Holograms, genre tribes & songwriting bots: five takeaways from 2017’s first Music Tech Summit

How is technology shaping the future of music? That was the question posed to the panel at the second Music Tech Summit, held at Universal Music’s Sydney HQ on May 4 this year. Four industry leaders spanning music, tech, content and events had a wide-ranging talk about recent changes and looming challenges in these spaces, moderated by Junkee Media’s Tim Duggan:

• Danny Rogers, Founder of Laneway Festival
• Georgie Powell, Music Partnerships at Google/YouTube
• Alice Kimberley,Strategist at VICE
• Joel Connolly, Blackbird Ventures (and founder of Umbrella Management)

Despite the incredibly broad nature of the topics under discussion and relaxed structure, the conversation pinpointed some issues at the absolute forefront of these adjacent industries. The full videois worth a watch, but for the time-poor (and isn’t that everyone?) here are TMN’s biggest takeaways from a fascinating chat.

1. Genre tribes aren’t a thing in the mainstream anymore

The stat that sent a murmur around the attentive crowd: 78% of young people don’t consider the genre of music they like to be key to their identity. Alice Kimberley pulled that figure from VICE’s research surveys, noting that it signalled a huge shift from the experiences of most people in that audience.

“That’s actually profound, when you think about it,” she said. “As a young person, you walked into a room and you said, ‘What kind of music do you listen to?’ And if I said, ‘Pop,’ and you said, ‘Rap,’ we weren’t friends. And now, that doesn’t happen.”

Duggan had just pointed out that Junkee Media’s recent rebranding of the rock-focused FasterLouder as Music Junkee was done for precisely this reason: genre tribes just aren’t a meaningful way to pigeonhole audiences anymore.

“We had FasterLouder, which we launched in 2004, which was back in the day, were you a dance fan or a rock fan. And you couldn’t be both. If you went to Big Day Out, you went to Boiler Room, or the main stage, you didn’t move between the two.

It was this year when we realised… we did a lot of research, we realised that those genres, they’re gone now. We relaunched FasterLouder as Music Junkee with the idea being that people just like music. So you can like Adele, Beyoncé, some band, and Childish Gambino.”

2. Artists and startups actually have a lot in common.

Connolly kicked off the discussion by drawing parallels between his previous career in artist management and his current work in VC – both, he said, involve trying to find people who are doing something cool and then making it your job to boost them up.

The similarity, he pointed out, is that both industries are “based on hits”.

“You maybe have… let’s say you’ve got ten startups or ten bands or whatever it is. Maybe one or two of those are going to be really, really massive, and the others are like … there’s some in the middle tier, and then there’s some that are a little bit below that.”

“Everyone is potentially a startup,” YouTube’s Powell agreed. “They’re same as a founder. They’ve got that passion, but they haven’t necessarily got the full skills to build a business. We’ve got a number of programs that we run which help creators and musicians to try and build a full suite of capabilities. We run businesses boot camps, for instance. We’ve got production spaces where they can come and create more content…” That facilitation, Powell says, is incredibly important to what YouTube’s music team hope to achieve.

3. Big paradigm shifts in music technology are few and far between, but world-changing when they turn up.

Connolly said that while Blackbird are “super keen for music tech”, it had only just recommended its first music tech company to an accelerator – because the goal is to find something that’s “completely transformative”.

“We see a lot of technology solutions for existing paradigms, and we look for things that want to knock the paradigm over, or just drive a truck right through it. It’s a difficult thing to do in music because you have these institutional pillars that are quite hard to move,” Connolly explained.

“I think music generally has been responsible for the success of some of the biggest technology companies in the world in the last twenty years. Like Apple brought itself back from the dead off the back of music. Spotify is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. There’s definitely a way to create really big returns and make a lot of money from music tech. It’s just a difficult thing to do.”

4. A computer or a bot could absolutely write a reliable hit – but one human with an interesting sound can change the whole game.

Startups like PopGun are developing songwriting AIs, and there’s been a rumble for years about whether songwriting software could create a hit from scratch.

“You can absolutely write a pop hit with a computer. One hundred percent. But I only say that because I don’t have a higher respect for pop hits,” said an unapologetic Connolly (whose background in music was in the independent and alternative space). “You could create an algorithm. You could analyse all of the hits of the last twenty years, create an algorithm which could repeat that. That’s what people do anyway, right?”

“That’s already happening,” Rogers pointed out, citing hitmakers like Benny Blanco and Dr Luke who excel at following a formula – but then added that even the most reliable chart-toppers aren’t omniscient, recalling that Gotye’s sudden ascendance into the realm of Billboard chart-toppers had the ever-reliable Dr Luke completely stumped as to exactly why Somebody That I Used To Know had caught on the way it did.

“The reason why I got invited to Dr Luke’s studio was because I managed Gotye … [And Dr Luke] was just getting so upset about it. He’s just like, ‘I just can’t figure it out. Like, this has changed things, man. This is crazy.’

“I do genuinely think while there will be people using all forms of technology as they are to continue to push rhythm, push sound… Like, there’s still that human thing that you can’t take away.”

5. Innovative tech can be fun, useful, and engaging – but it needs to maintain a human connection to really cut through with music fans.

“We see from our side is that technology just makes it much easier for artists to have a direct connection with their fans and to be really open about how their career is developing – what’s working, what’s not working – and to tell a complete story about their life,” says Powell, who said later that artists are only just starting to work out how best to use the VR and 360 video capabilities YouTube has had since last year.

Kimberley told the panel how the buzz at SXSW this year was all about the “humanisation” of tech, as well as the idea of the “adjacent possible”: the actual uses that can spring from technology once innovation has gone as far as it can go, once the novelty has worn off.

“I think for ages, everyone has been guilty of it. We just got distracted by bright, shiny things,” Kimberley said. The panel had just been discussing how hologram performances – a la Tupac at Coachella 2012 – had been all the rage for a cultural moment but then the idea slunk back into the shadows, even though Connolly and Rogers thought the idea could still work for certain departed icons like Bowie.

“I think this is the beauty of festivals like Laneway … the ones that still survive … is [asking] ‘What the fuck do our audience want? Forget the novelty. Like why are they here? Why are they coming to us?’ and then, ‘Could we use tech to provide that?’” Rogers said.

“I truly believe this is the future of tech in music. … If your artist is all about connection and emotional empathy, then maybe haptics, which allow you to feel through a phone, are the perfect way to do that because it’s about feeling. But if you’re just doing it for the sake of it, I think that’s the end.”

And when asked about where they’d invest their business’s last $1000, three of the four panellists said they’d put it into people power: buy some coffees for some smart, passionate humans, and have a chat.

“People are so important,” said Kimberley. “Like every album you’ve ever loved is because someone told you about that album and told you why it was special. That’s why you were obsessed with it. I know that’s my story. Computers and technology can’t generate word-of-mouth, like can’t be that person who’s like, ‘Fucking hell, listen to this, Danny.’ It can’t do that.”