✖️ Apple drives artists to chatbots 🍏 YouTube leveling the playing field? 🙈 AI will change your music strategy 🚨

There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.

Inside the rise and fall of Last.fm, the social network that understood how online music worked and that resembled bits of Facebook, Songkick, Blogspot, and Spotify.

CD Baby CEO Tracy Maddux: “The next time you hear an industry pundit decry the low per stream payouts from YouTube, consider who the source is and who is really threatened by access, transparency, diversity of art and competition for fans worldwide.”

Liz Pelly with an interesting thought piece about the streaming landscape, Spotify, and “the automation of selling out”. Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier:

“It is compulsory in our system, with the absolute commodification of everything, that [artists] become their own brand. The musician is more and more similar to the Instagram Star in that sense.”

I have been saying for a while that Instagram is the next big social network for music, and will fill a space that Soundcloud and others haven’t been able to fill. It’s doing that already, and we’ve seen nothing yet.

Underground artists have used the internet to build huge followings. Now, they’re figuring out how to bring that success to headlining tours of their own.

Some perspective on crowd investment into music royalty rights via platforms like Royalty Exchange’s Royalty Flow.

Interesting news and could have an impact on “artist apps” - a service offered by more than a few platforms. They take templates, let artists customise, and then help you bring it to the App Store. Apple says: no more. 

Likely outcome: more artist chatbots through platforms like POP, The Bot Platform, Chatfuel, and Octane.

The latest advance from DeepMind behaves in a very surprising way. Expect other AI systems to be just as odd. (seriously - what’s happening here is really important and will impact music in more ways than we can imagine)

Jaron Lanier is one of virtual reality’s most recognizable figures. He’s credited with popularizing the term itself. Interesting interview, which includes this link of a video in which Lanier plays music from inside VR: in the 80s!

This list describes cryptocurrencies. Each gets four words. There are many. Some are landmarks. Some are scams. Hopefully this provides orientation.