Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:55:52 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[00:55:52] S3: an investor in the future. Here and say that the the baby punk rocker in me is... We could do another full hour on artists now have the opportunity to sell their catalog to Goldman Sachs. It's another hour, but It is. I I I know it's there. [00:56:07] S4: And listen, we all... The... We all we all... We're all 20 at some time, and then we're 50 at another time. Fair enough. It's it's, you know, it's the way that... Everybody wants to take care of their grandkids at some point. So... But but this is an opportunity that they have now that they didn't have before. And so I think that this disruption, I think there's more skin in the game for the actual creator than there was in the past when the revenue was just kinda more bifurcated or trifurcated. And nobody on the creative side of the equation thinks that it's right that, like, Suno will be making all the money from all of the music that has been created in the past. And that that substitutional effect is gonna deprive the artist or any one of their partners. Like, if the artist is in the middle in the sun and you've got all the folks around them from performing rights organizations to record companies to publishers to managers to producers to agents, etcetera. Like they're all sort of partners in a piece of that larger puzzle. And now the artist has more skin in the game than they ever had before, which is another reason why I think we're sort of rowing together a little bit longer.
00:57:27 · Nilay Patel
[00:57:27] S3: There are other outcomes here. I think it's Warner who's partnered with Suno, they made a model on Warner's music so they don't run into these issues. If that proliferates, then you don't get to sue the AI music companies because they made their models with licensed music. But you'll face a supply problem on platforms like Spotify, where suddenly you can just flood the platforms of music and your solution there, at least as I understand this conversation is labeling. Right? You're gonna put labels on the AI stuff so the fans can make a market decision and the bet is the fans will choose humans. Is there another solution to the glut of supply?
00:58:05 · Mitch Glazier
[00:58:05] S4: Yeah. I I I think sort of an immediate sort of solution for the now in the marketplace is labeling. But I also think that these licensing agreements, and I'm not privy to the licensing agreements that exist with Suno or any other AI company because I represent competitors, so they would never tell me. But I would imagine this sort of idea of dilution where you don't wanna put at risk on streaming platforms, artists, music because 90% of everything that they're competing with is AI slop, if I could use that term. The licensing agreement gives you the leverage and the ability if your rights are secured to say, I'm not gonna let you download all this stuff. I mean, it's rumored that in the Udio agreement, like, a walled garden had to be built Yeah. So that fans could make music within the network on their own Spotify like app. It wouldn't discourage them from also having Spotify or Apple. It increases the revenue for everybody, but we're not going to allow you to download from this platform and dilute that platform. I don't if that'll work. That seems to be one model. It it could be that the that the terms with Suno had a limit on it or considered supply. But I'm not a business person, I'm a policy person, but I think that there are plenty of ways if the rights are secured that through licensing arrangements and agreements creators could then have the leverage to affect the supply so as not to cannibalize the the work that they have in other platforms.
00:59:37 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier, Mitch Glazier
[00:59:37] S3: Well, I think the policy problem of of supply is it will affect the business somehow. We should talk about Spotify for a minute. It's amazing that we haven't spent more time talking [00:59:45] S4: about Spotify. [00:59:46] S3: I'm I think the model companies are just not going to listen, right? Like you can see what they are doing. They are gluttonous for data and they think that they can outrace the consequences. We'll see what happens there. Spotify is not training a model. Spotify is just distributing music. That's the thing that they're doing. They're a pure play business in that way and they have a lot of incentives for AI music to replace the music they have to otherwise pay for on that platform. They have a lot of incentives for white noise and fake streams in in history in to to do these things and they've gotten in trouble for some of that. Right? Like this is a real thing that happens on this platform. Are they going to participate in a labeling scheme when say this is AI music? [01:00:27] S4: I think so and not because as much as they have an economic incentive to lower their costs, their biggest economic incentive is to keep fans paying $9.99, $129,915.99 a month. And so if fans feel duped, is [01:00:45] S3: that proven out in the market? I'm actually very curious about this. [01:00:48] S6: Yes.
01:00:48 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
[01:00:48] S6: Yes. [01:00:48] S3: Right, you're saying you're gonna know there's AI slop on Spotify now or when you search for Taylor Swift, you get a bunch of weird Taylor Swift sound alikes which is an experience everyone has on Spotify. It hasn't churned those fans yet. There's not some exodus to title or Apple Music. Spotify is still dominant in its way.
01:01:04 · Mitch Glazier
[01:01:04] S4: Right. I think they're walking down the road slowly, probably a little too slowly. I'm trying to see if they can do like just enough to keep those two things in balance. Like right now, for example, Spotify is saying, well, we'll only we will only disclose or label a recording as AI in the credits. How many people look at the credits? Yeah. I wish more people looked at the credits. They discover producers and songwriters and other awesome folks who have contributed to the recording, but they don't. They need to do it at the track level. They're not there yet, but they are disclosing AI personas that are made because that's sort of like the highest on the dupe on on the dupe scale. Right? And then on under that, they're looking at the fact that already 90% of the recordings available on Spotify get like 10% of the revenue and 10% of the content gets 90% of the revenue because most of what's on there gets less than 10 listens or less than a 100 listens because all of this slop is just going on. Which means storage costs and all sorts of other things that they have to think about. So I think that they will go as far down the road as fans will demand, as their users will demand. And I think when we get to a point if people get recommendations in their algorithm, Like, if you like this song, you'll also like this one. And when you listen to it, it turns out it was AI and you didn't know it was AI and you feel deceived, that's when they've got a giant problem. Because they're responsible for that recommendation. They're the one that fed that to you. And so we do have lots of consumer research out there that shows that subscribers just like all consumers wanna feel like nobody's pulling the wool over