever suits you best.
What separates Gigle, which hails from Helsinki, Finland, is that they’re mobile-first. They’re trying to lower the barrier to booking music: instead of getting the same oldĀ boring flowers and wine for someone’s birthday, why not get a violinist in?
The excuse for focusing on the desktop browser experience is often that you want people to be able to think things over calmly, keep an overview, and then make a decision. If your goal is to remove barriers, focusing on mobile is the right way to go: if you can’t do it on mobile, then you need to go back to the drawing board. Gigle’s right to emphasise the mobile experience.
At this point, the mobile phone is the personal computer we most often access. Maybe we don’t spend less time on it than on our desktop computers or laptops (although for many it’s the other way around already), but even for those of us that are chained to our computers, the amount of times per day we access our mobile phones far exceeds that of any other computer.
AustralianĀ Discovery Orchestra
Perhaps one of Australia’s youngest orchestras, the ADOĀ has an interesting digital strategy. Besides livestreaming their concerts, they turn some of their recordings into virtual experiences. People get placed into game-like environments, and then have to complete certain objectives to move through the composition.
This is an interesting way of adding another layer of experience to the music, which hopefully resonates with new audiences. I think the problem for classical music is not that young audiences think classical is terrible: they don’t. They’re just indifferent, have little understanding of it, feel overwhelmed because they don’t know where to begin, or feel thatĀ the genre has a stuffy image.
So give them something they can understand. Give them something with objectives. Something that encourages them to explore, to be curious. Something that is designed for a lack of understanding and knowledge as a starting point. That’s the powerful thing about these virtual experiences.
TrueLinked
Concocted as a way to get musicians more gigs and opportunities, TrueLinkedĀ also provides a way for people in classical music to organise the process of performing and recording music.
If you thought the logistics around casting for a band were hard, imagine a full-size orchestra with anywhere between 50 and a 100 members.
The platform has ways of categorising musicians by level, understanding of repertoire, collaborators, and other factors, so that the demand-side of the marketplace can easily figure out how to prioritize the people they contact. This provides artists with a great way to market themselves within their niche.
I’m sure there were lots of other innovative ideas & apps presented at the conference. I only had the one day there, and didn’t have much time to look around and attend the talks and panel discussions. Ping me on Twitter — always happy to learn more about interesting projects.
Special thanks toĀ Katariina Nyberg of ExClaM! Digital for organising & chairing the session I met some of these startups at.
Today Iām excited to announce that Iām joining IDAGIO, a streaming service for classical music lovers, as Director of Product. Iām already in the process of relocating to Berlin, where Iāll be joining the team later this month.
In this post, I want to explain why I so strongly believe in this niche focused music service and IDAGIOās mission. I also want to shed light on the future of MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as a newsletter, a type of media, and an agency. (tl;dr: the newsletter lives on!)
Two months ago,Ā a friend whom I had worked with in Moscow, at music streaming service Zvooq, forwarded me a vacancy as a Twitter DM. By then, I had developed a kind of mental auto-ignore, because friends kept sending me junior level vacancies in music companies. I was never looking for a ājobāāāāI had a job (but thanks for thinking of me ā¤ļø). However, I trusted that this friend knew me better as a professional, so I opened the link.
I was immediately intrigued. I hadnāt heard of IDAGIO before, but Iāve spent a lot of time thinking about niche services. At one point, the plan for Zvooq was to not build a typical one-size-fits-all app like all the other music streaming services are doing, but instead it would be to split different types of music-related behaviours into smaller apps. The goal would then become to monopolize those behaviours: like Google has monopolized search behaviour (now called Googling), and Shazam has monopolized Shazaming. Long term, it would allow us to expand that ecosystem of apps beyond streaming content, so we would be able to monetize behaviours with higher margins than behaviours related to music listening.
We ended up building just one, Fonoteka, before we had to switch strategies due to a mix of market reality, licensing terms, and burn rate. That was fine: it was what the business needed, and what Russia as a market needed.
Since then, there have been a number of niche music ideas, like services for indie rock, high quality streaming, etc. And while those are all commendable, I was never quite interested in them, because it just seemed like those services would not have a strong enough strategic competitive advantage in the face of tech giants with bulging coffers. Their offers were often also just marginally better, but getting people to install an app and build a habit around your service, unlearn their old solution, learn to do it your wayā¦ thatās a huge thing to ask of people, especially once you need to go beyond the super early adopters.
But niche works on a local level. You can see it with Yandex.Music and Zvooq in Russia, with Anghami in the Middle East, and Gaana in India.
Over the last decade, Iāve lived in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and The Netherlands (where Iām from). Each country has unique ways of interacting with music. Music has a different place in each culture. I think local music services work, because they combine catalogues and local taste with a deep understanding of how their target audience connects to music. It allows them to build something catering exactly to those behaviours. Itās music and behaviour combined.
When I started talking to the IDAGIO team, I soon understood that they too combine these elements. Classical music, in all its shapes and forms, has many peculiarities, which will remain an object of study for me for the next years. The fact that the same work often has a multitude of recordings by different performers already sets it apart. One can map a lot of behaviours around navigation, exploring, and comparison to just this one fact.
An example of one way in which IDAGIO lets people explore various performances of the same work.
Despite being younger and having more modest funding, IDAGIO has already built a product that caters better to classical music fans than the other streaming services do (and also serves lossless streams). Understanding that, I was fast convinced that this was something I seriously needed to consider.
So I got on a plane and met the team. Over the course of three days, we ran a condensed design sprint, isolated a problem we wanted to tackle together, interviewed expert team members, explored options, drew up solutions, and prototyped a demo to test with the target audience. Itās an intense exercise, especially when youāre also being sized up as a potential team member, but the team did such a good job at making me feel welcome and at home (ā¤ļø). Through our conversations, lunches, and collaboration, I was impressed with the teamās intelligence, creativity, and general thoughtfulness.
Then I spent some extra time in Berlināāāafter all, Iād be moving there. Aforementioned friend took me to a medical museum with a room full of glass cabinets containing jars with contents which will give me nightmares for years to come. Besides that, I met a bunch of other friends, music tech professionals, and entrepreneurs, who collectively convinced me of the high caliber of talent and creative inspiration in the city.
Returning home, I made a decision I didnāt expect to make this year, nor in the years to come. A decision to make a radical switch in priorities.
Motivation, for me, comes from the capacity to grow and to do things with meaningful impact. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE has exposed me to a lot of different people, a lot of different problems, and has allowed me to do what I find interesting, what Iām good at, but also what I grow and learn from. With IDAGIO I can do all of the latter, but with depth, and with a team.
Classical music online has been sidelined a bit. It makes a lot of sense when you place it in a historical perspective: a lot has changed in recent years. The webās demographic skews older now. You can notice this by counting the number of family members on Facebook. The internet used to be something most adults would just use for work, so if you were building entertainment services, you target the young, early adopter demographic. Thatās pop music, rock, electronic, hiphop, etc. Classical was there, sure, but Spotify wasnāt designed around it, iTunes wasnāt, YouTube wasnāt.
Now weāre actually reaching a new phase for music online. The streaming foundation has been built. Streaming is going mainstream. The platforms from the 2007ā2009 wave are maturing and looking beyond their original early adopter audiencesā¦ So weāre going to see a lot of early adopters that are not properly served anymore. Theyāre going to migrate, look for new homes. A very important segment there, one that has always been underserved, are classical music fans. And now, this niche audience is sizeable enough to actually build a service around.
Why? Well, the internet has changed since the large last wave of music startups. Mobile is becoming the default way people connect to the web. For adults, this has made the web less of a thing for āworkā, and has made entertainment more accessible. Connected environments make it easy to send your mobile audio to your home hifi set, or car speakers. The amount of people on the internet has more than doubled.
This makes the niche play so much more viable than just a few years ago. It has to be done with love, care, and a very good understanding of whose problem youāre trying to solve (and what that problem is). IDAGIO has exactly the right brilliant minds in place to pull this off and Iām flattered that in 2 weeks time, Iāll get to spend 2,000 hours a year with them.
What happens to theĀ agency?
Iāll be winding down the agency side of MxTxF. This means Iām not taking on any more clients, but Iām happy to refer you to great people I know. Some longer term projects, that just take a couple of hours per week, Iāll keep on to bring to completion.
What happens to the newsletter?
The newsletter goes on! I get a lot of personal fulfilment out of it. The agency was born out of the newsletter, so who knows what more it will spawn. Iām actually figuring out a way to add audio and video content to the mix. I expect Midem and SĆ³nar+D next June will be pilots for that. Berlin is a great place for music tech, so if anything, I hope the newsletter will only get more interesting as time goes on.
Besides the personal fulfilment, it allows me to be in touch with this wonderful community, to meet fascinating people, and occasionally to help organise a panel and bring some of my favourite minds into the same room at the same time.
If youād like to support the newsletter, you can help me out on Patreon. You can become a patron of the newsletterāāāwith your support, I can add extra resources to the newsletter, which will let me push the content to the next level (high on the list: a decent camera).
Elgar making an early recording of the work in 1920. Those pipes are acoustic recording horns, which were piped to a diaphragm which would vibrate a cutting stylusāāādirectly turning sound waves into a material recording.
Iād love to hear about your favourite works and recordings. Feel free to email me on bg@idagio.com, with a link, and tell me what I should listen for.
