Lyor Cohen Says Hip-Hop Should Dominate 2018 Grammys
Music executive Lyor Cohen says hip-hop should dominate the top categories at the upcoming Grammys.
Cohen spoke with The Associated Press on Thursday about the Recording Academy giving rap a "deserving" chance. Both JAY-Z and Kendrick Lamar are nominated for album and record of the year. JAY-Z, the leading nominee with eight, is also nominated for song of the year.
"It's long overdue for the right artists to win the right category in the right time," Cohen said.
Cohen is now YouTube's global head of music, but has been an integral figure in hip-hop for decades as the former head of Def Jam Records. Next week, he's hosting a pre-Grammy event with Nas that will pay homage to rap and include appearances by Grandmaster Flash, Q-Tip, Fab Five Freddy and Chuck D.
The only rap-based acts to win album of the year are Lauryn Hill and Outkast, though Hill's album was mainly R&B and the Outkast album a mix of pop, funk and rap. A rap song has never won song of the year or record of the year.
Cohen credits the Recording Academy for inserting people knowledgeable of the genre to give hip-hop a "deserving" chance.
"I think they have new blood pumping through their veins that are actually aware of the present and future, and not just holding onto the past," he said.
Cohen said now is the perfect time to celebrate hip-hop with the 60th annual Grammy Awards being held in New York, the birthplace of the genre, for the first time in 15 years on Jan. 28. The show will air on CBS.
YouTube's Jan. 26 '80s-themed event will pay homage to the legacy of New York's hip-hop scene.
Graffiti artist Cycle created a colorful mural on a 55-foot-long wall canvas stacked by 400 boxes containing Google Home Max speakers. After he finished the mural, it was deconstructed and each box with a stereo speaker device inside was sent to prospective guests as an event invitation.
"We thought it would be original and unique," he said. "Our mission was not to do the typical same ole, same ole. But we wanted to do something thoughtful and exciting. It was fun. We had fun with it. ... It's about bringing the past to future. What better way to do it during Grammy week?"
Cohen said he's happy for his friend JAY-Z.
"Jay remains pushing our boundaries and creatively discovering more," he said. "He's a creative force. ... I'm pinching myself because I'm so happy."
Crafting Sound at Radium Audio: Creativity First and Foremost
First of all thanks to Fabio Di Santo for this article.
Andrew Diey, founder and creative director at Radium Audio tells us some pretty exciting stuff about workflow, reveals some techniques and share with us the evolution of his extremely creative sound studio.Â
From the early days of music-making, to the most recent successes, Radium Audio has become nowadays involved mainly with audio production for visual media, although that’s not just it.
Reading this interview is a chance for anyone interested in sound for media to read how pros made it and know craft their stuff; working on this interview made us all truly feel creativity and inspiration flowing. So, enjoy:
1. Tell us briefly how it all started. What’s the story of RadiumAudio?
AndrewDiey: I started out as an artist touring and releasing records under the name Black Faction on the Soleil Moon label. A director at ITV got hold of one of my records, and got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in creating a soundtrack for one of his productions “Secrets of the Dark Ages”. It ended up being BAFTA nominated, which was a nice validation for my first media project, but the truth is I really connected with creating music and soundscapes to picture, and I ended up staying in my tiny basement studio doing more and more of that, because I just loved it.
That’s when I finally understood that I’m really a studio head, the applause and attention of being onstage didn’t attract me, I just wanted to create. Eventually, after a short stint as an inhouse sound designer at the BBC, I started Radium Audio as a natural evolution, to make an environment for the creation of music and sound worlds, because I wanted to explore and push that creative space as far as I could.
2. Why do you personally think sound is vital to enhance a visualproduct?
AD: Whether sound is vital depends on the purpose of the visual product. If you’re looking to create an immersive storytelling experience for an audience, sound is an essential part of the stimulus a creative team uses to do that, just as are the visuals. These immersive experiences can range from watching a film, advert, or TV show, to getting into your car, entering a room, or putting on your headphones.Â
TO FULLY ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE, YOU HAVE TO ENGAGE THE PHYSICAL SENSES THEY WILL USE IN EXPERIENCING YOUR STORY
Throughout the 20th century age of media, visuals and sound have been used to tell stories, sound has been an integral part of that process since the 1920’s when the first “talkies”, came to the cinema and movies were no longer silent.Â
We’re entering a 21st century era of virtual reality now, where in addition to vision and hearing, sense of smell, touch and kinetic movement will also be engaged in storytelling for an audience. To leave sound out of the experience, is akin to cutting off the ears of the audience and still expecting them to have the same depth of experience. It simply wouldn’t work.
Sound and music is the secret weapon of storytelling. The visuals show the audience what is happening. The sound and music helps them feel and experience the emotion of what is happening, and they live the story from the inside, not just watch from the outside.
Recording Fire Whooshes at Quarry
For example, an audience might not understand why they got so frightened by a horror movie at the cinema. Although the film may be fantastically acted, lit, directed, shot and edited, it’s very likely that the music and sound design is mostly responsible for that emotional response. Try watching a really scary scene with the sound turned off. Even though you can still see everything that is happening, are you still as tense and wound up, as you were with the sound on high volume? In most cases, the answer will be no.
3. We know you always aim to craft and create your own audio material in the Radiumphonic Lab. How much do you rely on on-line libraries during your creative process? Do you think that using them prevent a project to have its specific personality, or in the end, if it sounds good, it sounds good and no-one willcare?
AD: In sound design, except in extremely rare circumstance, we don’t use purchased libraries. We have a full time sound recording team who are tasked with continually capturing sound and adding to our internal library for our creative team to draw upon, and we prefer to work with our own self made internal libraries, because we’ve had total control over the technical and creative quality, and everything is very bespoke to the way we work, and for our clients.Â
WE’VE SPENT YEARS BUILDING OUR OWN LIBRARY AS PART OF THAT TOTAL CREATION AND EXPLORATION OF SOUND WORLDS RADIUM WAS SET UP TO DO
It’s a more expensive and operationally challenging way to work in comparison to simply buying off the shelf sample libraries, which is why many sound creatives, teams and companies understandably don’t take our approach. But Radium has always been about creativity first and foremost. So this is what we do.
Recording Fire Whooshes in our Soundstage
Purchased libraries and samples can be a good solution where budgets and deadlines are very tight, or it’s not necessary to have a unique sound, or to be totally immersive with the audience experience.Â
However, with a huge media production industry all using the same pool of available libraries for purchase, many productions across the industry by different teams and creatives will have the same sound flavour because there has been widespread usage of the same sound sources and material. Does anyone care if sample libraries or our own originated sound is used on projects ? Experience over time tells us the answer is a definite yes, it does make a difference both for our clients, and for their audiences.  Â
Clients who work with Radium know up front they’re automatically getting a different sound, because we don’t use those same industry libraries, we create everything ourselves. Our clients also have confidence that we really understand creative sound, because we’ve been obsessively exploring it from the ground up for years, and we’ve been able to translate that exploration into some highly successful commercial, artistic, and experimental projects.Â
AUDIENCES KNOW INSTINCTIVELY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOUND THAT WORKS, AND SOUND THAT DOESN’T
If the sound and music works really well, the audience either won’t notice it, or they’ll comment that it was interesting, or that they liked it. If sound and music doesn’t work in the right way, the audience knows immediately that something is wrong. Maybe they don’t understand exactly what is wrong, but the badly imagined and crafted soundtrack will have a negative impact on their entire experience and impression of the story being told.
Our client partners will often work with other sound companies, but come to Radium for specific projects needing a unique sound which isn’t the same as everywhere else, or a highly immersive sound and music experience in their projects. This could be for a physical product, niche brand advertising, aspirational tv or film director with a highly creative idea, or even a Hollywood film trailer, which we’ve been doing quite a lot recently.
4. What about the studio itself? Can you give us few more technical info about the Radiumphonic Lab?
AD: Our technical setup changes all the time, depending on what we’re working on, or exploring, at any given moment. We have the usual studio kit you’d expect, and we’re always building instruments and sound-making devices, and trying out new software and hardware, sometimes even creating our own tools in-house if we can’t find anything externally to do what we want. Our music studio and sound lab takes up 3,600 sq ft right now, and we’re about to expand our footprint further. We’re always evolving and growing.
Radium Sound Garden
5. Your creative process range from the most experimental sound art installations to media- related products. How does your team deal with such a wide productionrange?
AD: Everyone on the team has a few key strengths, but also an openminded attitude and a strong ability to learn new things quickly. We also have a wide range of age, background and experience on the inhouse team, and a strong core of freelance associates who can join us on projects as needed. Sometimes a project requires us to learn something new, or to invent something that we can’t buy off the shelf to get the job done. We like the stimulation of new creative and technical challenges, that’s pretty much required from anyone who wants to join the team.
6. Your approach towards young aspiring sound designers and composer is stunning, we think your paths for graduates are helpful and unique to get closer to your studio. More in general, what would you suggest to anyone aiming to make it in the sound industry? How should they start building up a network, a portfolio and how should they present it to theworld?
AD: I’m asked this a lot, and I think often people are hoping there’s a magic piece of advice which is a shortcut to instant success in the industry. I can only speak from my own experience, and from what I’ve seen, that shortcut doesn’t exist.Â
IT’S TAKEN 10 YEARS OF CONSTANT HARD WORK AND FOCUS TO BUILD THE RADIUM TEAM AND SOUNDLAB TO WHERE WE ARE TODAY, THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN OVERNIGHT
Really focus on your own creative and technical development. Don’t try to fake it, get stuck in and do the work to develop yourself. You’ll have to train like an athlete and always be self improving to be really great at what you do, to hold your own with some of the serious talent out there. Sound and music is a very competitive industry. If it’s what you genuinely love then definitely pursue it, but don’t see it as an easy lifestyle choiceif you want to be successful.Â
In the beginning of your career, work with young directors at the same stage of their career as you are, take on their student films, treat it as an opportunity to learn and grow, and to make contacts. Some of those beginner directors you work with early on will become successful directors later, and if you’ve established a great rapport and really developed your own creative contribution, you may have a lifelong creative and professional collaborator.Â
Don’t be afraid to take on unpaid work. I did this a lot myself in the early days. Everything you do is an opportunity to learn and grow your creative and technical skills. Some internships, project opportunities and creative collaborations will be incredibly valuable opportunities to learn and make connections, so when you’re starting out, don’t get fixated on how much you’ll be paid on those. Work a second job to pay the bills in the early days if you have to, and focus first and foremost on learning and getting better at what you do.Â
Build your relationships carefully, always treat people as you would want to be treated, and take a long term view when disagreements happen. It’s more important to have a successfully completed project and happy collaborators, than it is to win the argument, and to be right. You can have complete freedom of creative choice when you work on your own, solo, self directed projects, which is why you should always be doing these, even when you have commercial projects on your schedule.Â
When you’re working with a project partner or team, often you have to find ways to make great creative even whilst compromising on your own vision and ideas. So be open to that, and don’t fight it. It’s all part of honing your skills.
IF YOU STAY FOCUSED, GENUINELY BECOME REALLY GREAT AT WHAT YOU DO, AND WORK ON YOUR RELATIONSHIP BUILDING AS YOU GO, IT’S VERY LIKELY YOU’LL EVENTUALLY AT LEAST BE ABLE TO MAKE A LIVING FROM THIS
And possibly even go on further to become highly successful.
7. Let’s talk about future: do you personally see, in 5 years time, everyone mixing and arranging with holograms and virtual reality devices only? Or do you think some aspects of audio production will remain confined to the realworld?
AD: We love to mix new technologies with traditional soundmaking methods. Mixing and arranging DAWs will undoubtedly evolve over time, and it’s entirely likely that we could soon be using holographic interfaces in the way we use ipad controllers or a keyboard and mouse now. One day, maybe interfaces could be thought controlled, without any physical action needed at all. Sound has to come from somewhere though. Real world sound has different qualities to electronically generated sound. So I think there will always be a place for organic sound in the mix.
Sound Designer Chooses His Tools
8. We know you have a lot going on, any anticipations about upcoming projects you can tell us about?
AD:Â Right now we’re working on a couple of theatrical trailers and a technology brand film with some of the most impressive visuals we’ve seen in a while. Also, we had a total blast making our recent Shadow Oscillations collection for the sound community, and we’ll probably have something similar coming up in the not too distant future.
What Makes Industry Leaders Pair Songwriters Together as Collaborators?
First of all thanks to BMI or this article.
What makes you pair songwriters together as collaborators?
Tracie Verlinde, Vice President, Creative, Los Angeles:
One of the best parts of my job is introducing great people to each other. Many times it is instinctual, I just intuitively have a sense that based on their personalities or styles or energy, this could be a good fit.
Sometimes it’s more practical if someone is looking for a specific talent or area of expertise and we know writers and producers that fit that need, we will make an introduction.
I always try to find out what each writer is looking for at that point in their career, what they need and hope to find in a collaboration.
We always say that co-writing is like dating…it may look like a match on paper, but once you’re together in the room you realize there is no chemistry. Or the opposite scenario when two unlikely writers get together and create magic!
There is no scientific formula or guaranteed answer when you are trying to pair songwriters together, but after doing this for many years, it becomes instinctual.
Kevin Benz, Senior Executive, Creative, Europe:
Being based in London, we are in constant contact with such a diverse group of songwriters and artists, ranging in styles and backgrounds. Cross-collaboration of styles has been key for recent trends in popular music and this has encouraged us to connect songwriters of different genres, providing fresh takes on traditional pop music. It is also important to listen to the creative needs of the songwriter to best determine who they might collaborate well with, yet also who might encourage them to venture outside of their creative comfort zone. It’s a pleasure to work with such an abundance of talented, diverse, and innovative international songwriters and support them throughout their careers.
So, remember to look for collaborators that will complement your songwriting skills and keep an eye out for more helpful info from BMI’s many thought leaders right here in The Weekly!
Researchers at Radboud University split subjects into five groups, with each group randomly assigned to listen to one of four pieces of music -- or sit in silence -- before and during creativity tasks.
The music pieces were chosen for their "mood and arousal" levels:
The Swan by Saint-Saens was considered to be positive in mood but low in arousal level; in short, it's "calming."
The Planets: Mars, The Bringer of War by Gustav Holst was considered to be negative and arousing. Think "anxious." (Also consider it "hard to listen to," at least to me.)
Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber was considered to be sad and slow. (Correctly so.)
The creativity task focused on divergent thinking, a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.
Divergent thinking means coming up with a number of new answers to a problem. As the authors of the study say, "Divergent thinking is key to today's scientific, technological, and cultural fields because innovation often pairs disparate ideas."
Think of it this way: Convergent thinking is math; divergent thinking is the iPod.
So which group produced the most -- and the best -- answers to the creativity test?
Those who listened to Vivaldi, the upbeat, happy music. It inspired higher levels of "fluency and flexibility," a mindset that lays the perfect foundation for those moments when we need to come up with unique ideas.
Play it for a few seconds. You'll recognize it.
Interestingly, though, researchers found that it did not matter whether subjects recognized any of the music, or even whether they liked it.
Try it. Next time you need to come up with new ideas, listen to this Vivaldi piece for 15 or 20 seconds. Or leave it on in the background.
Third time's the charm, and there is nowhere to go but up. This was the essence of the BuzzAngle Music 2017 U.S. Report, which highlighted the music industry’s third consecutive growth year. The report was published by Jim Lidestri, CEO of Buzz Angle Music, one of the foremost data aggregation and information platforms in the North American music market. Here are my top 10 takeaways from the 2017 U.S. Report.
1. Deep Catalog Music Drives More Than Half of Total U.S. Music Consumption
Deep Catalog represents songs and albums that have been released over three years ago. BuzzAngle Music reports that across the spectrum of album and song consumption, Deep Catalog accounts for 51.2% of all listening. New releases - songs that are eight weeks old or less - represent only 9% of total song consumption. Based solely on listening habits, this suggests how challenging it is for newer musicians to build a habitual fan base.
2. Recorded Audio Streams Rose From 250 billion in 2016 to 377 billion in 2017
In 2017, BuzzAngle Music reported a total of 377B streams, an increase of 50.3% from last year. In addition, more music fans are now paying for their listening time while subscription streaming has risen from 76% to 80%. This large growth spike furthers Goldman Sachs’ projections that streaming will drive over $34 billion dollars’ worth of total revenue for the music business by 2030.
3. Rock Music Drives 20% Rise in Vinyl Sales While Leading Total U.S. Album Listening
Vinyl now comprises 10.4% of all physical album sales. In total, in 2017, the Rock genre made up 53.9% of all vinyl sales. The top-selling vinyl album of the year was Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1, with over 64,175 vinyl albums sold. Harvest Moon by Neil Young was the best-selling album and vinyl album on Black Friday at independent music stores. Overall, the rock genre was the most popular genre when measuring total U.S. album consumption, making up 22.2% of all U.S. listening.
4. Lil Pump, Post Malone and Drake Drive U.S. Streams During Holiday Season
The week of December 15th was the largest streaming week of the year. It marked the first time that total U.S. streams surpassed 14 billion for a single week. Post Malone was the number one streamed artist during the holiday season in the United States with 638.7 million streams. Drake was positioned at number two with 483.2 million streams. Gucci Gang by Lil Pump was the most streamed video in the U.S. during the holiday season, reaching 135.1 million video streams.
5. Despacito is the Most Streamed Song of 2017, While Latin Genre Sees Growth Spike
Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s hit entitled, Despacito,helped solidify Latin-pop crossover and mass-popularity in the U.S., reaching approximately 1.1 billion streams. The track’s continued success throughout the year was spurred by the release of a remix, featuring Justin Bieber. Overall, the Latin genre saw a 23.2% rise of total album consumption and a 25.9% rise in total song consumption between 2016 and 2017.
What is Total Album & Song Consumption?
Total Album Consumption = Album Sales + (Song Sales/10) + (Song Streams/1500)
Total Song Consumption = Song Sales + (On-Demand Streams/150)
The industry uses a single measure to calculate how a specific title is performing. Since revenue dollars are not public, consumption is calculated based on units sold. The industry uses one album sale as the base unit and then uses weighting factors for song sales and song streams to provide a blended measure of performance. These album and song consumption formulas are listed above.
6. Ed Sheeran & Taylor Swift Drive Top Album Sales in the U.S. with No Grammy Nomination
Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift were the only two artists in 2017 to surpass 1 million album sales, including digital album downloads and physical albums sold. Swift’s album entitled reputation, sold 1,899,722 albums, while Ed Sheeran’s album ÷, pronounced “divide,” sold 1,042,255 albums. Unfortunately, however, neither album was nominated for Top Album of the Year Award at the 2018 Grammys. Current nominations include Childish Gambino, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Lorde, and Bruno Mars.
7. In 2017, 90.9% of Jazz Music Consumed is from Online Streaming
Worth noting in the BuzzAngle Music Report is a graph that breaks down the percentage of album sales, song sales and total streams by genre. Interestingly out of all Jazz music consumed in the United States in 2017, cd’s, vinyl, and digital downloads only made up 9.1%, while 90.9% of all Jazz music consumed occurred on streaming platforms.
8. BuzzAngle Highlights Eighteen Past, Present U.S. Music Legends Lost in 2017
This year saw the tragic passing of past, present music icons, including but not exclusive to: Lil Peep, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Christopher Wong, Prodigy, Gregg Allman, J. Geils, Chuck Berry, Joni Sledge, Al Jarreau, Tom Petty, Fats Domino, Malcolm Young, Mel Tillis, Della Reese, David Cassidy, Pat DiNizio, and Kim Jong-hyun.
9. On Average, U.S. Listeners listen to 162 minutes of music per day
Based on a U.S. survey run in 2017, which analyzed the media consumption habits of over 3,006 people, listening to music was the second most popular media type at 83%. Viewing content on social media succeeded as the primarily consumed medium at 87%.
10. Urban Music Accounted for 32% of all U.S. Streams in 2017
Half of the Top 1,000 songs streamed in 2017 was Urban. Rap and Hip Hop made up 40%, while R&B comprised 10%. Drake led the charge in the Urban takeover, having been the only artist to break six million streams in one year, two years in a row. Artist, Future, was a close second at 4.2 billion streams. Worth mentioning in this category is Kendrick Lamar’s single, Humble, which was the must audio-streamed song in 2017 with over 555.2 million streams.
WaterTower Music has released the main title theme from the new CW drama Black Lightning. The track is performed by Godholly and is now available as a digital single, which also includes the song Powerfrom the pilot episode The Resurrection. Visit Amazon to download the single. A full soundtrack album is expected to be released after the show concludes its first season later this year. Black Lightning is developed by Samil Akil & Mara Brock Akil based on the DC comic books character created by Tony Isabella & Trevor Von Eeden and stars Cress Williams, Nafessa Williams, China Anne McClain and Christine Adams. The show’s first season premiered this past Tuesday and will air weekly on The CW. Visit the official show website for updates.
What Is Bitcoin, Blockchain's Future in the Music Industry?
"Blockchain technology is coming like a tsunami," says Dot Blockchain CEO Benji Rogers. "Every business in this space needs to start thinking about a Blockchain strategy."
A specter is haunting the music business -- the specter of Bitcoin. To be more specific, it's the Fear of Missing Out on Bitcoin, which is only natural given the digital currency's climb from a value of about $1,000 to more than $19,000, before it settled at about $15,000. Suddenly, a business that has spent the last decade making it more convenient to pay for its products is experimenting with digital cryptocurrencies that are technologically innovative, mathematically secure and actually fairly inconvenient to use. What is to be done?
In November, Bjork began selling her album in Bitcoin and three other digital currencies. (The first major artist to accept Bitcoin seems to be -- go figure -- 50 Cent.) Ghostface Killah got involved in issuing his own cryptocurrency, which seems uncomfortably close to the Chappelle's Show's "Wu-Tang Financial skit that shows the hip-hop group offering investment advice. In early December, a team involved with the cryptocurrency Monero announced Project Coral Reef, which allows consumers to buy merchandise from Mariah Carey, G-Eazy, Fall Out Boy and other artists who have deals with Global Merchandising Services. Now the DJ Gareth Emery plans to release, sell, and pay royalties for music using both digital currency and the blockchain technology that it often runs on.
Digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could be transformative and they're rising in value so fast that they're impossible to ignore. (Even J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon turned around.) At the same time, the only person I know who has ever actually bought anything with Bitcoin is my former neighbor in Berlin, who ordered LSD by mail from the online Silk Road marketplace for illegal drugs. It's not clear how much this will help the music business, however, since rising Bitcoin transaction fees are making the currency so impractical that even a bitcoin conference stopped accepting them.
As cool as cryptocurrencies are, it's still not clear what problem they solve. Consider Monero, which offers users even more privacy than Bitcoin by obscuring the identities of payers. That has potential and it makes sense for businesses to accept whatever currency their customers want to use. "It's what we want to do," says Christopher Drinkwater, Global Merchandising Services' head of e-commerce. "Make things as easy as possible."
The customer is always right and Drinkwater says purchases made with Monero are increasing. Once the novelty wears off, though, isn't it just easier to buy things with a credit card? Sure, anyone who's embarrassed about their love for the Backstreet Boys can now buy a T-shirt in secret. Wearing it will still be a giveaway, though.
So far in the music business, there are more serious discussions about the blockchain technology that Bitcoin is built on, since it can store information on a database that's distributed widely online -- and thus both open to read and impossible to alter in secret. "The blockchain is real," Dimon said recently. Dot Blockchain Media wants to use this to replace the industry's many, old, incomplete rights-holder databases with a music file format that contains rights information along with recordings. Theoretically, at least, this would solve the problem of streaming services not being able to identify or find the rights owners for the songs they use. Which some say has the potential to change the business. Theoretically.
"Blockchain technology is coming like a tsunami," says Dot Blockchain CEO Benji Rogers. (Why are digital technologies always compared to destructive weather events?) "Every business in this space needs to start thinking about a Blockchain strategy."
Some have. In April, ASCAP joined with SACEM and PRS for Music in a venture to explore the potential of the technology to track rights ownership. "The same real-time update and tracking capabilities that make blockchain attractive to the financial industry also make it an attractive option for the music industry, where accurate, real-time ownership data will grease the wheels for the money to flow to songwriters and copyright owners with less overhead," says ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews. "It is not a panacea to solve the music industry's problems, but we see potential in the future as one of many data initiatives the industry should be exploring."
This makes sense. So far, though, the music business is more interested in a tsunami that may never appear. (And if it does, wouldn't it actually make sense to hide? Does anyone ever look at a tsunami and think, "Hey, I'd like to incorporate that tsunami into my business strategy"?) Gareth Emery, who will soon launch Choon, wants to pay performers and songwriters accurately and immediately by transferring digital currency into their online wallets as soon as their songs are streamed. His idea is that blockchain technology can help musicians run their own careers, without so much money going to "intermediaries and middleman." It's a compelling vision, rooted in the kind of techno-utopian optimism that has fueled the rise of Bitcoin, but, like most music business blockchain ventures, it reflects a fundamental disconnect from what the technology can and can't do. Apparently, when you have a technologically innovative, encrypted hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Blockchain ensures the integrity of information by keeping records of it that are distributed online. That's awesome, but it only matters if the information is actually present and correct in the first place. And the main problem with music business record-keeping isn't that rights ownership information gets changed without authorization (although that does happen occasionally) -- it's that it's simply not there in the first place. As an example, think about Spotify's failure to license mechanical rights to the compositions it streamed, because it couldn't identify or find rights holders. The problem isn't protecting the integrity of information -- it's gathering and getting it right it in the first place.
The idea that blockchain will transform the music business is full of this kind of magical thinking. Dot Blockchain's new file format could help solve some of the music industry's problems going forward -- which could improve efficiency in several ways -- but it won't magically fill in information that's now missing. (Rogers says the project could solve that in another way that wouldn't involve blockchain.) In a blog post about Dot Blockchain Music, Rogers writes that songwriters now have no way to say that they don't want their compositions used to soundtrack objectionable videos -- white nationalist rallies for example -- and this technology would allow them to express this as a series of permissions that travel with a song. Cool! Except that in almost all these cases, the makers of such videos already need to get permission -- that's the law. The problem isn't that creators can't assert their rights -- it's that they can't enforce them. If Dot Blockchain gave them a way to do so, would YouTube implement it?
Choon is even more disconnected from the current reality of the music industry. The reason businesses don't pay right away isn't usually because they don't know where to send a check -- it's because they'd rather delay doing so in order to preserve their cashflow. Blockchain won't change that. Sure, it could eventually help eliminate some of the middlemen who divide up pools of revenue, but be careful what you wish for -- some of those same middlemen negotiate on behalf of right sholders to expand the overall amount of revenue to split. Without them, individual creators don't have much leverage.
So far, blockchain is still a solution looking for a problem -- it hasn't fundamentally changed a single business, except for conferences about blockchain technology (which, to be fair, are enjoying an unprecedented boom). "Blockchain is about solving problems that only exist because the people trying to do so have a fundamentally weird view of the world," says David Gerard, a technology consultant who wrote the book "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts." (How's that for a B'accuse?) "Here they're trying to use it to keep track of the data but the problem is that the data is crap."
In the long run, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology probably will change the music business -- just a lot less quickly and glamorously think people think. In 2014, years before Ghostface went crypto, the singer-songwriter Tatiana Moroz issued "TatianaCoin," digital tokens, not unlike Bitcoins, that her fans could exchange for memorabilia or access to exclusive events. It's an interesting idea, and Moroz was in the process of helping the company Tokenly make the technology available to other artists, but the SEC crackdown on initial coin offerings put those plans on hold. For now, at least, any artist experiments with crypto-tokens will be overshadowed by the SEC's efforts to prevent investors from being deceived by "initial coin offerings."
Blockchain could also change the way the music business tracks rights ownership, much as ASCAP's Matthews suggests. But it will probably do so in ways that aren't especially cool -- or even, perhaps, visible. The idea that rights holders will get paid the instant consumers stream a song just isn't realistic -- blockchain technology simply can't process that much data fast enough. But it could be used to compare rights databases in real time, flag conflicts for examination and improve back-office efficiency for collecting societies in all kinds of ways. This is a bigger deal than it sounds -- more efficiency for collecting societies means more money for creators and rights holders. But it's not much of a tsunami -- more of a steady, gentle wave. It only makes sense for music companies and creators to test the water -- but anyone who dives in expecting big waves might be surprised at how shallow it still is.
