Spatial Audio
Go to any given spa or yoga studio and you’re likely to hear music or soundscapes designed to help you relax. Sometimes the sound is of a pan flute, or soft rain. Most often, though, you’ll hear some form of ambient music: gentle, often instrumental “chill out” productions meant to enhance the serene atmosphere.
Now, two longstanding electronic music industry executives, in partnership with leaders in the wellness and music audio technology spaces, are getting into the genre through a new ambient label: Sacred Society Music Group.
The label is a project of founders Bradley Roulier, who also co-founded the electronic music digital download store Beatport in 2004, and Barbie Beltran, a wellness expert and co-founder of a Denver wellness center also called Sacred Society. Co-founders include Paul Morris — the founder of electronic agency AM Only, which was acquired by Paradigm in 2017, and Tiësto’s longtime manager — and Dolby Atmos specialist Adelio Lombardi. Matthew Evertsen handles A&R and special projects.
With Sacred Society, the label’s founders are aiming to heighten the quality and effectiveness of ambient music by producing its entire catalog in Dolby Atmos — a move they believe can increase the well-being of listeners who use the genre for relaxation, sleep and various wellness practices.
“As label owners, we felt we could make this music that is part of life extraordinary,” Roulier tells Billboard.
Based in Denver, the label launched this week with a collection of more than 55 tracks and over six hours of immersive content. A track named “Ancient Chant” features hand drum, a rain stick and lapping water with various bells and a voice repeating, “You have it all inside.” A meditation track, “Inside The Womb Of The Earth,” is precisely 11 minutes and 11 seconds long.
This music, organized by more than two dozen tags to help users find ambient sounds best suited for certain activities and times of day, is currently available on Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon Music. (It’s not yet on Spotify or YouTube, as those platforms don’t currently support Dolby Atmos.) So far the label features music from nine contributing musicians including Dynasty Electric, Matthew James Kelly, Cobane Ivory, Sean Stolar and Roulier himself, with all artists appearing under the “Sacred Society” name.
While a barrage of ambient music already exists on the market (a search for “ambient” on Spotify results in upwards of 30 playlists), the Sacred Society founders believe their output is distinguished by its production in Dolby Atmos. The spatial audio technology adds dimension and depth to music and can only be made, and played, through specialized equipment. The label founders claim that listeners will benefit from this technology; as Roulier says, by helping them “explore meditative and ambient soundscapes more deeply than [they] ever thought possible.”
Sacred Society Music Group’s side3 studio in Denver, Colo./Photo Courtesy Sacred Society Music Group
Sacred Society music is produced exclusively at Denver’s Dolby Atmos-equipped side3 studio, which was built by Lombardi. While construction of the studio required, as a Sacred Society rep says, “significant financial investment,” it was more intensive to set up the precise technical specifications necessary to record in Dolby Atmos.
But this investment was worth it, Lombardi tells Billboard, because “adding immersive audio to this [music] experience elevates it significantly.”
This may all sound like a niche endeavor, but there’s potential to tap a wide audience given how many people engage in wellness practices at home and how often this music is licensed for use in facilities like spas and yoga studios. Roulier says the group “wants our music to be widely available within the wellness space globally,” and has discussed launching a subscription service tailored for practitioners, hotels and spas that would allow them to use Sacred Society content commercially.
The demand for ambient music is also expected to grow; the label cites a report that says the genre was valued at $1.8 billion in 2022, with that number expected to rise to $3.21 billion by 2030. The demand for Dolby Atmos is also expanding, with the label citing a statistic that 90% of Apple Music users have engaged with the format, as well as that plays for music available in spatial audio have more than tripled in the past two years.
All this work is ultimately meant to deliver on the founders’ goal of sharing the holistic benefits embedded in the genre.
“I have always enjoyed ambient music, and I truly believe that music has the power to heal,” Morris tells Billboard. “With anxiety, depression, and mental health problems having escalated to unprecedented levels in our society, I can’t think of a more fitting time for the launch of Sacred Society Music. I have made a living from music my entire career and, by helping to put this music out into the world, I feel I am giving back in a small way through a medium that has given so much to me.”
“It’s about providing a unique and serene musical journey for our listeners, regardless of market trends,” Beltran adds. “We aim to offer a path to serenity, self-discovery and inner harmony through the transformative power of sound.”
Since unveiling Spatial Audio in June 2021, Apple Music has been pushing labels and artists to rework their music in the immersive format. Now, the platform is offering a financial incentive in the form of increased royalties.
In a letter sent out by Apple Music to its partners on Monday (Jan. 22) and obtained by Billboard, the streamer revealed that beginning with month-end royalty payments in January, music available in Spatial Audio — which is supported by Dolby Atmos — will receive a royalty rate up to 10% higher than content not available in the format.
“Pro-rata shares for Spatial Available plays will be calculated using a factor of 1.1 while Non-Spatial available plays will continue to use a factor of 1,” the letter reads. “This change is not only meant to reward higher quality content, but also to ensure that artists are being compensated for the time and investment they put into mixing in Spatial.”
The letter offers an update on the format’s adoption by artists and users, including a claim that more than 90% of Apple Music listeners have experienced the format and that “plays for music available in Spatial Audio have more than tripled in the last two years.” It additionally states that the number of songs available in the format has increased nearly 5,000% since launch and more than doubled over the last year alone. The company further claims that more than 80% of songs to have charted on the platform’s Global Daily Top 100 in the past year are available in Spatial Audio.
Seemingly to deter bad actors, the letter includes a mention of Apple Music’s “zero-tolerance policy against deceptive or manipulative content,” noting the service has a “quality control process that includes flagging content not delivered in accordance with Apple Music’s Spatial Audio specifications and standards of quality.”
Spatial Audio officially rolled out on June 7, 2021. The format, which provides a surround sound experience in users’ headphones, is offered at no additional cost for Apple Music users, seemingly to speed adoption. As part of this effort, Spatial Audio tracks also enjoy enhanced visibility on the app’s home page, sitting higher than even new music releases. Early adopters of the format included Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, J. Cole and Post Malone.
In a June 2021 interview with Billboard, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vp of internet software and services, conceded that encouraging artists to mix their tracks for Spatial Audio would be a challenge given the time, work and financial investment required.
“This is not a simple ‘take-the-file that you have in stereo, processes through this software application and out comes Dolby Atmos,’” Cue said at the time. “This requires somebody who’s a sound engineer, and the artist to sit back and listen, and really make the right calls and what the right things to do are. It’s a process that takes time, but it’s worth it.”
Immersive audio has been available in the live sector for about a decade now, but growing interest in spatial audio is fueling increased demand from artists and their creative teams to find money and physical space to deploy the technology at concerts.
That includes global superstar Adele, who wraps up her “Weekends with Adele” residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace this Saturday. After a brief demonstration in London, Adele and her creative team decided to use L-Acoustics’ L-ISA system for the high-profile residency, creating an ideal showcase for journalists, creative teams and other music executives to hear the system’s “hyper real sound,” as L-Acoustics sometimes calls it, and how it compares to traditional stereo sound.
“In a traditional stereo show, the sweet spot for sound as a mixer is probably pretty small,” explains Jordan Tani, project and technology marketing engineer for L-Acoustics, during a pre-show front of house tour of the Colosseum. In many venues, “the sweet spot” where the audience can fully capture the audio mix is as little as 5% of the venue. But immersive audio systems significantly expand the coverage area of a venue to more than 90% of the audience, thanks to innovations in loudspeaker configuration, algorithmic sound mapping technology and the processing power of the human brain to quickly calculate differences in time and amplitude to determine a sound’s location.
When delivered correctly through high-end lateral and overhead speakers, L-ISA creates a 3D soundscape that more evenly distributes audio to the audience and gives certain sound objects a distinct spatial position.
“And by having this type of coverage and this resolution, we can now pan things around, give spatialization, and give the instruments and the sounds, their appropriate space,” Tani says. “Immersive sound ensures all sounds are heard the way the artist wants them to be heard, not matter where the audience member is sitting.”
For Adele, that means the sound of her voice naturally moves with her as she walks around the stage and the venue, while greeting fans. It also gives her front-of-house engineers a chance to build impressive crescendo moments into her songs. As more instruments and audio elements are added, the soundscape is widened and given more depth, slowly immersing the audience for each track’s big musical moments.
For L-Acoustics, the pioneering sound company launched in France in 1984 and now headquartered in LA’s Westlake Village, The Coliseum is the most high-profile use yet for L-ISA. L-Acoustics is one of the largest premium loudspeaker and pro audio companies in the touring industry and one of only a few manufacturing complete audio systems for immersive sound at live entertainment venues.
The company’s founder Christian Heil is credited with inventing the modern line array, a system for stacking speakers familiar to live music fans used to seeing large, curved vertical arrays of loudspeakers hanging from the stage grid. Heil — a partial physicist and fan of Pink Floyd in the 1970s and 80s who wanted to improve the sound quality of the gigs he was attending in Europe at the time — noticed that many venues and sound techs tried to make up for sound coverage issues at concerts by increasing overall power, making it much louder in the front section than the rear. In 1992, he discovered that stacking speakers of the same frequency at a slight angle greatly expanded sound coverage, without additional power requirements, and gave way for a much more even listening experience from front to back.
Today, most loudspeaker companies have adopted the line array model into their touring systems, while the team at L-Acoustics have continued to innovate and develop new methods for how sound is delivered to an audience. Beginning in the early 2010s, the company began experimenting with immersive audio and object-based sound mixing, paving the way for the launch of L-ISA in 2016.
In order to expand adoption of the technology, L-Acoustics CEO Laurent Vaissié says the company has shifted its marketing and educational efforts away from production managers and front-of-house engineers toward artists, musical directors and sound designers that have creative input for a show.
“L-ISA opens up the creative process and you can see that with Adele show,” says Vaissié. “There are creative decisions that need to be made in terms of how the music should be heard. Is her voice front and center? Who wide do her backup vocals need to be? These are decisions increasingly being made by the creative director, the musical director, and sometimes even the artist themselves.”
By engaging directly with the creative teams, L-Acoustics has expanded the number of contemporary artists using its immersive technology, signing up Bon Iver, Odesza, Katy Perry, Lorde and more.
“It’s a slow burn,” says Vaissié who estimates that about 10% of the tours that work with L-Acoustics are now using L-ISA. In five years, he believes that immersive audio will account for 20-30% of his company’s business.
The challenges of building the system, which costs about 20% more than non-immersive products, are expected to improve as L-Acoustics shifts to a lower cost licensing model charging users based on how they use the system, lowering costs for smaller productions. He also added that the necessary gear is getting smaller and lighter, taking up less real estate on stage.
“And most importantly, fans are demanding it,” Vaissié says. “Once a fan hears it at one show, they come to expect it at other concerts they attend. Fans pay a lot of money for concert tickets, and they want to have the best experience possible.”
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