Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:07:19 · Mitch Glazier
[00:07:19] S4: The word balance is the right one and it's not an easy one. You know, you've... It's one of those things where over time, you you you know, a barrier pops up here and then you kind of pivot and then a barrier pops up here and you kind of pivot and you you sort of land in a zone that feels right because the responses that you're getting both from the creative community and from fans, they do start to line up. And I think in AI, they are lining up much more closely than they did during previous years of disruption. Some of it has been because of the democratization of the industry where the gatekeeping roles have changed, where the partnerships between those who partner and invest with artists and the artists themselves have changed. In a world where artist and label services, know like a la carte services are a bigger part of revenue, in an area where catalog and forever exploitation and new investors in the industry have come in, the landscape is much wider now And it's not like there are just two types of big actors kind of controlling or sharing in all of the money. Right? Now there's like dozens of different types of folks meeting artists in different places where they are and meeting fans in different places where they are. And so it feels to me like this disruption which is huge and I hope we talk about it. The good news is unlike Napster, I don't feel like we are facing it at odds at which is kind of what it felt like back then. Now it feels like we're not in the same place, but we're kind of rowing in the same general direction, which is that everybody understands that art and commerce have always had tension and there's always gonna have to be a balance. But authenticity and that connection between a human being artist and a fan, the the preservation of that seems to be paramount in everything that we're doing. Whether you're investing or whether or not you're listening or whether you're performing. And and to me, it's that sort of... We're not fighting in this, like, space anymore between just a business model or an investment. We are now fighting to keep the art as human art and the connection between an artist and a fan sort of preserved and alive. And that to me just seems like a much larger purpose, I guess. So it feels very different to me. I... It feels like a good bookend like you.
00:10:03 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
I started my career with Napster, but on the other side, learned a ton as a young lawyer. And now on the other side, we had AI and comparing the two is so wild. I mean, the polls during Napster were like, you know, fans over here and creators kind of hiding a little bit and the company's over here. And now it's like AI's over here and we're all together on the other side. [00:10:30] S3: Yeah. I mean, like, I was... Again, I I cannot emphasize this enough. I was a bad lawyer and I should not have been doing that job. [00:10:35] S4: I doubt that.
00:10:35 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[00:10:35] S4: I doubt that. [00:10:36] S3: I was not good at it. I I I really wasn't. And what I remember from that time was, you know, we we... It was college kids and they... You know, their universities would turn over their IP addresses and they would get their little lawsuit and we would tell them, we're gonna go to the district court in Chicago, you're gonna settle for $5,000 because that's what the RIAA is running this program at. It's $5,000 settlements to break even on the cost and to deter you and then you're gonna go work the pizza place for a semester, pay your bill and move on. And I thought this can't be accomplishing a goal. Right? Like the thing I'm doing right now is is nothing. Like, I... And and maybe that's why I felt like I was a horrible lawyer. Maybe that's why I got out of it. But what you're describing is the polls there where there was no pushback on, well these kids just love music. Right? The thing they love is just music and they now they can get it and they have it. They weren't thinking about the business model of CDs. Right? Because that's what fun maps are fundamentally disrupted was [00:11:32] S6: That's right.
00:11:33 · Nilay Patel
[00:11:33] S3: There was there was a scarce physical object that you could go pay $15 for and if Metallica sold enough of those, their plane would get bigger and everyone can kind of see that. And I'm listening to a lot of this music and it should make you rich was nowhere close to reality. We've built those models now. We have built Spotify and Apple Music and all the subscription models. I want to talk about YouTube quite a bit actually, where you can listen to a lot of music and some people will get rich but a middle class of artists may just be totally hollowed out. And now the AI companies are like, and we're going to stand up a competitor where you can just ask for music and no one except us will get paid. And that is probably built on a bunch of artists that we used to make money by having a lot of attention. That swirl to me is the, it's just the one that I can't decide where my ideals fit into that. Right? Like as a person who is open Suno and had a good time just making some music. I'm like, well, I understand how this is great for one kind of person with an artistic bent. I understand why this is fun as somebody who likes music. I do not understand the economics that follow from this. The same way I had no idea how the economics of disrupting the CD would shake out. And I think we can, I'll give you actually one example just to make this question even longer. We had the CEO of Cloudflare on the show. And they're trying to stand up a system where instead of websites running advertising on traffic, everyone gets paid a fraction of a cent to make content on the web. And he was like, you know, like Spotify. And I was like, dude, Spotify changed the entire music industry. Like artists have different jobs now because of that economic model. And he was like, no, I think the big ones are really happy. And you can argue with him or not argue with him. But it felt to me like the tech industry did not understand what that disruption actually did to music in that moment. And now we're standing on a precipice of it again. So again, I just want to start there. I'm feeling this like existential tension. You described it as art and commerce where the commerce is going to change and so the art has to change as well. How are you thinking about that?
00:13:45 · Mitch Glazier
[00:13:45] S4: If you go back to why... Since we're talking about existential things. If you go back to why copyright exists, it's to create more opportunities for more art in the future. That's why copyright exists. That's the reason why the property right exists. It's to create an incentive to allow people to protect their creations so that they will go ahead and make a living doing it. Right? We don't want this just to be a hobby. We want this to be, you know, artists are extraordinary people in our culture. They are geniuses who need to be incentivized to share that genius because, you know, they're not normal people. Like, they're not me. You know, they... These are like these are like incredible people who have something to share. And if they can't make a living doing it, then they can't and won't share it. And we are all worse off. Right? That's the whole purpose of copyright is to be able to allow them to be able to benefit from that in some way shape or form. Now obviously, all this infrastructure has grown up around it, these companies have grown up around it, etcetera. But that's sort of like the basic premise. And you you have to ask yourself the question, if nonhuman music, which can be made in two seconds without lived experience and in my view without a soul. If that can dilute or drown out the incentives for people to be able to make a living as humans making art, what happens? What happens to our culture? And I think that is an existential question that is not just sort of academic to ask. We can talk about differentiation in the marketplace. We can talk about, you know, whether or not, you know, Taylor Swift competing with like an indie grunge band is the right model, you know, for everybody to be able to get their piece of the business on these streaming services. But at its core, it's still essentially human and it still distributes art that took sometimes twenty years to make, sometimes three minutes to make. It depends on the genius of the of the artist doing it. But it still has all of those like human warts and and, you know, and and craft. It has craft. And I and I do think that if you have a system because the incentive is with the tech company that makes the AI to use everything that humanity has ever created to make money and at the same time then deplete the opportunity for future human music.
00:16:20 · Mitch Glazier
We're gonna have like a society that was like, you know, one way going backwards and another way going forwards. And if if the culture suffers going forwards more than improving on what went backwards, we are in the wrong place and we're not doing the right thing. And that's what I mean about sort of rowing together. I live in the policy world. You have to ask yourself what policies can we put into place to create the incentives to allow that better future of human made music. And it's really hard. It's it's super hard.