Music, Music, Music…Let’s Turn Up The Tempo

A Tech Revolution Makes Waves In The Music Industry

“Where are we?

What the hell is going on?

The dust has only just begun to form…”

Imogen Heap, Hide & Seek

When Imogen Heap voiced these lyrics, had she already sensed that a tech revolution was about to shake up the music world? Perhaps.

Creative Passport:

Her project, Creative Passport, is an early bird, a precursor to the next wave in music management. This blockchain-enabled platform houses all the data about a song in a single database. From the artist’s profile to all the digital assets that are part of the song.

Heap hopes that over time, Creative Passport will become the default go-to for all information and assets that belong to a given composition.

Why is this critical? Because behind the scenes, the world of music is murky.

Artists often don’t get paid on time or correctly. Copyright laws vary across different geographies. The data and equipment used in the making of the song may have restrictions. It’s easy to trip up and fall down the rabbit hole. Creative Passport aims to circumvent these pitfalls, helping artists streamline the administration of their creative work.

Creative Passport was conceived around 2019, just before the AI revolution hit the globe. With the advent of AI in music, Creative Passport’s relevance just went way up. Why? Because AI often scrapes data, using artists’ original work without prior permission. In music, this is hard to track and even harder to hold a single entity accountable.

Bright Side/ Dark Side:

On the bright side, AI makes it easy for anyone who has a musical ear to compose a piece of music. It can create harmonies, drumbeats, and even make suggestions on how to optimize your track.

But there’s a dark side. And it can get pretty insidious. The all important, massive question revolves around copyright – or the lack thereof.

If AI generates the music, who claims ownership? And how?  What happens when that AI-generated music is used in a larger production, like a film, a dramatic performance or a festival? This is a sticky, icky conundrum, one which is already reverberating off the walls of courts around the world.

This leads to stirring up the pot in an age-old controversy – artist compensation and fair use. How does the artist get credited for their work if AI has been trained on it? In several cases, they don’t and this issue  has caused a tremendous stir and anti-AI sentiment in the creative world.

Can blockchain address these issues? Absolutely – and that’s a big part of what Creative Passport and similar projects aim to do.

Is Blockchain The White Knight?

Authenticity is key to blockchain, and this serves the artist’s purpose. The moment a piece of music is uploaded onto a blockchain, it immediately starts to blaze a trail. From using the track to claiming ownership, developing a fan base to promotion, every transaction on the blockchain leaves its mark.

If someone tries to tamper with the track or purloin it, blockchain keeps a thumbprint of the original, and records instances when someone attempted to mess with it. The minute the track is on blockchain, it becomes immutable. Every transaction gets logged into the ledger, and as a result, one knows exactly how much revenue was earned.

Fair & Square:

It gets better. Usually, a piece of music has multiple stakeholders such as the artist, a sound engineer, a producer, a lyricist, and more. Blockchain’s smart contract system automatically distributes the revenues among all the listed stakeholders. Pay-outs take place as and when the revenue gets logged in, and this mitigates delays, accounting arrears or any other disputes.

NFT Nano:

Music has also embraced NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) with enthusiasm. NFTs not only allow for deeper engagement directly between the artist and the audience, but also allow the audience to invest in fractional ownership of a song. This creates a new platform for investment and innovation in the music industry.

Slaying The Pirates – Painlessly:

The single biggest crib of musicians in the AI era is the very real threat of piracy. While it has always been a big problem in the music industry, AI magnifies it to a much greater extent. Beyond listening pleasure, music is a soft power. It shapes cultures, movements and even defines generations. Music is often a critical peacemaker and transcends borders to infuse cross-cultural understanding across countries. Many artists genuinely believe that they deserve to be recognized, credited and duly compensated every time their music is played. While we do have copyright laws and legal licenses in different parts of the world that define how, when and where you can play music, this is a tedious, nebulous and opaque space, often mired in red tape and bureaucracy – precisely the things that an artist doesn’t want to have to deal with. Blockchain takes the pain out of the process.

Blockchain-based vehicles like Time-stamp certificates, NFTs and Smart Contracts create solid proof of ownership, which is easily verifiable across borders. Distribution gets a lot simpler on a decentralized blockchain. Gone are the layers upon layers of middlemen. Blockchain allows you to tap into your audience directly and keep a larger piece of the pie.

That being said, this is an evolving space and there’s a lot more to the tech tsunami that we haven’t experienced as yet.

But I concur with most of the experts out there, that AI and blockchain are not going to eliminate the human element in music. Instead, those people who harness the technology in a positive manner are the ones who are going to ride the next wave successfully and hit a high note.

Are you one of them?