Music is experienced in many different ways, ranging from massive concerts, to singing along to songs in a car, to just casually listening to some music when studying or hanging out. The ways music is created and delivered to listeners has changed drastically over the past years and will keep evolving in the future. In this blog two upcoming developments in the creation and delivery of music will be explained.
Recommendations are nothing new for music streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify, etc. At the moment though they are primarily used for analytics, besides providing personalized recommendations. For these services, it’s powerful to be able to recognize what kind of music will become a trend and which characteristics make that music popular. When creating new songs, this information can be leveraged by artists to create a new hit. However, AI will be able to compose music without interference of a human (Gautam, et al. 2018). Coupling this with the data from recommendation systems will bring artists an opportunity to use AI as an aid in making music (Deahl, 2018).
Concerts are an important part of experiencing an artist and the music they make. However, they are fairly expensive and most of the times difficult to access because of sold out tickets or distance to the concerts location. To solve this, concerts could come to anyone’s home by using virtual reality. Spotify might for example add a button on an artist’s page to stream a concert through VR glasses, even allowing you to position yourself in the front row, or even on stage behind the drummer. This idea isn’t that crazy either, some big artists like Coldplay, Stevie Wonder and Imagine Dragons have already offered concerts in VR (Esteves, 2018).
Music has always been evolving, changing the way it’s been made and delivered. New technologies will make the experience even more immersive and allow business to create and capture value through many new business models. Let’s see how it play’s out, but one thing is certain: the experience will only get better.
Deahl, D., 2018-last update, How AI-Generated Music Is Changing The Way Hits Are Made. Available: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17777008/artificial-intelligence- taryn-southern-amper-music [16-10-2018].
Esteves, A., 2018-last update, When Vr Meets Reality – How Live Concerts Could Be Enhanced By 21st-Century Opera Glasses. Available: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/how-live-concerts-could-be- enhanced-by-21st-century-opera-glasses-a8002606.html [16-10-2018].
Gautam, S. And Soni, S., 2018. Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Music Composition.
I enjoyed reading your blog, and I find the topic of the technological revolution in music very interesting. Although I do agree that the different technological advancements such as those made in the field of AI provide new ways of experiencing music, I do not necessarily agree with the fact that it is for the best. I have always considered music to be subjective and based on emotions. The fact that we are starting to use machines instead of human imagination for the production of music seems like a step towards ending human creativity and self- expression. If developed enough, AI could eliminate the need for producers and artists and thus disrupt the whole music industry. Though, it could be argued that machines will never match the creativity or skills of musicians, improvements in machine learning are proving the contrary. Stagnant machine-generated music is being developed to have timing and dynamics that are more expressive and human-like. On the top of this trend is Google, with its music project, Performance RNN that leverages neural networks for the production process. Additionally, another project by Google, Magenta, is creating deep-learning algorithms in order to produce songs. In conclusion, I think that the current developments in the music industry can be found both exciting but also daunting. Especially since the deep-learning algorithms cannot only be used for the generation of music but also drawings and other artworks. Thus, the development of AI not only affects musicians, but also other occupations that rely on the inherent human trait: creativity.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8333911/artificial-intelligence-music-reshaping-destroying-industry
Thank you for sharing these developments within the music industry. The way how music is being delivered to the audience has indeed changed in many ways: from prediction of hits to concerts using VR/AR technology. For instance, did you know there is a Virtual popstar in Japan called Hatsune Miku? While she is not a real person, she does hold concerts and appears in the form of a hologram. Apparently she is extremely popular and many people are willing to pay for her concert, even though she is not a real human, but ‘just’ an avatar created by AR technology.
I was not aware that big artists were offering concerts in VR. However, I do find it interesting that artists would enable this feature, since it might affect ticket sales and audience engagement. When people go to a concert, I imagine it to be because they want to see the artist perform in real life. When they use VR technology to view the concert, isn’t it “slightly” similar as watching it on youtube? While I can understand the fact they might feel as if they are ‘plunged’ into the audience at a live concert, the experience would still be different in my opinion. Personally, I wouldn’t want to pay to use this VR concert feature. I would rather pay full price for a concert to see my favorite artist perform in real life.
Hi Stefan,
Interesting post! I am also curious when and to what extent AI will reach the creative levels that will impact the music industry in a big way. AI can be a very useful addition (or maybe even a replacement) for musicians to create music, especially for the artists that are aiming at a large, mainstream audience. I do believe it will be harder for the lesser known genres in music, since there is less data to learn from and the taste of the (already smaller) audience in those (sub)-genres is more dispersed. Besides, external factor, such as political movements (for example the anarchists who fuelled the emergence of the punk scene), might be influencing the ability of the system to correctly predict trends.
By the way, I’m not sure if you are already familiar with it, but if you’re interested in both music and data, you should look into last.fm, which will track you listening across all kinds of devices and platforms.