WARNER MUSIC SIGNED AN ALGORITHM TO A RECORD DEAL — WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
WARNER MUSIC SIGNED AN ALGORITHM TO A RECORD DEAL — WHAT
HAPPENS NEXT?
By Dani
Deahl@danideahl Mar 27, 2019, 9:55am EDT
Last week,
a press release went out to tech and music reporters claiming that little-known
startup Endel had become the “first-ever algorithm to sign [a] major label
deal” with Warner Music.
The news was covered widely, with commentators tossing around
phrases like “the end is nigh”
while hand-wringing over the idea of coders coming for musicians’ label
contracts. But the press release wasn’t exactly right, and questions about the
future of music are even bigger than anyone thought.
Endel is an app that
generates reactive, personalized “soundscapes” to promote things like focus or
relaxation. It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to
create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite “musical” in the
traditional sense. It’s ambient, layering in things like washed-out white noise
and long string notes. It’s the type of stuff that’s exploded on streaming
platforms in recent years under newly invented genre names like “sleep.”
Although Endel signed a deal with Warner, the deal is crucially
not for “an algorithm,” and Warner is not in control of Endel’s product. The
label approached Endel with a distribution deal and Endel used its algorithm to
create 600 short tracks on 20 albums that were then put on streaming services,
returning a 50 / 50 royalty split to Endel. Unlike a typical major label record
deal, Endel didn’t get any advance money paid upfront, and it retained
ownership of the master recordings.
Even if Endel had signed over the masters, the company could
easily just make more: Dmitry Evgrafov, Endel’s composer and head of sound
design, says all 600 tracks were made “with a click of a button.” There was
minimal human involvement outside of chopping up the audio and mastering it for
streaming. Endel even hired a third-party company to write the track titles.
Five Endel albums have already been released, and 15 more are coming this year
— all of which will be generated by code. In the future, Endel will be able to
make infinite ambient tracks.
It’s not entirely shocking that the type of audio Endel creates
generated interest from labels like Warner Music, which has a history of
investing in music AI products. While the top playlists on Spotify are made up
of traditional genres like pop and hip-hop, streaming services have a bunch of
weird categories that have recently become very popular. These generally fall
under the kind of things you have on in the background, like “lo-fi” or “ambient.”
They’ve become popular due to the rise of what’s called a “context playlist,”
which is a playlist that doesn’t cater to a genre but instead targets events or
moods like “Peaceful Piano” and “Deep Focus.” These playlists have millions of
subscribers and are easy wins for labels like Warner — especially if they can
be filled cheaply.
These playlists briefly became a controversy in 2017 when there
was a conspiracy theory about Spotify astroturfing chunks of
chill and piano-driven playlists with “fake” artists. In the end, it
turned out to be a nonstory, as the “fake” artists were aliases for real
musicians. Many of these artists are composers with no interest in becoming
famous artists who sell ownership of their recordings to library content
companies. The companies traditionally just provided royalty-free soundtracks
for videos and podcasts, but they discovered a new revenue line from context
playlists.
It started a debate that rages on: what is a “fake” song? If a
song is created by people using aliases with no other online presence, does
that make them fake? Should streaming platforms disclose when songs are made by
“fake” artists?
If those questions were hard to answer two years ago, they are
even harder to answer now that Warner has signed a deal to market and
distribute 20 albums’ worth of material made by software. Streaming platforms
like Spotify created a new market for context playlists full of sleep and
ambient music, and music software like Endel might disrupt that market by lowering
the cost of production to zero. But the industry hasn’t yet been thinking about
AI that way.
In our Future of Music episode on AI last year, I talked with Michael Hobe,
founder of AI platform Amper. “We can facilitate your creative process to cut a
lot of the bullshit elements of it,” Hobe said. “For me, it’s allowing more people
to be creative and then allowing the people who already have some of these
creative aspects to really further themselves.”
Personally, I’ve tried almost every algorithm and AI-driven
software package for music creation, from Amper to Captain Plugins to Google Magenta Studio and
even the beta of Sony’s Flow Machines in
plug-in format. They’re all... fine. None of them are even close to
replacing a Beyoncé hit on the radio. But they can be tools to give me
inspiration or allow me to not have to worry about certain engineering bits so
I can focus on the creative parts. As I talk to artists around the industry,
the ability to cut out those “bullshit elements” seems to be driving the
adoption of AI.
But Endel isn’t a tool for a musician to use; it’s actually
making the finished product. Warner wouldn’t comment for this piece, but it
said in a press release that
Endel’s “innovative compositions provide unique listening experiences that will
be introduced to a larger audience.” Warner certainly seems to be treating
Endel’s tracks as music: it requested the Endel audio be cut into 600 tracks
instead of the 60-minute tracks the company originally submitted. That
increases an album’s total overall plays — one play for a single-track album can
now become over 20 plays for that same album — and all of those additional
track names create a much greater searchable dataset and ways for Warner to
experiment with marketing and placing the content. Warner is essentially
treating Endel’s algorithmic soundscapes on streaming platforms the same way it
would treat traditional music.
For its part, Endel maintains that it’s not competing with
musicians at all since what it makes isn’t music. But that is almost beside the
point: this collision of streaming, labels, and AI is going to happen to other
genres. It’s just a matter of time.
Ultimately, the Endel / Warner deal is an inflection point. A
major label made the decision to distribute and monetize automated audio, and
it got 20 hours’ worth of material for relatively little labor and expense that
will now live alongside traditional music on playlists that are only viable
because of streaming. Other labels will soon follow.
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