Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s bi-monthly breakdown of the music-web3 byway. 

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

But first, dear newsletter reader, I’m thrilled to say that starting June 15, The Beat will become a weekly email newsletter – stay up to date on all that music + web3 is up to by subscribing here.

Future Shock

In 1970 Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock was published. The eminent futurist predicted a second industrial revolution driven by frenetic technological development. “Future Shock is a 500 page book, but the premise is simple,” the writer and thinker Ted Gioia recently wrote in his newsletter The Honest Broker. “Things are changing too damn fast.”

Neil Postman, the late American author and digital tech objector, used the same phrase to title a 1963 essay from his book Conscientious Objections, describing future shock “as a way of describing the social paralysis induced by rapid technological change.” This was 60 years ago – before the moon landing, home video, personal computers, cell phones…

Many decades later and developmental escalations that are magnitudes of order higher, Gioia revisits Toffler’s prediction, pointing out that, yeah, things change too quickly, but in reality the exact opposite happened.

“People today aren’t put into shock by all their tech devices,” he wrote. “They are numbed and hypnotized. They’re addicted and won’t put them down.”

This is true. And a recent edition of my old friend Rhys Lindmark’s newsletter Rhys’ Pieces – this one titled “The Addictification of Everything” – outlines a harrowing tale of a society riven by addiction. Its talons are everywhere, pervasive, designed – at times even celebrated – for hooking us in great swathes. Scale scale scale!

I may fall prey to numbness at times but still I maintain my shock. Let’s take Rob Abelow’s last couple episodes of Where Music’s Going, for instance, where he showcases a streaming ecosystem drowning in music. “Streaming is Maxed Out” and “Everyone’s an Artist” are two subheadings worth considering – Abelow points out in one graphic that Apple Music has 90 million listeners and Bandlab – which just raised $25 million at a $425 million valuation – has 60 million music creators.

“For every 3 Apple listeners, there are 2 Bandlab creators vying for their ear. That’s just 1 service! And Bandlab is growing 2x as fast,” he writes. “The lines are about to get very blurry on creator vs. consumer.”

We need to unblur those lines. There are thousands of songs coming out every day that I want to hear and already don’t have time for – nor do I have a great discovery mechanism to break through the noise. I’m all for collaboration and interactivity, but everyone is not an artist. Maybe everyone has the potential to be an artist, but not everyone chooses it as a career path and relies upon it to survive. That differentiation is essential. Alas, it’s only getting worse. 

Universal Music Group – which has dramatically changed its tune on artificial intelligence – announced a partnership with Endel, a platform known for using AI to create functional music. They're calling it a "strategic relationship to enable artists and labels to create soundscapes for daily activities like sleep, relaxation, and focus by harnessing the power of AI.”

Endel co-founder Oleg Stavitsky told Billboard in March, “we can process the stems from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and come back with a functional sleep version of that album.” As MusicREDEF’s Matty Karas notes, this partnership doesn’t come with Kind of Blue (Davis released the album through Columbia Records, a subsidiary of Sony).

Back in 2021, Stavitsky said during an interview with Music Ally, “If you think about it, this compositional method goes back to the 70s and the 80s, when Brian Eno was working on his ideas of generative music, and then the minimalist composers of the 80s like Steve Reich and Philip Glass.” Stavitsky was referencing a then-new partnership with dance music legend Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) and his music. "You can sleep to this album, work to it, focus… It extends the universe of the album, and by extension the music universe of that artist."

Endel hardly represents the most egregious ramifications of AI, but we should be wary of the tipping point. Google’s text-to-music tool Music LM was launched in beta to a cadre of testers. Some folks at the excellent music research community Water & Music were granted access and generated this audio using the following prompt.

Audio Block

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"A dancefloor-ready track that fuses soulful jazz-funk piano melodies and ambient electronic textures. Incorporate Latin-infused house beats with rhythmically complex sampling techniques. The track should feel unexpected yet cohesive, blending these elements seamlessly to inspire movement and dance."

Think of the implications of this. And it’s not heartening that at the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee's hearing on artificial intelligence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman showed a limited wherewithal of the music industry. To his credit, he said he’s “talking to artists and content owners about what they want,” and “no matter what the law is, the right thing to do is to make sure people get significant upside benefit from this new technology.” But what’s that expression? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

At one point, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) asks Altman about Jukebox, OpenAI’s MusicLM-like audio generator. When he expressed optimism that AI will help artists “win, succeed, have a vibrant life,” Blackburn cuts him off and asks pointedly, “How do you compensate the artist?” He didn’t quite answer, and said there are “a lot of different opinions, unfortunately.” Sure, it’s a complicated question, but if you don’t have answers yet, then maybe you shouldn’t have built the platform yet.

Blackburn asks him if a Soundexchange-like model – the Congress-designated nonprofit that collects and distributes music royalties – could work. Altman said he wasn’t familiar and the senator waved at him dismissively. “Ok, you’ve got your team behind you,” she said. “Get back to me on that.”

The point is that there are use cases for AI – using the stems of Kind of Blue to create a sleep album sounds very cool – and it’s great that people want to use tools like Bandlab to create music together. But we need to differentiate between music by artists and music generated for function and play by non-artists. The more of the latter that exists – especially in a streaming world that still relies on the pro rata payout model (i.e. an exploitable system where the revenue generated from a pool of money is distributed proportionally among artists based on the number of streams they receive) – the less money artists make and the less time they have to make music.

Consider a world where people continue to stop caring, platforms treat all generated sound equally, artists can no longer commit time to making music because it doesn’t make them any money and music becomes a hobby. The future shock is being subsumed under dilettantish fare created in five minutes with a cell phone.

Let’s make room for the people who are dedicating their lives to this – we all have a vested interest in ensuring artists we love can keep making music that bowls us head over heels.

Elsewhere

• Supercollector, a custom indexer for music non-fungible token (NFT) activity on Ethereum, launched RELEASE, a layer two feature they’re touting as a “level-up” to Bandcamp. 

• The music streaming tech company Tuned Global partnered with Revelator, a digital infrastructure provider for music, to enable artists to release music as NFTs directly to web2 streaming services (not for the major platforms like Spotify and Apple Music – Tuned Global works with smaller clients in places like Thailand, Japan and the Pacific Islands).

• Independent music distributor Symphonic partnered with SHARE to empower on-chain music distribution.

• TikTok is a testing a feature that allows people to save discovered tracks to their Apple Music playlists

• The web3 label and artist advocacy group NVAK Collective launched a “music video game” with web3 artist Annika Rose, complete with token-gated extras – a creative on-boarding approach that also allows fans to deepen their relationship with Rose.

Coda

First I want to acknowledge MusicREDEF’s Matty Karas – mentioned above and in many previous editions – for his eight and a half years helming the newsletter. His immensely enjoyable ‘rantnraves’ have inspired my approach to The Beat and given countless people an intimate, relatable lens into the music industry. 

And finally, the world lost Tina Turner, an incomparable artist whose resilience and talent carried her through a singular music career. And most of it was on her terms, up until the very end. “How do you bow out slowly, just go away?” she said at the end of her 2021 documentary Tina, designed as her swan song and last public statement. Her story is incredible, and in all the ways, so was her voice.

That’s it folks, go listen to Tina.