From Fake Drake to a Fan Frenzy: AI Can Help – Not Just Hurt – the Music Business | PRO Insight

“Heart on My Sleeve,” TikTok creator Ghostwriter’s recent AI-generated riff on the Weeknd and Drake, understandably upped the ante of angst in the music industry. It threw off vibes of the original, “bad” Napster that pillaged musicians and decimated the music business back in the day.

Here we go again, more than two decades later. Spotify and other streaming services took down the “Fake Drake” track. But “Heart on My Sleeve” still proliferates across the Internet. And if there’s one thing we learned from bad Napster, whac-a-mole take-down and litigation strategies can’t turn back the clock on disruptive new technologies. Only open-minded acceptance and innovation can.

I lived this lesson firsthand during the dark days of Napster when I served as president of tech-driven music company Musicmatch, later sold to Yahoo. We were among the first to work closely with the music industry to beat back Napster’s threat by creating the legitimate music streaming world that, although certainly not perfect, demonstrated that better music listening experiences and deeper fan engagement could take back the industry, monetize at scale and open the door to a wider global market for artists.

And it has. The industry just experienced its eighth straight year of growth led by streaming. Spotify reported earnings Tuesday, revealing that it had crossed the threshold of half a billion customers: 515 million monthly active users and 210 million paying subscribers.

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Let’s apply that lesson here. AI fakes, just like peer-to-peer theft and CD counterfeiting before that, are here to stay. The pain is real, of course, and I’m not minimizing it. So how can, say, Beyoncé and other musicians take those AI lemons and turn them into “Lemonade”?

One answer is to make AI-generated music better: higher quality and easier, not harder, for fans to access. I touched upon one possibility in my last article, suggesting that artists could make music stems available to fans for them to generate their own reimagined songs. Rather than fight the AI power, imagine Drake welcoming fans to use AI to remix his tracks or add their own creative flourishes. Spotify might consider allowing fans to upload such tracks if the rights can get worked out, CEO Daniel Ek said Tuesday on a call to discuss the company’s first-quarter earnings. Consider this a new kind of AI-enabled fan collaboration that generates even more fandom.

Think about it. When Drake releases music — which, like most artists, is not through a continuous flow of new songs but typically through a drop of a creatively orchestrated album — hungry fans scrutinize every element of those tracks, from their hooks and the melodies to their lyrics and production. Fans obsess over every detail. They talk about it. They post about it on social media.

Now imagine them actively playing with it, creating a continuous flow of new music that, yes, is artificially assisted but authentically inspired. Those tracks potentially draw more attention to Drake’s real work, not less. Exhibit A is Ghostwriter’s fake. Does “Heart on My Sleeve” cannibalize Drake’s music? Or does it elevate it?

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The answer here comes from Disney’s animated film “Frozen” – the Mouse House’s $1.3 billion box office smash that spawned an even bigger blockbuster sequel, not to mention over $100 billion in related licensing and merchandise. And what lit the fuse for the twin films to become Disney’s top animated franchise of all time? It was fans and Disney’s great hands-off experiment. For the first time, Disney lawyers allowed fans to create and distribute their own videos using songs from the film, rather than send take-down notices or sue them for infringement. Active fan engagement with Disney’s sacred intellectual property became the single most powerful marketing weapon to generate excitement and anticipation for the actual Disney creation.

AI-enabled play that allows fans to reimagine their favorite artist’s music holds the potential to do just that, serving as a dynamic and interactive new fan-fueled marketing tool. Ultimately, if done right, it can open up entirely new fan-driven revenue opportunities.

I’ve got to believe that new technology will be developed to add tags to AI-generated collabs that trigger royalty payments to both artists, much like Google uses its Content ID tech to pay artists for fan use of their songs on their YouTube videos. Always the tech pioneer, artist Grimes tweeted a couple days ago that she would “split 50% royalties on any successful AI-generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist I collab with.”

And it’s not just about the fans. AI gives musicians an entirely new tool to create novel sonic landscapes. Now they can incorporate elements of their own music stems, perhaps even previously discarded ones, to expand their palette and create songs that enrich both themselves and their fans in ways that are simply different, perhaps even impossible to create with older generations of instruments and software. New canvases on which to paint should arguably augment their craft, not cannibalize it.

Of course, this is an optimist’s view of AI and the “Fake Drake” phenomenon. But let’s not forget that we’ve listened to this track before. When electric guitars came onto the scene, acoustic purists railed against it. Remember the blowback to Dylan after he plugged in? And then, how about when Gary Numan dropped those guitars for synthesizers? Disruptive and controversial, of course, but they also enabled him and other artists to create entirely new sounds.

Synths birthed ’80s New Wave and later the entire genre of techno that rules Coachella’s Sahara Tent today. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Musicians take both sides. But the reality is that it just is. I danced to it, of course. But I still mostly listen to acoustic. The old and the new coexist.

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I recently interviewed ’80s synth-pop superstar Howard Jones about AI for an earlier column. HoJo welcomed rather than bemoaned the new AI wave. He called for acceptance and opportunism, urging musicians to experiment with AI and use it to their advantage to create a new song. Maybe even a “New Song.”

Mega-artist and music futurist Peter Gabriel agrees. In a new blog post about AI and artistry, Gabriel’s advice to musicians was this: “When the future has shown itself so clearly and is flowing as fast as a river after a storm, it seems wiser to swim with the current.”

For those of you interested in learning more, visit Peter’s firm Creative Media at creativemedia.biz and follow him on Twitter @pcsathy. 

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