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Jan 4 2023

🔵 2023: can music endure the post-social, Web3-led, AI-assisted year of change?

Hi there -

it is - perhaps mercifully - a relatively quiet start to the year, without a mass of music-related news to report. That said, the march of progress continues elsewhere and I'm certainly curious to see what it will bring.

AI is the latest tech that I suspect most did not see developing quite as fast as it has. ChatGPT will doubtless have given Google a fright, and I think AI's use in and around the music industry is an area where people are mostly looking in the wrong place.

In general, the focus on AI in music appears to be around music generation. That's understandable; for many that is perhaps the biggest threat.

For myself and my colleagues however, the real focal point here is how much AI will be doing to evolve marketing practices. On that front, it's a more positive story - in our view anyway.

Things like ad booking, reporting and optimisation will soon be largely undertaken by AI, which I think we'd welcome. If anything we're surprised more tools have not yet presented themselves on this front, but I'd imagine it is only a matter of time.

In general, as we move into a new year, I am maintaining a positive outlook. As our industry learned with Napster, you cannot put the genie back in the bottle, and thinking that is a plausible strategy is naive.

A smarter move then is to engage with all of this tech and ask what it can be doing for you. That's what we are doing here at Motive Unknown, and so far it's proving highly illuminating.

Could 2023 be a post-social world in which Web3 shows its value and AI delivers practical solutions? I am hopeful - but I'm also curious to hear what you all think too.

Comments welcome!

Have a great evening,

D.

🎶 written whilst listening to Odyssey by Home. Not a group I know anything about - a friend sent me a track and I was hooked from there - but this is a fine album of Gallic-sounding electronica. Oddly lo-fi in sound at points, it oozes charisma. Check it out. 
Stories from the Music Industry:
Copyright Royalty Board officially accepts new rates that will see songwriters paid more in the US over the next 5 years
Its official: The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has accepted a (near) music industry-wide settlement that will improve songwriters streaming royalty rates in the United States from January 1, 2023. The settlement known as Phonorecords IV or CRB IV will see songwriters and music publishers paid a headline rate of 15.35% of a given interactive streaming services US revenue by 2027.

👆🏻Hot take: amid a huge amount of negative press regarding songwriters' royalties of late, this feels like a rare, welcome positive development. Fingers crossed this trend continues. 
The extent of the incident was revealed this by Have I Been Pwned, an online tool for checking whether personal data has been leaked in security breaches, in emails to users seen by MBW. It estimates that 229,037,936 peoples data was compromised in an incident dating back nearly three years. The leaked information included users dates of birth, email addresses, genders, geographic locations, IP addresses, names, spoken languages and/or usernames.

👆🏻Hot take: I feel a little for Deezer here, as its name gets dragged through the mud when in fact it was a third party provider whose data was breached. 
Over the past 18 months, we have worked tirelessly with De La Soul, maintaining a heightened attention to honoring the groups original musical details, including bringing Prince Paul and the original team to the studio to prepare the catalog for streaming. It is a real testament to our team and the group that we are able to execute these plans together. We couldnt be prouder to embrace De La Souls historic artistry and support them in sharing their music with the world, Lafargue added.

👆🏻Hot take: genuinely great to see all the obstacles overcome and a deal reached that the band especially appear happy with. (Disclosure: Reservoir is a MU client)
Thats according to the Wall Street Journal, which citing people familiar with the matter, says that the deal is valued at around $200 million and includes his interest in both his publishing and recorded music catalogs. Bieber has released six albums, the most recent of which wasJustice, via Def Jam / Universal Music in March 2021. Citing a source, the WSJ reports that the deal would be the largest music-rights acquisition for Hipgnosis to date.

👆🏻Hot take: if correct, Hipgnosis is certainly showing it still has some power moves to make here. Curious to see what else 2023 brings on this front. 
Stories from the Broader World of Tech:
Shopify in advertising push to fill void left by Apple privacy crackdown
The new tool allows retailers to pool their customer data and upload it to Meta and Googles advertising platforms. Marketers are then able to target ads at lookalike customers who might be more likely to buy their products because they bought similar items from another retailer. The system is designed to skirt Apples rules against tracking iPhone users, which put a multibillion-dollar dent in the online advertising industry last year, and compete with Amazons fast-growing ads business.

👆🏻Hot take: I could only read this wondering how this fits within GDPR, CCPA and other privacy laws, as it sounds hazardous to me. 
TikTok has announced that its expanding its audience controls feature, giving creators the ability to restrict their videos to adult viewers. Prior to this expansion, the adult-only audience controls feature was only available for TikTok Live. Now, the company is bringing the feature to its short-form videos as well. Weve started to bring our audience controls feature to creators of short-form video and will expand the feature globally over the coming weeks, TikTok wrote in a blog post. To be clear: our policies still fully apply to creators who use this feature, and we will remove content which contains nudity and other violations of our Community Guidelines.

👆🏻Hot take: a common sense addition, to be fair... 
Large, long andunproductivemeetings have become a scourge of todays hybrid workplace, prompting companiesto try and curtail them. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., household product maker Clorox Co. and tech firm Twilio Inc.are among those that have instituted no-meeting days. Employees spendabout18 hours a week on average in meetings, according to a survey conducted last year, and they only decline 14% of invites even though theyd prefer to back out of 31% of them.

👆🏻Hot take: this was met with a resounding 'hell yes!' around MU's team. Certainly the issue of too many meetings is one we ALL need to address, and pref. ASAP. 
The DPC announced today that Meta must pay 210 million (around $222 million) for violating European Union privacy rules with Facebooks practices, plus 180 million (around $191 million) over similar violations with Instagram.

👆🏻Hot take: it feels like the Irish DPC is finally making its presence felt around data breaches, with this being the latest fine against Meta on that front. Will it change anything? I suspect not, but one can hope.
Other Reads I've Enjoyed Lately:
‘Depeche Mode 101’ Review: An ‘80s Synth Pop Postcard And Reality TV Blueprint 
In the pantheon of rock docs, Depeche Mode 101 should loom larger.

👆🏻Hot take: I'd never thought of it in these terms, but the author has a point....
The latest additions are a rich trove of books, films, songs and other works from 1927

👆🏻Hot take: always interesting to see what works will now be public domain - especially in music, obviously.
New York City sidewalks contain all sorts of hazards that I steer my dog away from. But I didn’t think weed was one of them.

👆🏻Hot take: dog owners in NYC, LA and other cannabis-legal places: watch what your dog might eat from the street! 🤢
The latest from Motive Unknown on Twitter:
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