THOUGHTS ON AI AND MUSIC

Why are you getting so on board with AI? There’s no way this doesn’t hurt our business or worse. Would you please explain to me if you don’t mind?”

This was the email I received today from a subscriber.

It’s a great question, and it inspired me to write an article to detail why I believe it’s important for us to talk about AI and its impact on sync and the music business in general.

To start, I’m not totally on board with AI. Mostly on board, yes, but not totally. Allow me to give you a little background to help explain my perspective on AI and tech in general.

I’ve been involved in the development of technology and content for over three decades, as a market research analyst, a content creator, an entrepreneur, an executive and a developer, and the one thing I’ve learned is that when a transformative, disruptive technology debuts, the most important thing you can do is learn everything you can about it, understand its good and bad points, and then apply that knowledge to your work and business to take advantage of its potential while being aware of its downsides.

Just saying that you hate it, getting scared of it, ignoring it or only focusing on either the positive or negative aspects of a new technology is a losing proposition. Only by understanding a new technology in its totality can you properly utilise it. And if you don’t understand it, you remain ignorant at your peril, and the world will pass you by.

I’ve seen this happen multiple times.

I started my career as a market research analyst writing and editing printed industry reports and newsletters, as well as writing articles for magazines and newspapers. I loved that work, but as soon as I saw the World Wide Web for the first time in 1994, I knew printed media as we knew it was going to die, and that’s why, in the mid-90s, I adapted to the new reality and became a developer of internet-based companies and content.

A few years later, in 1999, when I first used Napster, I knew the recorded music industry as we knew it was going to die, all while the mostly ossified geniuses running the recorded music industry, instead of evolving their business models for the digital download era, acted like the old business models would be a license to print money forever, but forever ended.

I won’t do you the disservice of recounting the useless meetings I had at the time with labels trying to convince them to build their own file-sharing service behind a paywall, but I will say that if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue at Apple providing them a lifeline with iTunes to make money again through a paid music download system that actually worked for customers, they would probably never have recovered or evolved their business models.

I saw this happen again when I had a company in the mobile business in the early 2000s, and we, as an industry, transformed what was a communications device into an entertainment device that completely decimated the photographic industry because companies like Kodak ignored the fact that, after 2003, almost every phone shipped with a camera and their services were no longer required by the mass market.

And how about Blockbuster versus Netflix?

You get the picture. The people and companies that harness tech win; the people and companies that don’t get left behind or go away.

So that brings us to the present. I believe AI is the most transformative technology in my lifetime, and I believe it is crucial that we understand it and harness it for good.

AI certainly has its negative aspects: AI slop music flooding Spotify and other DSPs, unauthorised usage of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models like Suno, the supplanting of music library and lower-level syncs by AI-generated music, and the automation of many types of administrative jobs in music are all very real. And we, as people and an industry, need to work to minimise or eliminate these downsides as best we can. And a lot of good people are working hard to create tech and legal guardrails to minimise the downsides of AI.

Negatives aside, I believe that AI, especially Operational AI, has the potential to make our work better, more efficient and more accurate at greater scale, freeing us from administrative tasks so we can focus on creative and strategic work. Here are a few examples just in sync.

  1. Music Pitching and Delivery. Figuring out who to send music to, how to send it and what kind of music to send to what person, whether they are asking for music or you are sending music to introduce your music to someone, is tedious using conventional methods and can be done more quickly, more accurately and with better metadata with an AI assistant. There are a variety of services that can help you do this right now, and through using AI, you can greatly scale your efforts to connect your music to more people more quickly and more accurately.
  2. Music Research and Evaluation. Music supervisors and other decision makers looking for music for their projects go through a tedious and time-consuming evaluation and clearance process. Usage of operational AI can greatly assist people looking for music to more quickly find music, evaluate it, filter it and share it with their teams. This is a huge value add that will allow music supervisors to free up their time to work on more projects or other creative work.
  3. Music Strategy. Operational AI can assist in the building of music programming strategies for brands, stores and live experiences, and help artists develop marketing strategies for their music. This democratises access to processes and intelligence that are expensive, hard to access and normally take months to develop and execute.

These three implementations of AI are just a few examples of how operational AI can positively transform workflow and work in general in the sync industry. 

So, to go back to the original question—why am I getting so on board with AI?

  • Because I believe we have to. It is here, it’s not going away, and it doesn’t care about our feelings. We cannot hide our heads in the sand, whether we like it or not. We have to understand it and harness it.
  • Because I believe in the transformative nature of technology for good, with human management. I know that AI can help us work better, and we can, at the same time, help AI work more towards our needs the better we understand and manage it.
  • Because I believe that talking about AI honestly leads to understanding. It’s not all good or bad; it is a tool. And the more you understand it, the better you can use it.
  • Because it solves some major issues we have. AI can help solve metadata issues and issues with finding, pitching and licensing music at scale, do it quicker and do it more efficiently than humans alone. And this saves time and money that can be spent on creative and strategic work.
  • Because I believe it will help artists, labels and publishers to discover more opportunities and get their music found and heard. 
  • Because I believe that it will help music supervisors and other decision makers better find, filter, select and ideate on music.

At the end of the day, whether or not you agree with my breakdown, I urge you to get informed and understand all the elements and impact of AI. And I’ll do my best to help.