Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. I'm Dan Runcy. Welcome to Trapital. Today you're going to hear a conversation that I moderated on stage at Humanx, this big multi day AI conference in San Francisco at the beginning of April. And I hosted a talk about AI and putting artists in control with AI. I was joined by Kakul Subastova, the CEO of Splice, and Michael Nash, the Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Universal Music Group. We covered a bunch of topics, but three key themes to look out for. First, the abundance of music created with AI. How does it compare to the music that's already been created on music streaming services and uploaded daily? And what does it mean and not mean in terms of music fans and how people actually relate to the music that comes out? Second, we talked about finding that right balance with AI. How do you push innovation forward so you don't get left behind? But how do you also respect the rights of the people that own the music and the people that make the music and have certain desires that they have to have in their control and what they're willing to let a tool or platform do? And third, what does a better AI model actually mean for the artist and for the fans? Really fun conversation and I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Here's our talk at Humanx. So, Michael, we'd love to start with you. What is your thought on that framing and where we are right now?
B (1:31)
That whole framing about artists versus AI, let me just mirror it to its conjoined twin, AI against artists. I think that there's a false premise, false narrative that really comes from an investment thesis that needs to be pulled apart here. There was an idea that I think led to investment in AI a few years ago. The thesis is basically AI eliminates music content supply constraints, kills the legacy model and jailbreaks the economics of the music ecosystem. The problem with that thesis is that we already exist in an infinity of music content. There was no constraint on music content creation prior to the rise of AI four years ago. 100,000 tracks being uploaded to services every day. So let me do a little cocktail napkin math to break this down for you. If you were to never sleep and attempt to listen to all music ever created, you'd have to live 1700 years in order to experience all music previously created. And then you'd have to live 17,000 more years for every year that AI models are cranking out new music. That's the volume of output from just one AI model this year. So for those of you that are planning immortality Based on singularity, you'll never catch up, right? Because you could live 1700 years and listen to all the music. But then every year that you've spent listening to all the music, another 17,000 years worth of music has been produced. So forgive the reductio ad absurdum, but the point is, a nuclear explosion, a production of volume of content through AI doesn't have a market. There's no audience for that. It's not addressing any kind of need. But you flip it back in terms of artists and how they're thinking about AI, how artists are thinking about AI is there's an incredible opportunity to significantly amplify creativity. Artists are interested in and are engaging in the development of and the application of AI tools because they see tremendous opportunity for, with respect to their creativity, with their the compositional process itself, new approaches in terms of music production, and the opportunity to use new types of AI instruments to produce new experiences for their fans. I think that the really important framing here revolves around why artists have always been excited about advance in technology. It's the same thing that applies here. So it's really artist times AI, that AI has an opportunity to be a huge force multiplier. So instead of thinking about going from 1700 years worth of content to 17,000 years worth of content and seeing an order of magnitude explosion in irrelevant content volume, we're looking at it as an order of magnitude advancement in creative potential for artists engage with technology.
