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Source: NurPhoto / Getty / Elon Musk
It looks like Elon Musk will honor the results of his Twitter poll, well, sort of.
The Chief Twit, Elon Musk, announced on his Twitter account Tuesday, Dec.20, that he would “step down” as CEO as soon as he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job.”
Musk’s announcement comes two days after a poll he posted on his Twitter account asking his 122 million followers if he should step down as the chief operating officer of the social media company he spent $44 billion on.
As expected, a majority of the people who cast a vote in the poll voted yes and wanted him out of the position.
Bootleg Tony Stark, oops, Elon Musk decided to ask the question after Twitter announced a dumb content moderation policy forbidding users from sharing links to other social media platforms and using services like Linktree.
The new policy was met with intense backlash, and Musk and Twitter scrapped the whole idea. It was so bad that even some of Musk’s biggest supporters thought he went too far this time.
After sharing the poll that 17.5 million people partook in, with a whopping 57 percent agreeing he needs to step down, the very socially active Musk was eerily silent after finding out people don’t f*ck with him like that.
When he broke his silence, as expected, he only spoke to people who didn’t believe the poll results and entertained the idea that only “verified users” should be able to vote.
Tuesday, he finally seemed to abide by the poll results, saying he’s planning on stepping down as CEO but “will just run the software & servers teams.”
Elon Musk Has No Idea What He Is Doing
Musk “running the software and servers teams” has also come into question after his knowledge of running the platform after a Twitter user had some basic engineering questions for Musk, and the struggle was apparent.
We want Elon Musk to remove himself from Twitter altogether. Just saying.
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Photo: NurPhoto / Getty
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.
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Source: Neilson Barnard / Getty / Fortnite
Epic Games, the studio that gave us arguably the most popular game in the world, Fortnite, pockets got a bit lighter.
Spotted on Kotaku, Epic Games will have to dip into its funds and pay an astounding $520 million combined settlement after the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) found the company invaded kid’s privacy and was tricking some of its players into purchasing things in Fortnite, they didn’t want.
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The FTC announced the epic (no pun intended) penalty on Monday, Dec.19, pointing out that it is the most significant penalty in the history of the regulatory commission. In response to the fine, Epic Games said, “No developer creates a game with the intention of ending up here.”
So What Did Epic Games’ Do?
According to the FTC, the multi-billion dollar video game developer was making money off children without following the rules to protect them while playing online games.
One settlement was for Epic Games to collect information from Fortnite players under 13 and in-game settings that automatically turn on voice and text chat by default. That was considered a violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule resulting in a $275 million fine and a commitment from Epic Games to change the default settings in Fortnite.
The second settlement was for using “dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases.” According to the FTC, Epic accidentally made it easy to purchase skins and hard to locate the refund option.
The FTC also alleges that Epic Games sometimes banned accounts that could secure refunds leaving players locked out of the content they accidentally paid for. For its egregiousness, Epic Games put $245 million into a fund to help reimburse players for those accidental purchases.
Fortnite has made $9 billion, so this fine is just a slap on the wrist for Epic Games, but still, it’s a costly one.
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Photo: Neilson Barnard / Getty
Millions of Twitter users asked Elon Musk to step down as head of Twitter in a poll on the platform that the billionaire had created and promised to abide by.
When the poll closed Monday, however, it wasn’t clear if there would be a new leader for the social media platform, which has grown more chaotic and confusing under Musk’s leadership with rapidly changing policies that are issued, then withdrawn or altered.
The billionaire Tesla CEO Musk had attended the World Cup final Sunday in Qatar, where he opened the poll. After it closed 12 hours later, there was no immediate announcement from Twitter or Musk, who may be midflight on his way back to the U.S. early Monday.
More than half of the 17.5 million respondents voted “yes” in answer to Musk’s Twitter poll asking whether he should step down as head of the company.
Musk has taken a number of unscientific polls on substantial issues facing the social media platform, including whether to reinstate journalists that he had suspended from Twitter, which was broadly criticized in and out of media circles.
The polls have only added to a growing sense of tumult on Twitter since Musk bought the company for $44 billion at the end of October, potentially leaving the future direction of the company in the hands of its users.
Among those users are people recently reinstated on the platform under Musk, people who had been banned for racist and toxic posts, or who had spread misinformation.
Since buying Twitter, Musk has presided over a dizzying series of changes that have unnerved advertisers and turned off users. He’s laid off half of the workforce, axed contract content moderators and disbanded a council of trust and safety advisors. He has dropped enforcement of COVID-19 misinformation rules and called for criminal charges against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert helping lead the country’s COVID response.
Musk has clashed with some users on multiple fronts and on Sunday, he asked Twitter users to decide if he should remain in charge of the social media platform after acknowledging he made a mistake in launching new restrictions that banned the mention of rival social media websites on Twitter.
The results of the unscientific online survey regarding whether Musk should remain as top executive at Twitter, which lasted 12 hours, showed that 57.5% of those who voted wanted him to leave, while 42.5% wanted him to say.
The poll followed just the latest significant policy change since Musk acquired Twitter in October. Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.”
That decision generated immediate blowback, including criticism from past defenders of Twitter’s new owner. Musk then promised that he would not make any more major policy changes to Twitter without an online survey of users, including who should lead the company.
The action to block competitors was Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.
The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
A growing number of Twitter users have left the platform under Musk, or created alternative counts on Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr or Post, and included those addresses in their Twitter profiles. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included some websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.
A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and then restored, as Musk reversed the policy implemented just hours earlier.
Graham has not posted on Twitter since saying he would leave.
Policy decisions by Musk have divided users. He has advocated for free speech, but has suspended journalists and shut down a longstanding account that tracked the whereabouts of his jet, calling it a security risk.
But as he has changed policies, and then changed them again, created a sense of confusion on the platform about what is allowed, and what is not.
Musk permanently banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then changed Twitter’s rules to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent. He then took aim at journalists who were writing about the jet-tracking account, which can still be found on other social media sites, alleging that they were broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.”
He used that to justify Twitter’s decision last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover the social media platform and Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll by Musk.
Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz was suspended after requesting an interview with Musk in a tweet tagged to the Twitter owner.
Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.
“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation — this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Musk for a story,” Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.
Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer. Musk also said he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been more than a month since he said that.
In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.
While the downfall of FTX and the Crypto Winter that saw NFT sales drop 90% dominated Web3 headlines this year, for many creators there was a bigger issue at play. Their royalties have been under attack, undermining a central promise of Web3 as a sustainable model for musicians.
Creator royalties on NFTs ensure that artists get paid a cut of revenue every time their work is sold on a secondary market. As the music NFT market has matured since multi-million dollar sales attracted widespread attention, these royalties have been a central part of the Web3 proposition — presenting musicians with a possible alternative to the major label system and allowing them to generate meaningful revenue over the long term. Only now, that promise is being pulled from under them as several new NFT platforms effectively or explicitly cut out creator royalties — even though it was a core part of the Web3 promise when they originally listed their NFTs for sale — in an aggressive bid for market share.
Even OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, briefly considered changing its policy before a deafening backlash from artists forced the company to double down on its commitment to royalties. OpenSea also introduced an “enforcement tool” allowing artists to blacklist rival marketplaces that don’t honor creator royalties. It’s a small win for creators although some have called it a “bandaid” as many growing platforms including Blur, Magic Eden, LooksRare and Sudoswap still do not enforce royalties by default. In some cases it’s a hardline policy, in others the royalty is “optional” allowing traders to opt out of paying the artist when they sell an NFT. Most traders opt out, making the effective royalty rate close to zero.
Creator royalties are the beating heart of Web3 and the primary reason why artists flocked to NFTs in the first place. “Coming from the music world, the promise of being able to earn royalties in perpetuity without the interference of middlemen, was something I could only dream about,” says Illa Da Producer, a 12-time platinum-certified music producer credited on Eminem’s “Killshot” and community lead at Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club. The artist can choose their own royalty rate — typically 2.5% to 10% — and they are lucrative, earning more than $1 billion for creators on OpenSea in 2022 alone.
But there’s a problem. These royalties are not coded directly into the NFTs themselves. They were introduced by marketplaces like OpenSea, originally to attract artists to the space, which means they can be removed just as quickly.
None of this was an issue during the bull-run where cartoon animal JPEGs sold for over a million dollars a piece. Collectors were flush with crypto, happy to pay the artist royalty whenever they made a winning trade. But now the bubble has popped. The price of Ethereum has dropped by 75% and NFT volume is down 90% from the highs in January. NFT platforms are left fighting for market share in a shrinking economy and traders are trying to save as much money as possible.
In a desperate bid to attract users, rival marketplaces like X2Y2 effectively cut out creator royalties by making them “optional” — traders can choose not to pay the artist royalty when they sell their NFTs, therefore pocketing more money from each sale. Other platforms including Blur, LooksRare, Sudoswap and Magic Eden followed a similarly aggressive policy.
Creators were blunt in their criticism. “In many ways, it amounts to theft by the marketplace,” says Jeff Nicholas — founder of WRVPSound, a collection of 9,999 AI music NFTs and the biggest Web3 music project ever by volume at 6,115 ETH (~$7.15 million at current prices) traded, “If a project sets royalties in their terms of service and those royalties are not enforced.”
Nevertheless, it worked. Traders abandoned OpenSea in droves. The platform’s market share dropped from 80% earlier in the year down to 45% in November according to crypto research company Messari. As a result, OpenSea claims that more than $1 million of creator royalties was effectively bypassed in the first week of November alone. At risk of losing even more market share, OpenSea was forced to act quickly, launching a tool that allows artists to blacklist those rival marketplaces.
But there’s a catch. The tool only works for new NFTs. It would not work for the thousands of existing NFTs and projects. The future of royalties on these collections — including the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Doodles and Azuki, was left wide open. In a blog post, OpenSea put all options on the table, including the potential of optional royalties.
The backlash from artists was fierce. “The message to trading platforms like OpenSea is this,” says Gino the Ghost — a Grammy winning producer and founder of Web3 music project Blocktones — “You either stand firm to support the ethos of of Web3 as the creative revolution or you lose the trust and business of the very creatives that make you successful in the first place.”
Many artists spoke out about their fear of losing their livelihood if OpenSea followed through. “I am a transgender teen that escaped an abusive household through the power of NFTs,” wrote Fewocious — a 19 year old digital artist who’s built a massive following in Web3 — in a statement on Twitter. “And there are probably so many more artists, many of whom may not be as fortunate as me, who live off their artist royalties … Please reconsider removing royalties.”
Fewocious’ statement quickly spread across social media, garnering retweets from Snoop Dogg (“Power to tha artists”) and prompting further discussion from industry execs like Lady Gaga’s former manager Troy Carter, “Fucking over creators is very Web2.”
Founders in the space also warned that it would threaten the future of NFT companies, given that many projects rely on royalties to fund their business operations. “None of the top NFT projects you see would be where they are without them,” says Betty — founder of Deadfellaz, an NFT project that partnered with Steve Aoki in October for a Halloween merch drop and has generated more than $37 million in total volume since launching in 2021. “It’s why most of us flocked to this industry and it’s what platforms like Opensea were built on.”
After engaging with the community in several heated public debates, OpenSea clarified its position and promised to enforce creator royalties on all existing collections going forward. Speaking to Billboard, OpenSea admits they could have communicated better during this time. “We own that,” says Shiva Rajaraman, vp of product. However, he affirms that OpenSea has always stood behind artists and, while all options were discussed internally, OpenSea never truly wanted to cut out creators. “Honestly, the idea of just getting rid of creator fees made no sense.” Instead, OpenSea wants to put the power in the hands of creators, he explains. “We should respect, as platforms, that choice that is made [by creators], rather than make that variable.”
Meanwhile, the new on-chain enforcement tool — which Rajaraman describes as a “healthy tension against other marketplaces” — is beginning to work. At least one rival marketplace X2Y2 has backed down and conceded that it will also enforce royalties on all existing collections. OpenSea has since handed over ownership and control of the tool to a collective of several NFT platforms so that the community can be more involved in how it develops.
Artists have mostly responded positively. “This is actually a really good start to enforcing royalties,” says Nicholas. And it’s proof that artists can still make themselves heard, force change and define their terms in the nascent Web3 space. However, he also admits that this solution might just be a “bandaid.” Despite the progress made by artists in the last month, the final decision still appears to be in the hands of the marketplaces.
Some creators are therefore fighting for a complete change to the system. “[We need] a creator focussed and led solution,” says Deadfellaz’s Betty. “We’ve needed to come together for a long time … and work on solutions outside of centralized marketplaces.”
In the meantime, artists and OpenSea do agree that creator royalties should be enshrined as a social and cultural rule, even if they are not always honored by some marketplaces. “If we don’t,” says Nicholas. “Web3 runs the risk of going the same way every other technical innovation has over the last 20-plus years and squeezing the artists and creators yet again.”
LONDON — As the world’s first purpose-built recording complex, Abbey Road Studios has a long and storied history of pioneering technological innovation.
Opened in 1931, No. 3 Abbey Road is indelibly associated with The Beatles, who recorded most of their catalog there and named their 1969 album after the tree-lined road in London where the studios are located. The first ever stereo music recording also happened there, in 1934, and artificial double tracking was invented in the studios three decades later. Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse and Adele have laid down tracks at Abbey Road, which has also recorded movie scores for blockbusters such as Return of the Jedi, Raiders of The Lost Ark and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Today, the studios remain a popular destination for recording artists, composers and orchestras, and thousands of tourists make the pilgrimage to the English Heritage-listed site every year to recreate the image of John, Paul, George and Ringo striding on the nearby pedestrian crossing, immortalized on the Abbey Road album cover.
Abbey Road’s illustrious history is profiled in a new documentary, If These Walls Could Sing, directed by Paul McCartney’s daughter Mary McCartney, which premiered globally on Disney+ on Friday (Dec. 16).
But it’s no longer only musicians making noise inside the famous facility.
Since being acquired by Universal Music Group in 2012 as part of its £1.2 billion (then equivalent to $1.9 billion) deal for EMI, a steady flow of tech entrepreneurs, researchers and developers have also been interfacing with Abbey Road, enticed less by its cutting-edge recording facilities than by its burgeoning success as a technology hub through its Abbey Road Red program.
Launched in 2015 and billed by the studio as Europe’s first music-focused technology incubator, Abbey Road Red — named after the studios’ REDD mixing consoles used by The Beatles — is now building momentum in the hyper competitive music tech space. In February, Apple acquired London-based AI Music, which was part of Abbey Road Red’s 2017 intake, for an undisclosed sum.
Other Red alumni include music video licensing platform Lickd, which has signed deals with Universal, Warner Music Group and Merlin to provide their catalogs to online content creators — and last year secured around $7 million in funding with Warner Music and Fortnite creator Epic Games among the investors.
In March, AI-augmented adaptive music platform LifeScore Music, which was part of Abbey Road Red’s 2019 cohort, raised £11 million ($14 million) in Series A funding, with Warner again providing financial backing. Another graduate of the program, London-based Audoo, which tracks music played across public performance locations, counts among its investors ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Paul McCartney’s MPL Group.
Of the 19 businesses that have been enrolled on the incubator so far, two have folded while 17 have raised over $80 million among them. Collectively, the 17 companies are valued at more than $325 million based on their investment rounds, says Abbey Road Studios.
At the time UMG took over the facility, Abbey Road had been losing money for years. Like many other prestige recording studios, it was finding its business under threat from bedroom producers and micro-studios able to create professional-sounding songs at a fraction of the cost.
That prompted its new owners to begin diversifying the studio business to attract a wider range of clients. In 2017, UMG opened two smaller, less-expensive-to-hire studios, the Gatehouse and the Front Room. Abbey Road Institute, a specialist music production school, opened the same year as Red. In addition to running a start-up incubator program, Red is carrying out research around immersive spatial audio listening.
Isabel Garvey, managing director of Abbey Road Studios, says the Red program has transformed how the facility is perceived by executives both inside and outside the music business. It’s “not just a room for hire,” she says.
The Beatles pose outside Abbey Road Studios in London.
Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/GI
“There’s a wonderful halo effect from Red in terms of being at the forefront of technology and being able to share that with the artists in the studios and share that with our parent company,” says Garvey.
Like other tech incubators, Abbey Road Red provides early-stage companies with access to the studio’s experts and facilities, including mentorship advice around business development, brand partnerships, securing finance and commercial strategy. It also enables start-ups to tap into UMG’s global network and consult with senior management and label execs, as well as with other major and independent labels and publishers.
In return, Universal receives a 2% equity stake in each business it backs and a participation right to invest in the company’s future financing rounds. By comparison, Y Combinator, a successful Silicon Valley start-up accelerator that gave early backing to Airbnb, Dropbox and Twitch, invests $500,000 in every company that enrolls in its three-month program in return for 7% equity. LA-based TechStars’ music tech accelerator program, which counts Warner Music, Sony Music Entertainment and Concord among its partners, offers start-ups up to $120,000 of investment for 6% equity.
James Shannon, co-founder of metaverse platform XONE, which joined the Red program in July, says the incubator’s close integration with the world’s biggest music company distinguishes it from other accelerators and provides a “fast-track towards getting a product into market.”
Neither UMG nor Abbey Road Studios gives start-ups any capital investment as part of the incubation process, although Garvey says it is an idea under consideration to grow the division.
Abbey Road Red currently takes on between four and eight businesses each year with each intake lasting six months. Last month, DAACI, a tool that uses AI to assist composers, became the 19th start-up to join Red. Start-ups can apply to Abbey Road for consideration, although the majority are scouted through the team’s technology network and connections.
“We set out to find the best quality start-ups that bring value back to the music industry, whether that’s [a platform] that helps artists get paid or new technology that empowers them to create,” says Karim Fanous, innovation manager at Abbey Road Red.
Following Abbey Road Red’s lead, other music companies, as well as UMG, have ramped up their presence in the tech incubator space.
In 2017, Universal launched a tech incubator program, Accelerator Engagement Network, followed a year later by the Capitol Innovation Center, which is housed in Hollywood’s historic Capitol Studios. In 2018, Warner Music Group announced a multi-million-dollar seed stage investment fund called WMG Boost, while Sony Music Brasil recently launched a digital accelerator program to drive artificial intelligence innovations.
“We are meaningfully thinking about where the music business is going in the future,” says Garvey. “That really excites artists, the industry and the people that come through the doors every day.”
JKBX, a start-up offering retail investors fractional shares in thousands of hit songs, said Friday (Dec. 16) it has hired executives from Spotify, NTWRK, Comcast and others as it builds out its executive team and aims for a mid-2023 launch.
Pronounced “jukebox,” the new investment platform founded and led by former Warner Music Group chief innovation officer Scott Cohen hired Whitney-Gayle Benta to be its chief music officer from Spotify, where she was global head of artist & talent relations, and Jason Brown as chief marketing officer from the livestream commerce platform NTWRK. Brown previously held top marketing roles at Foot Locker and PepsiCo.
JKBX is part Robinhood, the popular online brokerage, and part Spotify. Cohen says it will offer bite-sized investment stakes in hundreds of thousands of No. 1 songs by current artists and back catalogs belonging to rock legends for a price starting at around $10.
While several start-ups offering fractional share investing in music copyrights have launched in recent years, JKBX aims to differentiate itself with its scale, as well as by packaging the investments in SEC-registered entities and creating a platform welcoming of investors confused by blockchain and NFT jargon, says Cohen.
“This is about the interest in owning a real asset that is something you love, a piece of music,” he says. “This is a wide-open market now because retail investors have never had an opportunity to get involved. We’re creating a new asset class, building something at scale and … I think it’s going to explode.”
Cohen declined to name any of the artists or songs to which JKBX has acquired rights. But Benta, who was featured on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players list this year, brings numerous artist relationships with her. In her previous role, Benta curated events including Spotify’s presence at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, which featured Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa and Post Malone.
Building out the technology supporting the platform will be Matt Brown, JKBX’s new chief technology officer, who previously co-founded the web3 startup Arthur, and worked at the hedge fund Citadel and the Blockchain company Ripple; and Madhav Gopal, who worked in cybersecurity operations at Comcast Cable and now serves as JKBX’s chief information security officer. Jacqueline Ortiz Ramsay joins JKBX as its chief communications and public affairs officer, having previously helmed public policy communications at Robinhood.
JKBX is structuring its offerings by putting the rights it buys into special purpose vehicles — such as an LLC — and registering them with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a step that adds an extra layer of protection for rights holders, investors and the company.
Investors can then buy and trade stakes in those entities, with the share price being determined by the song’s valuation. The entities will gain value as they are streamed, synched and played, with that revenue being paid out intermittently to investors and other JKBX partners.
JKBX is still hammering out the technology and mechanisms that will be used for its public offerings, but the company is following all existing securities laws, Cohen says.
“We believe that everything should have this regulatory wrapper because this isn’t the first time for me,” says Cohen, who founded The Orchard with Richard Gottehrer in 1997, just a few years before the dotcom bubble burst in early 2000. “There were a lot of companies that IPO’d with these silly business models and they all disappeared. But what remained was people doing business by the fundamentals leveraging the technology of the day.”
“We will use blockchain technology, but as far as the consumer knows you want to buy royalty streams, click buy, enter how much and it goes into your account,” Cohen adds.
The company has not yet picked a date for its 2023 launch, but it is “fully capitalized,” says Cohen, who is bullish about the promise of the fractional shares market.
“This is the only area where I see explosive growth. I don’t see explosive growth from VR, AR, blockchain and NFTs, gaming,” Cohen says. “We’re not substituting anything the way albums replaced singles, or cassettes replaced albums. We’re not replacing anything. We are building an entire asset on top of it. We [fractional shares investing platforms] can add billions and billions of dollars to the ecosystem.”
Jaylin Hawkins was working as a court reporter in Washington, D.C. when the pandemic hit. “Suddenly all my work froze,” they say. So the then-25-year-old did what many young adults did at the time: moved back in with their parents. Cooped up in West Palm Beach, Florida, Hawkins recalls friends urging them to get on TikTok. “At the time I thought TikTok was just for kids doing dance moves,” Hawkins admits. But without much else to do, they gave it a try by uploading videos that offered new music suggestions and entertainment news recaps.
Meanwhile in San Luis Obisbo, California, then-college senior Max Motely was also starting to share self-taped videos, highlighting his favorite emerging artists on TikTok. He says he had spent the whole spring relentlessly applying for music business jobs, hoping his summer internship at Paradigm would at least help him land a mail room gig, but with live music shuttered and increased competition for remaining music jobs, Motely found himself 20 applications deep and with no offer letter in sight.
After researching how other people found their first gigs in music, Motely became inspired by the do-it-yourself nature of starting a blog like Jacob Moore’s Pigeons and Planes or a YouTube channel like Anthony Fantano’s The Needle Drop. He thought, since no one was hiring anyway, he might as well spend his quarantine building a TikTok account to recommend music instead, giving the blog and YouTube critic a Gen-Z twist. “I thought this would make sense as the next format for a music blog,” he says, noting the app’s fast-paced nature and its already solid usership of young people.
For many of TikTok’s most successful music curators, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for getting on the app to share recommendations of new songs, and now, about two years later, these videos made in their childhood bedrooms are responsible for launching successful careers in the music business. Plenty of headlines have espoused the merits of using TikTok to promote new artists and songs, but less has been said about the new class of music business executives beginning to break on the app too, circumventing the notoriously exclusive path into the industry usually required.
On TikTok, there seems to be a place for anyone with passion to find an audience, due to algorithms that can quickly connect niche creators with niche audiences. Instead of the traditional model of social media, dependent on following friends to build out news feeds, TikTok serves up content based on shared interests. Because of this, if TikTok thinks a user is a fan of bedroom pop, often that user will be shown Motely’s latest video about the subgenre, even if they don’t follow him.
This constant creator discovery allows fledgling music curators to build a quick, loyal audience on TikTok, perhaps easier than any other app. That’s what happened for Motely’s account “Mostley Music” which swelled to 231K followers for recommending “everything from indie pop to hip-hop,” as he says in his characteristic tagline. Hawkins’ account, called “Pablo the Don,” also quickly amassed a following. Now at 222.5K followers, Hawkins’ is known for telling it to you straight, whether that’s offering their opinion on music news or sharing songs from overlooked artists, often from marginalized communities.
Other curators who started building their accounts at the same time as Motely and Hawkins have come to own other niches as music curators. Jesea Lee, for example, gained a presence sharing his favorite rock, alt, and metal picks to the millennial and older Gen Z set, Carla Turi of “Carla’s Infinite Playlist” built her following by sharing her thoughtful playlists of indie rock, folk and acoustic songs to an audience of mostly women and LGBTQ+ viewers. Ari Elkins went for the everyman by suggesting tracks to fit relatable situations, rather than genres – like driving in the car with the windows down.
“It’s crazy how you can build something yourself and leapfrog these [early steps] in the music business,” Elkins says of building his TikTok account. “Now you don’t have to wait on anyone.” When he started out, he was a student at University of Michigan, working part time as a college rep for Warner. After focusing on widening his TikTok presence during quarantine, he’s now perhaps the biggest music curator on the app with 1.9 million followers and counting and has leveraged that following into a successful hosting career, including Spotify Live’s Soundtrack Your Day, Simon Cowell and TikTok’s Stem Drop, and various Live Nation events. Long term, he says he wants to be thought of as Gen Z’s Zane Lowe.
To William Gruger, global music programs for TikTok, these kinds of music curators are already this generation’s “new media personalities,” pointing out the similarities in cultural taste making between these creators on TikTok and VJs at the height of MTV’s reign.
Within a year of posting as Mostley Music, Motely found himself suddenly able to break into the industry which felt impenetrable to him just months earlier. Atlantic and Interscope/ Darkroom offered him A&R consultant gigs and Spotify tapped him as co-host of their Spotify Live show Lorem Life. And just a few months ago, Motely co-founded a label of his own. Called Music Soup, the record label provides expertise in digital marketing and was the first to use TikTok Sound On as a distributor. Motely says if it hadn’t been for building out Mostley Music during quarantine, he’d probably be working his way up slowly in the ranks from the assistant level of a record label – not founding his own at age 24.
Hawkins is still focusing on building their numbers on TikTok with the long term goal of being a major personality rather than an executive, but in 2021, their account led them to a full time gig on the social media team at United Masters which allows them better access to the industry and the ability to earn a steady wage from content creation.
Turi says curating Carla’s Infinite Playlist proved to be “absolutely instrumental” in landing her “dream” job as folk and acoustic curator at Spotify. “It gave me the credibility to have the position I’m in,” she says. Lee, who is now a DJ for SiriusXM Octane and works with events like Lollapalooza and When We Were Young, goes further to call building his TikTok music curation account “life changing.”
Some curators have slowed their use of the app – like Turi and Motely – after earning the highly-coveted industry roles, but others still make posting on TikTok to be a major priority. For those curators interested in more public-facing roles in music, maintaining their account can be instrumental to landing brand partnerships and paid hosting gigs off-platform.
No matter what they are doing with the app now, their ability to use TikTok as a career launchpad has proven that the app has further democratized not only which artists can succeed but also who can become an industry tastemaker.
“I wasn’t born into this business,” Hawkins says. “So I had to find my own way in. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but now I have even bigger goals for the future.”
Elon Musk’s Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members.
The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was “reevaluating how best to bring external insights” and the council is “not the best structure to do this.”
“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” said the email, which was signed “Twitter.”
The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes. Shortly after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late October, Musk said he would form a new “content moderation council” to help make major decisions but later changed his mind.
“Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council was a group of volunteers who over many years gave up their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of online harms and safety issues,” tweeted council member Alex Holmes. “At no point was it a governing body or decision making.”
Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, had confirmed the meeting with the council Thursday in an email in which it promised an “open conversation and Q&A” with Twitter staff, including the new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin.
That came on the same day that three council members announced they were resigning in a public statement posted on Twitter that said that “contrary to claims by Elon Musk, the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.”
Those former council members soon became the target of online attacks after Musk amplified criticism of them and Twitter’s past leadership for allegedly not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.
“It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!” Musk tweeted.
A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter earlier on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting the council’s role.Those false accusations by Twitter leaders were “endangering current and former Council members,” the email said.
The Trust and Safety Council, in fact, had as one of its advisory groups one that focused on child exploitation. This included the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Rati Foundation and YAKIN, or Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need.
Former Twitter employee Patricia Cartes, whose job it was to form the council in 2016, said Monday its dissolution “means there’s no more checks and balances.” Cartes said the company sought to bring a global outlook to the council, with experts from around the world who could relay concerns about how new Twitter policies or products might affect their communities.
She contrasted that with Musk’s current practice of surveying his Twitter followers before making a policy change affecting how content gets moderated.
“He doesn’t really care as much about what experts think,” she said.
Twitter is once again attempting to launch its premium service, a month after a previous attempt by the company failed.
The social media platform said it would let users buy subscriptions to Twitter Blue to get a blue check mark and access special features starting Monday (Dec. 12).
The company owned by billionaire Elon Musk has also started granting a new gold-colored check mark to businesses on the platform. The gold label began appearing Monday on the account profiles for Coca-Cola, Nike, Google and dozens of other big corporations.
“The gold checkmark indicates that the account is an official business account through Twitter Blue for Business,” the company says on a support web page.
Twitter’s blue check mark was originally given to companies, celebrities, government entities and journalists verified by the platform. After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, he launched a service granting blue checks to anyone who was willing to pay $8 a month. But it was inundated by imposter accounts, including those impersonating companies like Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter suspended the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service will cost $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for iPhone and iPad users. San Francisco-based Twitter says subscribers will see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently. Twitter’s website doesn’t say if business accounts must pay extra for the gold label or if it is granted automatically.