Musician James Blake’s most recent album, Wind Down, rang in my ears on my way to meet Oleg Stavitsky, the co-founder of Berlin-based audio technology company Endel. As the sun turns to rain, the melancholy piano-led ambient music echoes my mood. Stavitsky said that might not be a coincidence, pointing to the album’s attribution in which Endel is cited alongside Blake as the music co-creator.
While Wind Down bears Blake’s name and face, and is a blend of his components — he provides individual “original” tracks featuring drum beats and melodies — Endel’s technology has made possible. final product. Its sound engine, trained on thousands of indoor tree trunks, creates personalized “soundscapes” for listeners by adjusting to external factors such as heart rate, temperature or time. in the listener’s day. Stavitsky cites Brian Eno’s “creative music” as an inspiration, with humans building a framework that machines can then arrange and rearrange.
If the AI Turing test of music is good, my album Blake-Endel doesn’t pass. I like the sound a little less cold. But I’m not Endel’s target audience. “Functional” music — whale songs, white noise, anything designed to be played in the background — gets 10 billion streams a month, more than double last year’s total, says Stavitsky. and contribute between 7% and 10% of the entire streaming market. People are actually listening to machines: Endel says it has more than 2 million monthly listeners across all streaming platforms, has signed a playlist partnership with Amazon.com Inc. and released “AI Lullaby” featuring Canadian electronic artist Grimes.
All of this is serious enough to rattle record labels, who are beginning to wonder if functional music is the flimsy end of a dangerous wedge. Currently, Endel’s technology produces music to strict specifications, such as sticking to the C major scale, and is intended to provide background music for tasks including lullaby infants and adults. go to bed. But how long before ChatGPT or something like that can make music like James Blake or Grimes-esque or Beatles from scratch? Benoit Carre, an AI-powered composer, says there’s still no “big red button” to create ready-made songs, but he ticks what artificial intelligence what the tools can do: Create tracks in a variety of genres, mimic the style of each lyricist, and use the vocal timbre of specific singers.
After sleepwalking with the last major hiatus of MP3 file sharing two decades ago, studios are reacting with sound and fury to what is often seen as muzak. Universal Music Group NV, after recently blasting “lower quality functional content” (presumably excluding Wind Down, released on a UMG-owned label) has announced that platforms streaming suppresses AI services that collect the following catalog of artists to train their machines. Shareholders are worried: When analysts at Exane BNP Paribas downgraded UMG earlier this month citing potential AI disruption, the stock lost 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) in value. market in just one day.
While AI is a social disruption technology that requires a guardrail, as my colleague Parmy Olson wrote, there is also something more self-serving and effective about the “war against this white noise”. UMG is less worried about the future of humanity than it is about defending the already markedly unequal music streaming model. If function music outstanding features on platforms such as Spotify Technology SA, that’s because it acts as leverage in negotiations with music label, whose collective market share is under pressure.
It’s also highly likely that of all the artists at stake by AI, iconic pop stars — the top 1% accounting for 90% of streaming — are the ones most likely to respond. with the highest future. UMG is working with streaming platform Deezer SA on a new “artist-centric” payment model that puts the music people actually hear first. And Endel’s Stavitsky knows humans have star power: His ambition is to convince studios to allow his technology to tap into the latter’s portfolio of artists like Taylor Swift or Weeknd to produce versions soundscape of existing albums. That could strengthen, not break, the aristocracy of rock music.
The real problem is for those lower in the food chain. “It will be much harder to overcome noise,” said Stavitsky. Even the Who Optimists who see AI as a tool for artists, rather than a threat, are worried. Denis Ladegaillerie, head of Paris-based music company Believe SA, says AI can help musicians in a way that the punk generation’s “three chords are all you need” generation has sparked a sensation. democratic revolution in creative writing. But he also said that equality and diversity will need more protection in the global music market, where curation algorithms have encouraged the listening habits of winners. “There is a real problem here for regulators,” he said.
Thus, music’s disruptive future risks being the same as its past: noisy and unequal. It’s not entirely wrong for record labels to ask streaming platforms to clean their homes in favor of more “human” music. But it’s also a good time to come up with more equitable ways to distribute streaming loot and keep new human artists afloat. If whales are about to become a musically endangered species, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Lionel Laurent is Bloomberg Opinion columnist on Digital Currencies, European Union and France. Previously, he was a reporter for Reuters and Forbes.
