Of course, the streaming services have also moved to capture the demand for functional audio. (That exceeds $15,000 a day, with some estimates putting the figure north of $30,000.) For comparison’s sake, Omar Apollo and Latto, two recent best new artist nominees, earn a little over 3 million streams a day on Spotify combined. Together, the trio currently earn around 7 million daily Spotify streams, according to the Spotify for Artists tool. The first two churn out instrumental covers of classics (a version of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” for example, is a more modern form of Muzak), while the third specializes in tranquilizing ambience. Strange Fruits has created a series of background-music brands - Chill Fruits Music, LoFi Fruits Music and Sleep Fruits Music - that rack up streams. And WMG owns the Alternative Distribution Alliance, which has a deal with Strange Fruits, founded by Dutch electronic producer Stef Van Vugt. WMG entered a distribution deal with Endel for 20 albums (including Rainy Night and Foggy Morning) in 2019. How Much Humanity Will AI-Generated Songs Need to Be Copyrightable? (Guest Column) (A royalty payout is triggered after 30 seconds of listening.) UMG has partnered with the Calm app on 60-minute sleep remixes of tracks in its catalog. In 2019, Donoghue wrote about a playlist called Sleep & Mindfulness Thunderstorms put together by Filtr, a playlisting company owned by Sony Music: a downpour cut into hundreds of minutelong snippets. It’s no surprise, then, that all of the majors have tried to establish a presence in this corner of the streaming market. When companies upload hours-long playlists of rainfall with the goal of earning nighttime streams, “it’s hard to argue that there’s any composed thought in that - there doesn’t seem to be a creative act,” says Philip Sheppard, founder/CEO of LifeScore, which uses AI to “create unique, real-time soundtracks for every journey.” He adds, “Some aspects of that look like a cynical money grab.” Put more simply, functional music’s gain could be part of the majors’ loss. “The model right now, whether you’re an independent artist or on a major label, really sucks when rain and white noise is eating into market share,” agrees one executive at a distribution company. Universal Music Group (UMG) chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge wrote to staff recently that “great music” is under threat from “a flood” of “lower-quality functional content that in some cases can barely pass for ‘music.’ ” And it makes it harder for both established and new artists to compete for listeners’ time and attention. The continued growth of functional audio can cut into major-label market share - imagine over a dozen Swifts running around without any links to the big record companies - which has already fallen noticeably on Spotify in five years. What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music? And it’s worth noting that another music executive with extensive experience studying this corner of the market believes that functional music is even bigger. For comparison’s sake, Taylor Swift’s entire catalog did around 8 billion streams through all of 2022, according to Luminate Endel’s estimate of functional music’s size is 15 times that and equates to over $630 million annually for recording rights holders. Endel conducted research regarding the size of the functional audio market early in 2022 and estimated that it was earning around 120 billion streams annually. “There’s a lot of money” in this corner of audio, according to Kieron Donoghue, founder of Humble Angel Records and former vp of global playlists strategy at Warner Music Group (WMG). Oleg Stavitsky, co-founder/CEO of AI-driven functional sound company Endel, defines this type of audio as something “not designed for conscious listening” - instead, it’s engineered to help people achieve “a certain cognitive state.” It’s often encountered on popular playlists designed to promote sleep, studying or relaxation, and it can encompass the pitter-patter of rainfall, warm baths of ambient electronics and the laid-back wing of instrumental hip-hop known as lo-fi. That tidal wave of billions of new songs may not lead to a corresponding number of hits - after all, how many of the photos on Instagram actually attract widespread attention? But one sector that could be easily transformed is functional music, which is not driven by hits or even distinctive artists. It Takes a Lot of People to Create All This AI Music
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |