Making and playing music have never been so popular. The modern music technology industry has made a lot of this possible but may have reached an inflection point.
Innovation is thriving, but fragmentation persists across formats, standards, protocols, processes, and data. Interoperability, transparency, and trust are essential between stakeholders across the ecosystem and throughout the music value chain. Failure in these and other areas raises costs for everyone and can limit opportunities for collaboration, between both the technologies themselves and the artists and studios that use them, making everyone's musical journey more difficult.
Many industries have created consortia, associations, and coalitions to address similar issues and the desire to work cooperatively on matters that affect them all. The music technology industry is no exception, and the time seems right to act, particularly with regard to current concerns about privacy, data security and integrity, and the increased use of artificial intelligence.
A new music tech industry initiative might be the answer—and at the very least there should be a conversation about its potential value. The objective should not be to duplicate existing efforts, such as developing common standards, protocols, or business practices. However, the entire music tech ecosystem could benefit from high-level direction and governance on these issues; highlighting gaps and new challenges; and guiding work that remains to be done, so that the industry can achieve its full potential.
The Realities of Music Making Today
Making music has rarely been so popular and accessible, and the instruments and tools available so varied. Creatives have always cherished their autonomy, and the tools they rely on (whether owned, rented, borrowed, used in a studio—or even built to their own needs) are key to their creative process. Today, artists can access a vast range of tools for recording, mixing, and producing music, before—and increasingly, even without—being handled within fully equipped professional studios.
So-called digital audio workstations (DAWs) record and save information about every aspect of an artist's work: the actual music (whether captured as audio or notation), settings used for every track or session, including which effects or software plug-ins are used, together with their respective settings, workflow, and automation of any of those settings. Whether for recording or live performance, DAWs are a central tool for today's artists.
"Collaboration in isolation" – making music during Covid-19There are many testimonies—from artists all across the music spectrum to hobbyists—that have offered insights as to how people responded to enforced isolation during the pandemic but nonetheless wanted to continue musical collaboration. Their experiences highlight not only the challenges of real-time collaboration on the Internet; but also of security, data integrity, and being forced to work across the range of technologies that they individually and collectively used.
However, creativity is also a collaborative effort, and that collaboration means that artists will often work with others using different tools. There are tools for everyone—but not everyone working on a single collaborative project necessarily opts for the same ones. And this is where problems emerge, with unnecessary friction between parties trying to get different tools to work together without losing valuable time, content, and data in the process.
Overview of Some of Today's Challenges
From Analog to Digital
In an older world of "all-analog" music production, challenges were principally ones of sound quality, whether of the original music played, in its recording or performance, or of the playback media used. In today's world of "mainly digital" music production, stakeholders—whether an amateur musician or a large professional production studio—are faced with a highly competitive market and a dizzying array of tools, from physical (analog and digital) instruments to technology hardware, software, platforms, and services.
(Nearly) Everything Is Now Data
In the whole value creation chain—from initial content creation and processing, through recording, mixing, mastering, production, diffusion, sharing, and performance—audio (by its nature analog), music notation, and control messages are increasingly encoded and shared as digital data.
Interoperability and Portability
This data—together with other types—is often tightly bundled within a specific hardware or software product and as such can decrease the opportunity to collaborate with others using different products. Every stakeholder needs to be able to work together with any other without friction between the technologies being used.
Transparency and Integrity
Taken on its own without proper context, it is nearly impossible to know what any data represents. It could be encoding anything—a sound, a melody, orchestration, an effect, an automation or other instruction, metadata, etc. It can be repurposed and manipulated for uses other than originally intended. It could be corrupted—accidentally or deliberately. Every stakeholder needs to know what data they are working with, where it was received from, where it has been sent or shared, and that the data is complete and not modified in any way.
Availability
By their nature, digital systems—or rather systems that need to convert analog to digital and back again, as is the case for music—introduce latency or a delay in a transmitted signal. In professional studios and standalone DAWs, latency will be in the milliseconds range and be effectively imperceptible. When artists work collaboratively over the internet, latency becomes an issue for real-time collaboration. Stakeholders need to be able to access data where and when they need it, particularly when timing is critical.
Provenance
When an artist is at the center of every aspect of creativity, they are able to identify what has been done by whom, whether in the musical creation itself or in its subsequent treatment or processing. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence systems, it is increasingly difficult to know what has been created by or has originated with a human and what has not. Every stakeholder needs to know the source of all data with which they are working.
Confidentiality
Particularly in situations where recording or production is deliberately conducted out of the public gaze, security is important for artist and brand reputation. When a product is finally published, distributed, or performed, artists and studios want to be able to determine when, where, how, and by whom their work is used by others, if at all, including by artificial intelligence systems for their own training purposes. Stakeholders need to be confident that their data has been accessed or seen only by those intended. They should be able to indicate freedom of, or limits to, the use of their creations and have such information persist and accompany their work.
Ultimately, all of these challenges have one theme in common:
Trust
In an industry and market with so many products and services, stakeholders need to feel secure and comfortable that everything and everyone they work with is known, reliable, consistent, and predictable.
Existing Pain Points and Responses
Artists and producers are working in a fragmented technology ecosystem. There are problems of limited interoperability between products and platforms, licensing and attribution conflicts, distribution and platform bottlenecks, weak incentives for cooperation, data silos, and AI model fragmentation.
This is not the first time many of these issues have been raised or addressed by specific initiatives or standards. But as these challenges and pain points are identified and addressed, one key conclusion emerges: that while there is a sprawling landscape of excellent initiatives addressing the specific music technology issues raised, there is no overarching response or governance framework across the industry.
The advent and widespread uptake of artificial intelligence systems is merely accelerating these trends, as well as presenting new challenges. The space is growing larger and more complex, but the artist—the human content creator—remains the focus. The use of music technology is thus also becoming embroiled in discussions of policy and legislation.
Stakeholders attempt to navigate this increased complexity, but without a clear and agreed road map—and this underlines the need for a coordinated industry response while protecting and nurturing human creativity.
For more information, or to discuss how interoperability, trust, and governance challenges may affect your business in the evolving music technology ecosystem, contact the author, Peter Brown of Venable's Technology and Innovation Group, at musictech@Venable.com.