Category: technology

  • AI Will Help and Hurt Music. Here’s How.

    Computers have been helping us make and store music for many years. Music AI is not so new either; already by the early 1990s there was widely available software runing on consumer grade desktop computers which could generate and regenerate music-like patterns of sound. The last 30 years have seen incremental improvements in the way…

  • Net Neutrality Won’t Help Music. Here’s Why…

    With the best intentions, some in the music industry are adding their voices to protest the US FCC’s rollback of net neutrality regulations. Keeping them won’t help the music industry; pretending it will means the real threats to open and fair digital markets will remain unaddressed. To recap, net neutrality, as it is framed in…

  • Three Conditions for Independent Music to Survive

    My biggest mistake was to assume that major labels would not want to buy margin-shrinking and inherently weak independent distribution companies. Since 2015, several ‘insider’ distributors (the kind whose founders and owners sit on trade association boards) have been sold to major labels, or major owned distributors. It’s impossible to understand these acquisitions any way…

  • My Platform, Right or Wrong!

    It was an early hero of the United States navy, Stephen Decatur, Jr., who gave the world the dubious chant of nationalist zealots, reportedly in an after dinner toast to, Our country – in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong. a notion which…

  • Record Labels! Beware of Fake Independence!

    Giant corporate groups are a fairly recent development in the music industry. The most extraordinary and wonderful music has always been produced outside the city walls by innovative and committed independent record labels. Around 40% of recorded music industry value is created by independent record labels, but 65% of that independent music is captured by…

  • Streaming versus Downloads? The Fight is Far From Won

    The recent decline in the music download market, coupled with an acceleration in the streaming revenue numbers, has led many to predict the kind of transition that saw the end of the cassette tape, or indeed the cart and horse. There are a few reasons, some a bit less obvious, why this might not be such…

  • Change How We Think First, Technology Second

    Many years ago I was asked to discuss with the board of a trade association how the music industry was changing. One prominent executive summed up by saying “complexity has served us well”. A few days ago Spotify’s James Duffett-Smith was moved to exclaim “music industry licensing and copyright structures are legendary in their complexity”…

  • The World Is Singing A New Song

    We live in an age of everyday activism, with every purchase an expression of values as well as needs. Ideas about fairness go far beyond the impact of certified fair trading schemes; they permeate consumer marketing. Social media drives a radical transparency in supply chains, with no exploitation tacitly excused. Alongside fairness we have discovered a new appreciation…

  • Listen to the Music, not the Audio Nihilists

    The trade offs that made digital music possible, when storage and bandwidth were scarce, are no longer quite so necessary through much of the developed world. Some brave services are trying to take advantage of this technological advance by offering higher quality music on demand. They face considerable obstacles, and oddly, a chorus of voices…

  • GRD? More Like GOELRO, Comrade!

    Music industry watchers will have noted the recent demise of the Global Repertoire Database (GRD), a project so misconceived that its collapse should more properly be greeted with relief than hand wringing and woe. Some background. In 2008 EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes posed a question to a small and odd group of interested parties at two…