Written by our CMO Jakob Höflich

This is the second part of my take-aways from Musexpo 2023. If you have missed the first part, you can read it here.

Besides a noisy market and the importance of back catalog, those were further topics that stuck with me when I travelled back to Germany.

AI & Data

Of course, as an AI representative I would have loved to see more AI players on stage such as Beatoven.ai, but on the other hand it was refreshing to have this hype-topic not so in the fore-front as is the case at many other conferences, but rather bringing actual applications and use cases up while discussing proper real-world challenges. Nevertheless, it became clear that the current AI discussion is dominated by AI generated music. There was fear issued by industry representatives that it will take away creativity and replace it. But then there was also the beautiful quote that in music, “only hearts will touch hearts“ – unfortunately I forgot who said it but I think that is very true. Still, the entire Castaway in Burbank, where the conference was held, held its breath when Dennis Hausammann, CEO of iGroove put it out upfront: “Guys, AI is here and it’s here to stay. It will change the industry and you can either embrace it or decide not to. But let’s face it, it is here to stay and it is happening right now“. As you can imagine, I loved that.

What I also experienced in my conversations is that the value and benefit of AI for tagging and searching music, such as we do at Cyanite.ai, is not yet fully leveraged by music publishers. So even though this technology already proves hands-on benefits such as saving money on tagging and licensing more music by leveraging the depths of a catalog with AI, everything is still young. I feel we are really at the beginning of a new wave of tech-driven publishers, supervisors and sync teams who are super data and music-savvy and leverage the huge opportunity of data and play it back to their artists and teams meaningfully.

Internationalization

I really loved the panel “Market Discovery India“. We deal with quite a lot of requests from India and I can really see this market blowing up. What was fascinating to hear is that 5-10 years ago, around 90% of the popular music in India came from movie soundtracks. There was no separate film and music industry, it was one big industry with no separation of video and audio. Today, that number has dropped to 30-50%, which is still very high compared to other markets, but also shows that a new Indian music industry is on the rise.

But it’s not only about India. One panelist spoke of an exceptionally famous artist from South Africa who is not represented on a single streaming service. There are new, emerging markets that not only have the opportunity to transform the global music industry, but also to redefine streaming payout models as they are currently applied in the Western world.

What was also dropped here was the importance of subtitles. With good subtitles, regional music is not limited to its countries of origin anymore. But with subtitles, Chilean kids can enjoy K-Pop and Japanese teenagers can dig underground Macedonian rap.

Bottom line was that we will see a change from a US and UK dominated music industry to something more international. I find this truly fascinating as it also opens the western dominated music industry model for new influences from new cultures which bring different business ethics, new ideas, and just more diversity to this fascinating industry.

Music For Mental Health

A little bit more niche but by no means less fascinating was the Alchemic Sonic Environment experience created by Satya Hinduja and her team. In a multi-sensory listening experience, they presented an intimate, spatial audio installation that demonstrated the potential of music for mental health. Personally, I am deeply convinced that music makes our inner walls permeable and better connects us to our true desires and needs, which is why it was so great to see and, more importantly, experience this outstanding work. They also easily won the award for the most beautiful setting and booth.

The most interesting question to me is if and how an industry that is primarily focused on entertainment is also able to tap into the healing aspects of music. A good example for that might be Endel which offer soundscapes for all kinds of scenarios from studying to sleeping, and also collaborate with artists like Grimes or James Blake to offer “functional” musical experiences designed by actual artists. I believe something very big is starting there that also contains lots of potential for new and innovative revenue streams for artists and their work.

Conclusion

Honestly, I would have liked to have one or two more days at Musexpo to further connect with people and possibly have some hands-on workshops that could be initiated and led by delegates, working together on some of the topics discussed in the panels (as it’s done at Future Music Camp for example). It was an intimate setting that made it easy to share openly and meet people in person that you usually only see on screen. Although the focus is very much on A&Ring, I felt there was almost a 360-degree view of the music industry’s most pressing challenges, and I’m sure everyone enjoyed getting out of the usual bubble and enjoying other perspectives as much as I did.

It became so clear to me at the conference, that the biggest challenge in the music industry right now is not that AI will replace artists, but it’s about discovering the great music, the hidden gems, the outstanding artists that are out there, and to find ways to connect those artist with audiences that resonate with their music. At the end of each day, every single job of every single person attending the event goes back to human creativity and the artists who write and produce music. We need technology to help us navigate the masses; we need an open dialog between old and new music industry and we need events like Musexpo to bring all of this together.

Written by our CMO Jakob Höflich

I just came back to Berlin after visiting this year’s Musexpo on behalf of Cyanite after Covid closed the event down in 2020, when we originally planned to attend.

It was a four-day event packed with panels featuring some of the industry’s leading figures such as Adam Taylor (President APM Music), Evan Bogart (Founder & CEO, Seeker Music) and Kristin Graziani (President Stem Disintermedia Inc. ) as well as evening showcase performances at iconic S.I.R. Studios Hollywood by an international group of artists such as Caity Baser from the UK or Holly Riva from Australia. My first eye opener was when the German band KAMRAD played their hit song “Believe” on the first night of the showcase, which I definitely knew from radio and has been listened to over 70 million times on Spotify, but is still completely unknown in the American market. It made me realize again how isolated Western music markets can still be.

The panels were mainly about “traditional” craft in the areas of sync, publishing, artist promotion and distribution. In addition, many artists had the opportunity to meet supervisors and A&Rs. Technology topics such as AI, NFTs and the Metaverse were not represented in the panel topics. However, on the panels themselves and in the audience Q&A, AI was a recurring topic brought up. Of course, as an AI company, I would have liked to see a bit more tech talk, but on the other hand, it was interesting to approach these topics from the “inside out”.

One thing that’s always refreshing to see is that everyone puts on their trousers one leg at a time. The challenges of mass content production, an extremely decentralized media and distribution landscape, and the future of creativity in the age of AI were topics to which no one had a perfect answer or a concrete solution. The challenges are obvious, and it became very clear at a conference like this that these challenges can only become solutions that benefit all players equally if they are worked on together and a dialog is cultivated between the music industry, artists and technology providers – as Cherie Hu recommends as well in this article.

Besides meeting really inspiring and genuine people in person, such as a leading NASA researcher turned music composer, here are the main take aways, that I brought back to Germany and that were interesting to see addressed.

Before I start, a huge thanks to Sat Bisla and his team who put together a fabulous event and provided a setting in which new and old relationships can evolve, nurture, and deepen.

Without further ado, here are my personal key take-aways – of course, there was much more and I won’t be able to cover the whole scope of the conference.

It’s noisy and crowded

The conference started off with taking a look at the industries most pressing problems and opportunities. It directly became clear that the biggest challenge for all players involved is the masses of content and the numerous outlets for them. It was said that “it is freedom and chaos at the moment“. It’s extremely hard to cut through the noise and in contrast to the times when there was MTV and your local record shop to distribute music, it is an extremely individualized case by case decision about which target groups to focus on, where to reach them, and what kind of content to produce for them.

Also, everything comes with lots of new challenges for artists who were often called “brands“ at the conference. Artist development is more and more in the hands of the artist themselves (and their teams) as the big players in particular focus on placing bets on single hits that often dominate today’s streaming landscape. However, it is said that fans engage with artists, not with songs, and that is where true fandom is created.

Lots of question marks in this space of freedom and chaos evolve around TikTok and Co. and how those platforms will be able to set up fair royalty payouts. And as we shift to poorly-paid licensing models such as Tiktok, artist teams need to find new revenue streams.

The importance of back catalog & sync

There were a couple of really amazing panels around sync, publishing, and music supervision. The Hello Group’s President Phil Quartararo said in the opening panel: “People have unlearned to work their back catalog“ and have forgotten how to maximize the use of it. And he subtly but directly addressed the majors with this statement. Apparently, the majors are so focused on breaking new artists and “going where the money is“, that they forget about all the brilliant music that’s in their back catalogs. According to him, the industry should pay more focus on the dusty corners of the catalogs where the real gems can be very well hidden.

What also became clear, that despite the fact that access to music has become so easy, the access to the influential people who recommend your music to the music directors at Netflix et al. or at the most influential radio stations, create a very tough bottleneck to pass through. Both radio stations and music supervisors have their so-called ”trusted sources“ that not only provide them with music that could work amazingly well in sync, but from whom they also know that they make sure that the music is easy to clear.

One thing that I found mind-blowing is that supervisors apparently often prefer to take older music where the rights don’t have to be cleared from 15 co-writers but maybe just 2 or so. Contemporary music takes more time to clear the breadth of songwriters that were involved. This is another motivation to all songwriter out there to pay meticulous attention to clean and neat metadata!

Last but not least, commercial music only produced to get attention in sync, is not really favored by supervisors. Yes, it can be a great fit sound-wise but the initial motivation might reveal a lack of authenticity. And authenticity is what supervisors are looking for when they connect music with movie productions and especially with brands. Here, again, people engage with the people behind the songs, not only the songs themselves.

More insights tomorrow in Part 2 on AI, data and the internationalization of the music industry.