Music Everywhere

Chances are that, like me, you grew up on cassettes, taping your favorite songs when they were played on the radio, thus creating your own unique playlist that you could take with you in your Walkman. Those were the first days of portable and personal music. Prior to that, we would mostly listen to music in our homes and cars using radios and stereo towers.

Today, music is everywhere, in our homes and on the go. Of all the forms of entertainment within our smart homes, music is omnipresent, both in itself and as part of our other activities. Technology has profoundly changed the way we consume and produce music, but it hasn’t changed who we listen to: people making music. Will AI change that as it becomes capable of generating music?

We Are Engaging With Music Everywhere

We use music on our personal devices during our daily activities. It energizes us when exercising or cleaning our homes and it helps us to relax and fall asleep. Moreover, with music accessible on our personal devices and through smart speakers, our homes and lives are filled with music.

Source: IFPI, 20221M¹

We engage with music in more ways than ever: through streaming services, social media platforms, short-form video apps, live music, but also live and on the radio or TV (see graph). According to the IFPI (the organization that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide), music fans listened to an average of 20.1 hours per week in 2022 (up from 18.4 hours in 2021).

Those hours are not just spent listening to music on streaming platforms; music is also an important part of other entertainment forms. Music-focused TV shows or films are very popular, with 58% of people watching those, according to IFPI1. And 44% of gamers watched a virtual music concert on a gaming platform in the last three months1. On social media, music is used to make reels more engaging, a practice that is made even easier with most social media platforms licensing popular music from the major labels.

When looking at all innovations, it is striking that each one has resulted in us consuming more music. From vinyl to cassettes to CDs to MP3 players and most recently to streaming, each new technology increased the number of accessible songs, the quality of the music, and the ease with which we could get to the song we wanted to hear.

Everyone Can Now Create Music

Today, with AI, the number of tracks is increasing faster than ever. Luminate², who monitors the entertainment market and provides insights, recently found that in the first quarter of 2023, streaming services added on average 120,000 new tracks per day, up from 93,400 per day in all of 2022.

According to Universal Music Group’s CEO Sir Lucian Grange³, AI contributes in part to this oversupply. While most of this content is of poor quality created by prior generations of AI, newer generations are getting better at making music. In April, an AI-generated track called "Heart On My Sleeve" mimicked the popular artists Drake and The Weeknd so well that it went viral before it was taken down for copyright infringement.

However, Will We Listen to All That Music?

Back in 2004, Chris Anderson published an article in Wired (later turned into a book) about the Long Tail. He described how the democratization of production and distribution in combination with a reduction in search costs would reshape how we consume content by driving more attention away from traditional hits and to the long tail of niches and small publications and creators.

When applied to music, we indeed see a long tail. And with the help of AI that long tail of niche content will probably get longer. Nevertheless, this long tail mostly applies to production, but not so much to consumption. In his book Tarzan Economics, Spotify's former chief economist Will Page points out that people spend 90% of their time listening to less than 2% of all songs on streaming platforms. It is the left side and not the long tail that drives music consumption and contains most of its value.

When considering all the innovations that music has incorporated, all the technology that has upended the value chain, the one person who remains standing is the artist. In a sea of artificially created content, they are likely to stand out even more. Moreover, these artists will probably use AI. In a recent interview, Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys⁴ said that AI is a useful tool in a songwriter’s kit, for instance to help overcome writers’ block

It's not so long ago that the internet and digital piracy could have been the death of the music industry. Yet another innovation, streaming, saved it. Similarly, AI and other innovations could potentially improve quality and create new music experiences, in and out of our homes.