Classical music has lost a generation's worth of music lovers beginning in the late-90s with the rise of file-sharing and Napster. A significant part of the reason might be: metadata. Metadata are the tags that travel with every audio recorded track. For a piece of music or a recording to be found, it needs to be tagged. Metadata comes (mostly) in three varieties: Each track travels with … [Read more...]
When “Vacuum Cleaner for Babies” Beat Taylor Swift: Fixing the Music Streaming Problem
On a panel at SXSW recently, John Dworkin, a VP at Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, told the story of how at one point last summer, a Taylor Swift song placed at No. 7 on the Billboard charts. At No. 6 was "Vacuum Cleaner for Babies," the sound of a vacuum cleaner that parents can play on a loop to soothe babies and help them sleep. He used the example to illustrate how … [Read more...]
A Framework for Thinking about Disruption of the Arts by AI
Enough experts in artificial intelligence saying that AI will "change everything," suggest that it's worth pondering what the "everything" means. The short answer is we don't know. But we do know that technology has had profound impact on how the world works. And we know that the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s changed how we interact in profound and unexpected ways over the past thirty … [Read more...]
How Subsidy for Big Tech Wrecked the Arts (and Journalism)
In the 2010s, cheap solar panels from China began flooding the US market, killing off US domestic panel-makers who couldn’t compete on price. The US government slapped a 40 percent tariff on Chinese panels, claiming under World Trade Organization rules that China’s government was unfairly subsidizing panel-makers. Given how quickly solar panel costs were plummeting and the Byzantine ways in which … [Read more...]
Is the Universal Translator Finally Here?
Only about three percent of books published in languages other than English each year are translated into English. And even that three percent sometimes takes years to hit bookshelves after original publication. Foreign-language movies account for only about one percent of American box office. And translation of foreign TV shows and radio into English is vanishingly scarce. Universal … [Read more...]
How to Think About How AI will Change the Arts?
A lot of the stories about AI and art right now are about legal issues -- artists and content companies suing Big AI for copyright infringement -- or reporters prompting AI models to create essays, novels, poetry or images and then explaining why AI will never be able to truly compete with human artists. Both stories, in my opinion, are distractions. (current copyright law never anticipated how AI … [Read more...]
Post-COVID Arts Observations: #3. The Future is Hybrid (or Not)
The past eighteen months while live performance venues were shut down has said a lot about how arts organizations see themselves. During COVID Lockdown Some went into hibernation, not having the resources or in some cases the imagination to go online, or else determining that the live in-person experience was essential to what they do. Others scrambled to get archived performances online or … [Read more...]
Make Google Pay for Linking to Content? Hmnnn.
Journalism, like the arts, has seen its business models upended. According to the Pew Research Center, advertising revenue in newspapers “fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, a 62% decline. Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.” One could find equally dire equivalents in the arts, … [Read more...]
How Has Technology Changed Orchestras? — My Talk for the League of American Orchestras Conference
I was asked to deliver a "provocation" for this week's League of American Orchestras annual conference with the prompt "How has Technology Changed Orchestras Forever?" Here's a transcript of the talk, and, at the bottom of this page, the video: Hi. I’m not sure how smart it is to attack the premise of the session you’ve been asked to be part of, but I was asked for a provocation, so here … [Read more...]
How Technology is Shaping Opera
Opera America had asked me to speak at their annual conference this year, but of course the conference was canceled and moved online. So I made this video for the online conference, talking about the influence of technology on opera and how audience expectations evolve as they use technology. We've marveled at the speed of change in our lives over the past twenty years because of technology, but … [Read more...]
Parlez-Vous Screen? (online arts and other considerations)
So your workplace has shut down (your theatre, concert hall museum, stage, whatever). Now what? Moving online is the obvious play. And in the weeks since lockdown there has been a flood of artists going online, making content for the web or repackaging performances that have already taken place. Early efforts were encouraging. The Rotterdam Philharmonic did a "stay-at-home" "Ode to Joy" and … [Read more...]
What If Disruption Was Just A Tech Con Game?
The tide has turned on the tech revolution. Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the Dark Web, privacy, hacking, fake news, and the deadening and manipulative effects of social media addiction. Tech was going to disrupt everything: Even after the word lost its meaning from overuse, it … [Read more...]
Man Down! We’ve Lost Andrew Sullivan: The Battle For The Real World Is Coming For You
Every age is illuminated and shaped by its innovations. In my father’s time it was cars. At the turn of this century it was desktop computers. More recently it’s been mobile devices. If you were interested in innovation in any of these decades these were the technologies you got excited about. My dad’s generation waited eagerly for the latest models of cars, learned how to take them apart and … [Read more...]
Why Music And The Concert Experience Are On The Front Lines Of Virtual Reality
Following on my post from yesterday about anticipating the kinds of experiences people will want from concerts comes this article from Wired about virtual reality and music. Evidently creating content for virtual reality is proving to be a challenge and music is so far the best showcase for VR. Outside of games, music is almost certainly the most popular content type in VR right now, which makes … [Read more...]
Artists Erased From The Web And Our Growing Problem With Facts
Artist and author Dennis Cooper got his blog back this week. Google had suddenly removed the 14-year-old blog a few months ago without warning and had refused to answer Cooper's repeated attempts to find out why. After the takedown got attention "from international media outlets, a statement of support from PEN America and a petition to recover the blog," Google finally responded to Cooper's … [Read more...]