ok catch-up thread: #MWE day 5—listening through J Dilla's posthumous "Motor City" feels like looking at a mantelpiece full of old photographs, permanent representations of faintly heart-throbbing, swiftly-fading memories from simpler times.
faves: "Motor City 3," "Motor City 13"
#MWE day 6: @Emilykingmusic's "Scenery" effortlessly blends earthy old-school grooves with vocal melodies and harmonies so delicate, you could be sprint-walking through the frenzied streets of NYC and still feel like you're floating on a cloud.
faves: "Look At Me Now," "Marigold"
#MWE day 7: growing up practicing hours of piano daily, i was one of the few in my social group who found pure calm in the most cerebral. Nujabes' posthumous "Spiritual State" immediately brought me back to that state of mind.
faves: "City Lights," "Rainyway Back Home," "Island"
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1/ there's a lot of really sharp writing happening right now on music-tech innovation + strategy, by both reporters + industry folks working on the ground.
an ongoing thread of examples (disclaimer, many of these folks have also been instrumental in @water_and_music's growth) 🧵
2/ @holmesprice, who helped spearhead @water_and_music's current AI coverage, now has his own newsletter Future Filter on how tech is shaping electronic music culture. his latest issue on AI voice model marketplaces is a really good guide on the topic
@holmesprice @water_and_music 3/ @srishtitechts, formerly of @midiaresearch, has started her own newsletter and consulting agency @hivewireclub focused on emerging music markets. the writing they've published so far is sharp and strategic, with tons of concrete examples / case studies. hivewire.club/hivewire-how-g…
for some weekend reading, i present to you the absolutely chaotic mess of rights holders and music/tech companies all owning stakes in each other, 2023 edition — in 4 parts.
pt. 1: the tencent music ouroboros, plus Sony adding Bandcamp (via Epic Games acquisition) to its arsenal
pt. 2: the emerging Access Industries <> BlackRock <> Rotana Group tech/rights entanglement, with newly-public companies Warner Music Group and Deezer at the center
pt. 3: Liberty Media + Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund being two of the top three shareholders in Live Nation, plus those two individually being top investors in two separate behemoth media/tech companies (SiriusXM + Kakao)
it's coming, for sure (we're dedicating a whole season to it at @water_and_music). but i think ppl are underestimating how much more of an uphill battle it's going to be for music to get its "midjourney moment."
a short 🧵on why...
1. LACK OF DATA
text+image models are trained on dozens of *terabytes* of data EACH. there isn't close to this much public training data for music. to get to that point, we'd have to train a model not just on all recorded music, but on everyone's GarageBand/Ableton/Logic drafts.
2. LAWYERS
one could *maybe* pirate all the 10s of millions of tracks across music streaming services and use that as training data — but then the majors + their legal teams will come straight for you.
IMO lawyers have more power in music than in any other creative industry.
compared to our previous collab sprints on music/web3, Season 2 presented an incredibly steeper learning curve; there are SO many contradicting definitions of the metaverse out there, and so many different technologies it invokes (gaming, 3D design, VR/AR/MR, spatial audio, etc).
so, we had to start from square one. in this first drop, we try to establish a shared language and understanding around what we’re really talking about when we talk about “the metaverse” — and why these underlying ideas matter to artists and the music industry in the first place.
we at @water_and_music have been working hard on a new Web3 strategy that will serve as the rails for a new model of collaborative music-industry research, and are thrilled to share an early view of what this strategy looks like.
ok now that Seed Club demo day is over... time to break this out into a mega-thread
the main points:
- Water & Music's history and community ethos
- why web3 makes sense for us (and the music media market) now
- our higher-level token strategy + launch drop plans
I launched Water & Music's paid membership in 2019, and am mind-blown that the community has since grown to nearly 1,500 paying members — spanning everyone from emerging artists and startup founders to marketers, investors and C-Suite executives at major music companies.
a simple but illuminating model from @createos:
if you an artist in an 80/20 label/artist royalty deal with a $300,000 advance, $80,000 recording budget and $150,000 marketing budget, your music would need to generate over 500M streams before you make just $1 on the backend.