Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very likely to be a massive game changer for the music industry in the near future. Joining us in the main room of Zouk, Hazel Savage, founder, and CEO of tech company Musiio gave us the rundown on “The Next Big Thing In The Music Business: Artificial Intelligence.” Moreover, she covered how exactly AI will play a role in the future of the music industry and supercharge the A&R process.
What is the current state of the A&R process and how could AI possibly help?
”I was in Australia for Australia Music Week and there was a guy on the panel with me who manages his own music production company and would look at several thousand tracks a week, and he got to a point where he said: “I can’t do it anymore.” One guy couldn’t hold 10,000 songs in his head and effectively license them out. So it’s a shame for the company and a shame for the artist. What we do is we allow the people who are already doing this job, to do it more efficiently. It’s not about replacing people.”
How will labels use AI in the future?
“Labels want to be able to search through large amounts of music to be able to find potential talent. From an A&R perspective, labels often tell me they use Spotify, Instagram, Youtube, and SoundCloud etc, but if there are 30,000 tracks uploaded a day and they only listen to 5, they’re listening to 0.0001% of all the music. With AI, we can guarantee you can listen to all of it and present you with some top results.”
So then it’s all about efficiency?
“There are now 1 million female vocalists on Spotify with over 5 million streams. So its no longer effective to ask who’s trending, what we want is the next big female vocalist who has zero streams so you can find her before anyone else and if you can do that using AI, that’s a better result for the record labels.”
So what does this mean for artists? Will it improve their chances of being found or not?
“Currently, the chances of you as an artist getting heard individually by an A&R person or by a streaming company are almost zero. With AI, we can at least filer all the music and put a set in front of A&R representatives. If you’re only listening to a few tracks a day, you’re only 1% efficient. We can at least make you 99% efficient.”
So will music all sound the same? if there’s an AI, is it not just like having one main A&R listening to everything?
”It’s based on the data you put in and the data you take out. Companies who work with us want a custom trained AI, that is trained on their own music. So, for example, you can train an AI on only Sony-signed tracks. But you have to give the AI a level of customisation that allows it to create its own personal profile. So the short answer is no.”
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