Decoder with Nilay Patel
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.
00:16:55 · Nilay Patel
[00:16:55] S3: That to me, again, when I say I'm having this existential dilemma, just to put it into a clear focus for the listener. In the age of the CD, the economic value was a scarce physical object. Yes. There are only so many CDs and then you could maybe copy CDs and like Apple would get in trouble for saying that you could like rip, mix and burn CDs, right? Like that was a whole ad campaign and Apple got in trouble for incentivizing people to copy CDs but what the you would pay money for an object that existed. And we got to the digital world and the friction to copy the song went to zero and we had to invent a new model and that model looks like Spotify and the rest and now we're in the age of AI and the friction to create might be going to zero. So there's even less scarcity because you can just horsepower an AI pop star into existence singing AI song and you're gonna there's gonna be a glut of supply. Somewhere in there is marketing, somewhere in there is fandom, right? There's all this stuff that can create other kinds of scarcity. But that's the journey the music industry has been on. I always say whatever happens to the music industry happens to everybody else five years later, it's all the music industry is always on cutting edge. Where does the new scarcity come from in this model? Is it you doing policy work and lobbying governments for changes to the laws? Is it is it fans revolting and saying we want human label, human artists? Is it the platforms labeling everything? Where does the scarcity come back in?
00:18:16 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
[00:18:16] S4: You're the first person I think that sort of that I've listened to that sort of honed in on like on on this particular question. At the end of the day, it's always the fans in in my view. They will always at the end of the day sort of win because if you are any kind of service, any with any kind of business model, I don't care if you're AI, I don't care if you're streaming, you need human beings to pay you money Usually by subscribing, that's the highest revenue source. And they're not gonna do that if at the end of the day, they feel like they are losing out. And I do think given all of the focus groups and polling and, you know, everything that we've done and other people have done on this, it is very clear that fans wanna maintain that human connection with an artist. Mhmm. Yeah. It's not just about the music. It's also about the artist, the persona, the brand, the the emotional connection. You know, Taylor Swift's fans love her music, but they also love her. Yeah. Right? Pearl Jam's fans love their music, but it's also like Pearl Jam. You know what I mean? It's a... It it... They're their own piece of culture. And so we know, for example, that if a fan knows that a song is AI, then they have a different view of it than if they know that it is human. So do you think that's gonna last forever? [00:19:42] S3: I'm I'm honestly curious about this because it has changed even in the last year.
00:19:47 · Mitch Glazier
[00:19:47] S4: It has. I think on generative AI, it will last forever. In other words, a completely machine made piece of art because you lose that connection. An assistive AI where creators are using AI even in a broad way in order to sort of... As a tool to get their creation out there. Right now, it might be a little bit suspect. You know, in a few years it may just be like using a synthesizer or using auto tune. Like, you know, there might be some people who think it's, you know, not the greatest but it it it'll be an accepted part of the art form. So I think there's a difference between are you maintaining the human connection? That's the question. You can use AI as a as a big part of the tool to do that, but in some way are you maintaining that human connection? I think that's the test. And that doesn't happen with a prompt. I mean, that doesn't happen with me sitting there typing in 18 words on Suno and then like more words to like, you know, get it to a place that sounds better to my ear and then sticking it up on Spotify through DistroKid. That I I just don't think that that will ever cut it even though I think there is a bigger scale when it comes to assisted AI. So fans rule, I think labeling is happening and will continue to happen because of fans. I think consumer reactions will happen because of labeling and that that will then drive the economics of the business. So labeling is actually a very important piece of But I also think that if you don't secure the right, fans never get a chance to then do their thing, which is to ultimately control the market. So, you know, my focus all around the world is have we secured the basic rights of creators? If we've done that, fans can take over and drive the market from there.