artificial intelligence
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Spotify announced a new listening feature that incorporates artificial intelligence technology on Wednesday (Feb. 22). Instead of clicking through an editorial playlist like Today’s Top Hits or an algorithmic one like Discovery Weekly, premium users in the U.S. and Canada can now turn to “DJ,” which supplements algorithmic recommendations with commentary about the selections delivered via an AI voice platform.
DJ “will sort through the latest music and look back at some of your old favorites — maybe even resurfacing that song you haven’t listened to for years,” Spotify wrote in a blog post. “It will then review what you might enjoy and deliver a stream of songs picked just for you. And what’s more, it constantly refreshes the lineup based on your feedback. If you’re not feeling the vibe, just tap the DJ button and it will switch it up.”
Sulinna Ong, Global Head of Editorial at Spotify, praised DJ as “a new and unique music experience” in a statement. “I’m personally so excited about DJ because we’re able to harness this power to tell an artist’s story, to be able to provide context around their work and their songs in a broader cultural arena like never before,” she added.
Spotify’s blog post also noted that “early tests” of DJ — the feature is still in beta mode — indicate “that when listeners hear that additional audio context alongside their music recommendations, they’re more willing to try something new and listen to a song they may have otherwise skipped.”
The streaming service said that technology from OpenAI, the company that also developed ChatGPT, helps furnish “insightful facts about the music, artists, or genres you’re listening to” — facts sourced in part from Spotify’s editorial team. The AI voice of DJ is based on that of Xavier “X” Jernigan, the platform’s head of cultural partnerships, who previously hosted a morning show podcast for the streaming service. Spotify announced that it acquired Sonantic, an AI voice platform, last June.
Generative artificial intelligence has become a red-hot topic in tech in recent months thanks to ChatGPT and new image generators like DALL-E 2. AI is already being incorporated by tech companies like BandLab and Boomy, which aim to make the barrier to artistic creation lower by providing aspiring acts access to AI-powered music-making tools.
Music “as we know it” has been prematurely pronounced dead several times over. The cassette tape, MIDI digital synthesizers, Napster, Auto-Tune and streaming were all received with apocalyptic hysteria. The current existential threat is artificial intelligence (AI), a software leviathan with a voracious appetite for copyrighted works, and a prolific capacity for human-free creative processes. Whether AI will kill the humanity of music remains debatable. What is not up for debate is that AI raises many legal issues. While courts have yet to weigh in, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued instructive decisions and made AI-related copyright issues a 2023 priority.
The proliferation of AI in music
AI in music is not new. Alan Turing, the godfather of computer science, created a simple melody-making machine in 1951. Experimental trombonist and composer George Lewis improvised a live quartet with three Apple II computers in 1984. David Bowie experimented with a digital lyric randomizer in the 90s. Hello, World, the first AI composed pop album, was released in 2018.
Today’s AI is more evolved and exponentially more impactful. Indirect enhancements (personalized playlists, music recommendations, etc.) have given way to direct creation tools. For example, Google’s Magenta wrote a new “Nirvana” song by analyzing the melody, chord changes, guitar riffs and lyrics of the band’s past works. ChatGPT receives text instructions to compose lyrics superior to those that IBM Watson wrote for Alex da Kid in 2016. Authentic Artists leases AI-powered artists-for-hire. MUSICinYOU.ai generates tailored compositions from a 300-question personality test. Bandlab’s Songstarter is an “AI-powered idea generator” capable of creating royalty-free music in seconds. Startup Staccato pitches itself as “an AI Lennon to your McCartney” given its ability to bounce ideas off human songwriters.
Only “sufficient human creative input” supports copyright ownership
The Copyright Act protects “works of authorship” – a concept derived from the U.S. Constitution’s Copyright Clause, which empowers Congress to secure “exclusive rights” for “authors.” Courts have held that authors must be human. Consequently, animals (including the famed monkey selfie) and natural forces (a naturally growing garden) cannot be authors of copyrighted works.
While current legal precedent suggests that AI also cannot “author” copyrighted works, the critical issue is what amount of human creative input or intervention suffices to make AI-generated musical works copyrightable (and by whom)?
U.S. courts have yet to answer this question decisively. The Copyright Office has drawn some basic boundary lines. AI-advocate Steven Thaler filed a copyright application for AI-generated artwork. The Board rejected his applications three times, finding that the artwork was not “created with contribution from a human author” and thus failed to meet the human authorship requirement. (Thaler has since sued.)
Conversely, copyright protection was afforded to David Cope’s 1997 work Classical Music Composed by Computer (and, again, to his 2010 album From Darkness, Light). Cope successfully demonstrated that his works only partially used AI and were the result of sufficient human creative input and intervention. More recently, the Copyright Office granted a first-of-its-kind copyright to a comic book created with the assistance of text-to-image AI Midjourney (though the Copyright Office is now reconsidering its decision).
In the absence of bright line rules for ascertaining how much input or intervention by an AI’s user is needed, each work must be individually evaluated. It is a question of degree. Under traditional principles, the more human involvement, and the more AI is used as a tool (and not as the creator), the stronger the case for copyright protection. A song created with the prompt: “create a song that sounds like The Weeknd” will not suffice. But a copyright application which both: (i) demonstrates that a human controlled the AI and (ii) memorializes the specific human input in the creative process is more likely to succeed.
A word of caution: the Copyright Office has made clear that misrepresenting the use of AI in the music generation process is fraudulent. And although the Copyright Office solely relies on facts stated in applications, both it and future litigants are likely to soon deploy AI-detecting software to verify the extent to which AI was used to generate the musical work.
AI “training” looms as the first major battle ground
Generative AI software (like Magenta) is “trained” by feeding it vast quantities of content – text, lyrics, code, audio, written compositions – and then programming it to use that source material to generate new material. In October 2022, the RIAA shot a warning flare by declaring that AI-based extractors and mixers were infringing its members’ rights by using their music to train their AI models. Those that side with the RIAA argue that AI’s mindboggling ingestion of copyrighted music violates the Copyright Act’s exclusive rights to reproduce and create “derivative works” based upon one or more preexisting works. Because generative AI produces output “based upon” preexisting works (input), copyright owners insist that a license is needed.
On the other hand, AI-advocates argue that the use of such data for training falls within copyright law’s “fair use” exception, claiming that the resulting work is transformative, does not create substantially similar works, and has no material impact on the original work’s market. They contend that the training data has been sufficiently transformed by the AI process to yield musical works beyond the copyright protection of the original works.
These competing views are likely to be tested in the class action lawsuit just filed on behalf of a group of artists against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney for allegedly infringing “billions of copyrighted images” in creating AI art. (Getty Images recently filed a comparable lawsuit against Stability AI in the U.K.).
Proving infringement with AI-works
How exactly the AI was trained and operates will be issues in copyright infringement litigations. Proving infringement is a two-step process. The plaintiff must demonstrate that copying occurred; and that the copying is unlawful, because the defendant copied too much of the plaintiff’s protected expression and is, therefore, substantially similar.
The first of these inquiries can be proven by direct evidence of copying or circumstantially by establishing access to a specific, allegedly infringed musical work. With art, there is a Spawning AI software called “Have I Been Trained” which allows users to search through the images used to train AI art generators. While no known current analog exists for music, the technology is likely imminent.
The nature of the AI instructions will also be crucial to showing an awareness of the original work and substantial similarity between the AI-generated music and the allegedly infringed music. Prompts that intentionally draw on copyrighted works (i.e., create a work in “the style of _”) undoubtedly bear on the issue of substantial similarity. The marketplace is pivoting in advance of anticipated rulings: Songmastr has, for example, stopped marketing its ability to create songs based on the styles of Beyonce and Taylor Swift.
AI is evolving faster than the courts can evaluate how laws apply to it. The just-filed art litigation may provide some clarity; however, while in the fog, those creating AI-generated music are well-advised to stay cognizant of the legal risks and guide the artificial music making process with a genuine human touch.
James Sammataro is a partner and Nicholas Saady an associate at Pryor Cashman LLP.
Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” It was true then and it’s true today — on great issues like politics and governance and, closer to home, for America’s music community.
We know the costs of division and mistrust. During the Napster era, we lost nearly half the revenue from recorded music. Working together over the last 10 years, we’ve built a robust and thriving streaming economy well on its way to recovering what was lost. But we still have a long way to go.
From powerful platforms that undervalue music to short-sighted attacks on creators’ rights around the world to abuses of new technologies that attack the very idea of human authorship — it’s more important than ever that we unite to face new challenges in 2023 and beyond.
And we know how to do it.
In recent years, the music industry has joined together over and over again to accomplish great things and move music forward.
In 2018, we enacted “once-in-a-generation” Music Modernization Act legislation here in the U.S. to update streaming rights for songwriters and ensure legacy artists are finally paid. We are now working together to protect artists’ free expression through bills like California’s Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act and the federal RAP Act.
In 2021, we saw a landmark Copyright Directive in the European Union to strengthen music markets and fair pay for artists on all platforms.
Earlier this year, all three major record labels decided to voluntarily disregard unrecouped balances owed by certain legacy performers ensuring these great artists could immediately share in streaming royalties.
And of course, we supported one another through a devastating pandemic, working to sustain small venues and develop public policies and relief programs to reach working artists and songwriters.
Those were all major steps, but new challenges keep coming — including some designed to stoke division and turn our community against itself. Fortunately, we know from our many recent achievements that the music community — and music itself — does best when we stick together in the face of common challenges. Especially at a time when American music is already thriving — across formats, styles, and all around the world with competition, creativity and choice all stronger than ever.
Artists continued to find new ways to reach more fans than ever with do-it-yourself recording and distribution, while independent labels have become the fastest-growing sector of the market. In a shrinking online world where language and geography are no longer barriers, an artist’s potential audience has become almost limitless.
In this dynamic new music business, success is more broadly shared than ever, with growing opportunities and revenues for indie artists and the very top acts taking a smaller share of revenues today than during the CD era. Globally, out of a $10 per month streaming subscription, artists receive roughly $1.35 while labels net $0.55 once the cost of spending to drive artists’ success is accounted for. Meanwhile, the share of revenues going to publishers and songwriters has nearly doubled in the streaming era.
It’s a powerful testament to what all of us who make up the music community have built together.
It is success borne first from the blood, sweat and tears of America’s creators — artists, songwriters, session players and the legions of those who support and distribute music — producers, publishers, road crews and venue operators, tour support, managers, digital services and more.
It is also the product of round-the-clock drive and commitment by the people working at record labels– music lovers who wake up every day fighting for the artists they work with and helping them achieve their creative dreams and commercial goals. From marketing and promotion to brand and design to social media campaigns to wellness and health to business and back office services, labels today do more than ever to support artists and position them to break new ground and thrive.
The labels that make up the RIAA are committed to a future of continued shared growth. We are determined to keep pushing for even more positive change. And we will work every day in this new year to unite our music community with forward-looking policies and goals that benefit artists, songwriters and fans as well as rightsholders and music services.
That means standing together and ensuring creators get full value for their work on every platform, service, game, fitness app and anywhere else it is used — from AM/FM radio to the metaverse. It also means building on shared commitments to diversity, wellness, and equality — both inside and outside the recording studio and across our entire community.
Additionally, it means presenting a united front when tackling the next generation of challenges, including artificial intelligence, where artists, songwriters, labels and publishers have an immense and shared interest in establishing responsible rules of the road that value human authorship and creativity. Also important is fighting against new forms of music piracy and other efforts to undermine the creative economy, from stream ripping to stream manipulation to pre-release leaks that suck the economic value out of the most seminal times in an artist’s career.
All of us who make up this community are bound together by a shared love of music — and a shared commitment to the people who create, distribute, and listen to it.
In 2023, let’s work — together — to turn those values into concrete action that builds a rich and lasting music future for us all.
Mitch Glazier is the Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the recorded major music companies.
In the recent article “What Happens To Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music,” Alex Mitchell offers a rosy view of a future of AI-composed music coexisting in perfect barbershop harmony with human creators — but there is a conflict of interest here, as Mitchell is the CEO of an app that does precisely that. It’s almost like cigarette companies in the 1920s saying cigarettes are good for you.
Yes, the honeymoon of new possibilities is sexy, but let’s not pretend this is benefiting the human artist as much as corporate clients who’d rather pull a slot machine lever to generate a jingle than hire a human.
While I agree there are parallels between the invention of the synthesizer and AI, there are stark differences, too. The debut of the theremin — the first electronic instrument — playing the part of a lead violin in an orchestra was scandalous and fear-evoking. Audiences hated its sinusoidal wave lack of nuance, and some claimed it was “the end of music.” That seems ludicrous and pearl-clutching now, and I worship the chapter of electrified instruments afterward (thank you sister Rosetta Tharpe and Chuck Berry), but in a way, they were right. It was the closing of a chapter, and the birth of something new.
Is new always better, though? Or is there a sweet spot ratio of machine to human? I often wonder this sitting in my half analog, half digital studio, as the stakes get ever higher from flirting with the event horizon of technology.
In this same article, Diaa El All (another CEO of an A.I. music generation app), claims that drummers were pointlessly scared of the drum machine and sample banks replacing their jobs because it’s all just another fabulous tool. (Guess he hasn’t been to many shows where singers perform with just a laptop.) Since I have spent an indecent portion of my modeling money collecting vintage drum machines (cuz yes, they’re fabulous), I can attest to the fact I do indeed hire fewer drummers. In fact, since I started using sample libraries, I hire fewer musicians altogether. While this is a great convenience for me, the average upright bassist who used to be able to support his family with his trade now has to remain childless or take two other jobs.
Should we halt progress for maintaining placebo usefulness for obsolete craftsmen? No, change and competition are good, if not inevitable ergonomics. But let’s not be naive about the casualties.
The gun and the samurai come to mind. For centuries, samurai were part of an elite warrior class who rigorously trained in kendo (the way of the sword) and bushido (a moral code of honor and indifference to pain) since childhood. As a result, winning wars was a meritocracy of skill and strategy. Then a Chinese ship with Portuguese sailors showed up with guns.
When feudal lord Nobunaga saw the potential in these contraptions, he ordered hundreds be made for his troops. Suddenly a farmer boy with no skill could take down an archer or swordsman who had trained for years. Once more coordinated marching and reloading formations were developed, it was an entirely new power dynamic.
During the economic crunch of the Napoleonic wars, a similar tidal shift occurred. Automated textile equipment allowed factory owners to replace loyal employees with machines and fewer, cheaper, less skilled workers to oversee them. As a result of jobless destitution, there was a region-wide rebellion of weavers and Luddites burning mills, stocking frames and lace-making machines, until the army executed them and held show trials to deter others from acts of “industrial sabotage.”
The poet Lord Byron opposed this new legislation, which called machine-breaking a capital crime — ironic considering his daughter, Ada Lovelace, would go on to invent computers with Charles Babbage. Oh, the tangled neural networks we weave.
Look what Netflix did to Blockbuster rentals. Or what Napster did to the recording artist. Even what the democratization of homemade porn streaming did to the porn industry. More recently, video games have usurped films. You cannot add something to an ecosystem without subtracting something else. It would be like smartphone companies telling fax machine manufacturers not to worry. Only this time, the fax machines are humans.
Later in the article, Mac Boucher (creative technologist and co-creator of non-fungible token project WarNymph along with his sister Grimes) adds another glowing review of bot- and button-based composition: “We will all become creators now.”
If everyone is a creator, is anyone really a creator?
An eerie vision comes to mind of a million TikTokers dressed as opera singers on stage, standing on the blueish corpses of an orchestra pit, singing over each other in a vainglorious cacophony, while not a single person sits in the audience. Just rows of empty seats reverberating the pink noise of digital narcissism back at them. Silent disco meets the Star Gate sequence’s death choir stack.
While this might sound like the bitter gatekeeping of a tape machine purist (only slightly), now might be a good time to admit I was one of the early projects to incorporate AI-generated lyrics and imagery. My band, Uni and The Urchins, has a morbid fascination with futurism and the wild west of Web 3.0. Who doesn’t love robots?
But I do think in order to make art, the “obstacles” actually served as a filtration device. Think Campbell’s hero’s journey. The learning curve of mastering an instrument, the physical adventure of discovering new music at a record shop or befriending the cool older guy to get his Sharpie-graffitied mix CD, saving up to buy your first guitar, enduring ridicule, the irrational desire to pursue music against the odds (James Brown didn’t own a pair of shoes until he 8 years old, and now is canonized as King.)
Meanwhile, in 2022, surveys show that many kids feel valueless unless they’re an influencer or “artist,” so the urge toward content creation over craft has become criminally easy, flooding the markets with more karaoke, pantomime and metric-based mush, rooted in no authentic movement. (I guess Twee capitalist-core is a culture, but not compared to the Vietnam war, slavery, the space race, the invention of LSD, the discovery of the subconscious, Indian gurus, the sexual revolution or the ’90s heroin epidemic all inspiring new genres.)
Not to sound like Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, but technology is increasingly the hand inside the sock puppet, not the other way around.
Do I think AI will replace a lot of jobs? Yes, though not immediately, it’s still crude. Do I think this upending is a net loss? In the long term, no, it could incentivize us to invent entirely new skills to front-run it. (Remember when “learn to code” was an offensive meme?) In fact, I’m very eager to see how we co-evolve or eventually merge into a transhuman cyber Seraphim, once Artificial General Intelligence goes quantum.
But this will be a Faustian trade, have no illusions.
Charlotte Kemp Muhl is the bassist for NYC art-rock band UNI and the Urchins. She has directed all of UNI and The Urchins’ videos and mini-films and engineered, mixed and mastered their upcoming debut album Simulator (out Jan. 13, 2023, on Chimera Music) herself. UNI and the Urchins’ AI-written song/AI-made video for “Simulator” is out now.
Last year, a 17-YEAR-old artist from Houston named d4vd released “Romantic Homicide,” a track he had made using BandLab, the Singapore-based social music creation platform. “He recorded a song in his sister’s closet on his mobile phone with Apple earbuds, using a stock preset,” says CEO Meng Ru Kuok — stock presets being one of many things aspiring musicians can find on BandLab, which wants to make it possible for anyone with an idea, no matter their skill set, to create music.
“Romantic Homicide” became an example of that ideal: The brooding, guitar-hooked track caught fire on TikTok, and d4vd (pronounced “David”) signed to Interscope, with the song peaking at No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100
“I was cheering him on,” Meng says of d4vd. “We’re so excited and rewarded when people move on to other places, whether they stay independent or get signed by major labels.”
BandLab, which was founded in 2015, doesn’t receive royalties from music made on its platform. Instead, the company makes money on artist services (which include distribution, livestreaming and BandLab Boost) that allow acts to turn their profiles or postings into ads on the platform to better reach the 50 million registered users BandLab has.
Meng, 34, has aggressively expanded BandLab’s assets, which are grouped under the holding company of Caldecott Music Group. Along with instrument manufacturing and sales (including Michigan-based Heritage Guitars and Asia’s largest musical instrument retailer, Swee Lee), Caldecott has editorial properties like Guitar.com, Uncut and NME. (BandLab acquired 49% of Rolling Stone in 2016 before selling it in 2019 to Penske Media, Billboard’s parent company.) In September, Billboard and BandLab launched the Bringing BandLab to Billboard portal to expose emerging artists to a global audience.
“On a day-to-day basis, it is not just geographically split, but also mentally in terms of all those areas,” Meng says.
In November 2021, BandLab announced the acquisition of independent artist platform ReverbNation from its parent company, eMinor. And in April, it announced it had raised $65 million in series B funding, bringing the valuation of the platform upwards of $300 million. BandLab envisions a different sort of future — shorter songs made by anyone, using presets or even artificial intelligence (AI) — with the idea that the more music that exists, the more need there is for its range of offerings, from equipment cases to advertising. Business, says Meng, is “gangbusters, in terms of focusing on product and improving the experiences that we bring out.”
Do you feel that d4vd’s success validated your business model?
Yeah, it’s extremely rewarding. We’ve seen stories like that happening thick and fast. Earlier this year, we had an amazing viral success with an incredibly talented young rapper. He was 13 when he started making music on BandLab. He’s 14 now. His name is Cl4pers. He has 1.2 billion views on his hashtag on TikTok alone. It’s not just the viral success but the incredible talent — like d4vd, like Cl4pers — that, prior to BandLab, wasn’t making music with the capabilities that their creativity would have afforded them. D4vd is now signed to Interscope Records and [its artist development/management joint venture] Darkroom and has changed his personal career and the life of his family. Millions of people around the world have listened to his song and have really connected with it. It’s truly special, and it just reminds us of what we’re doing every day, beyond just creating a great business that we’re excited about.
What are the numbers behind that growth at BandLab?
Our last public figure that we shared, we have over 50 million registered users around the world. More than 16, 17 million songs are being made a month on BandLab. I still feel like we’re a small platform getting started. We have 80 full-time staff, 140 if you include all team members around the world. That has grown relatively quickly, and we have a lot of hiring plans in place to expand even further in the next six to 12 months.
Do the creators get royalties?
Yeah, that goes to the artists. We don’t take a position on artists’ rights. There’s a big movement, obviously, toward independent creators being fully in control of what they own. That’s really important to us. We’re focused on empowering the artists. The music is their content. So they are generating their own royalties if they’re distributed by BandLab or ReverbNation or via TuneCore, CD Baby, DistroKid — that’s one way they can be generating money off their music. The artist gets 100%. That’s what we do.
You don’t take commission?
We don’t. Actually, we have a lot of creator economy features on BandLab. For example, someone can tip users on BandLab in their profiles. We allow users to subscribe to other users, similar to Patreon or OnlyFans. We have features where artists can sell their tracks and albums, similar to the iTunes Store or Bandcamp, for example, and the artist keeps 100%. We don’t take a commission from the artists’ earnings after processing fees; Stripe and PayPal are involved in that transaction. We as a platform don’t take a cut of the creator economy. We believe it’s very important the artists are able to monetize. Especially in the United States, you guys get taxed enough. They don’t need more taxes on top from a platform.
How do you make your cut?
We’re focused on empowering artists in creating, making that accessible and free, and truly democratizing music. What Apple did with GarageBand was obviously an incredible progression in democratizing music creation, but 80% of the world uses Android. To be able to afford an iPhone is already out of reach for many people around the world. We don’t believe that people’s creativity or their ability to make music or to express themselves should be limited by their spending power or their knowledge of how to write a song.
Where we make our money is actually in artist services. If you are spending to distribute your music to Spotify, Apple Music, if you are running a promotional campaign — things to help promote your music or develop your career as an artist — that’s where we charge. We have a subscription service that we’ve just announced. There’s our BandLab Boost membership. We also have ReverbNation services that come through membership and various a la carte services.
Your business also supplies royalty-free music packages?
We do provide royalty-free samples. One of our features is BandLab Sounds: We collaborate with artists, commission our own sample packs for people to use in their music-making. And those are provided royalty-free — loop samples, one shots, which are utilized by musicians all around the world to make music. We also have an AI feature called SongStarter, which helps people generate royalty-free song ideas to start off their songwriting process.
All the music on BandLab is original music and original content. We’re very strict and pro-rights owners because we’re trying to protect the creators and all rights holders. This is something that we take very seriously with regard to licensing. It’s about protecting rights holders both on platform and off platform.
Do you train your AI to mimic popular human artists?
No, we don’t.
In the United States, the presumption, based on the Copyright Office, is that only works by human authors can be copyrighted. Who will own the copyright to AI-created portions of songs?
Ownership of content that is developed further from our AI SongStarter tool is owned by the user.
Do you offer marketing services?
We provide a variety of services through BandLab but also through our ancillary services. We acquired ReverbNation last year, which allows you to run third-party advertising campaigns on sites like Billboard, NME and Rolling Stone. They can buy campaigns and centralize their music for promotion on Instagram, Facebook and to promote videos they release on YouTube, for example. We recently announced the beginning of the rollout of BandLab Boost, which allows users to promote, for a fee, their posts and their profile on the BandLab network.
Do you have relationships with the streaming services?
Absolutely. We’re not a [digital service provider]. We believe there are platforms out there that do their job incredibly well. We’re here to empower the music that has been created that ends up on these platforms. We obviously have commercial relationships, like our distribution relationships, but also where we can funnel exciting talent that blows up on their platform.
Whom do you see as a rival?
I’ve been asked that question a bunch. BandLab is creating a whole new category of platform. There are certain services out there that do similar things, but our whole perspective on the ecosystem is that music is collaborative. By nature, it’s not just about the tools — it’s about collaboration, it’s about different influences when people get together. Services need to collaborate as well. That’s where we work closely with other platforms that people outside may see as competitors. There are lots of ways a platform like BandLab can have relationships as a funnel to other services through affiliate partnerships. There are many businesses that have the full suite of tools that we have as BandLab, and it’s our core objective to work closely with all of them. If the music market grows and the creator market grows, everyone benefits.
How has the democratization of music creation that BandLab and other companies and applications have enabled changed music?
The barrier to making a hit is now fundamentally more accessible to anyone. You don’t have to have had a long education or engineering degree to do so. So much of this is being empowered by short-form video and changes in the music industry where a hit song is no longer three minutes long but 10 to 30 seconds — which is really scary and meaningful at the same time.