Strange feelings looking at this... This is almost exactly the product I failed to get into YC with back in 2017... All the same ideas as far as the UX goes with one main difference: the business model. I wanted to apply the Steam business model where people would actually buy album again (and not tracks a la iTunes).
The issue is that while it's nice to have a UX tailored for classical, this won't likely help the classical industry to thrive again.
To simplify a bit, the classical music industry is composed of:
- the majors labels (Universal Music, Sony, Warner and EMI)
- A dozen large independent labels (Naxos being the largest)
- hundreds of small labels
The majors mostly care about promoting a few star performers and milking their huge existing catalog. They have no problem with putting everything on subscription services for pennies. This what you find on all subscription services.
The larger independent labels also have significant catalog and some will also put part of it on subscription services but mostly won't.
However, it is totally financially impossible for the smaller labels which are actually recording most of the interesting new records to survive on the pennies they would get from subscription services. Most of them have rejected that model and caters to the increasingly niche market of audiophile still ready to buy new high quality music.
As a classical music fan, I'm happy to see that there will finally be an offering offering a good experience and massively increasing discoverability (which is terrible in mainstream services).
But unfortunately, this wont change the fact that the classical recording industry is dying and that the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies.
I've used Idagio for 6 months. They have a reasonable interface, good performances and sound quality, but their catalog is indeed limited. There are hundreds of performances of the same well-known works, but there's not (very) much beyond it. I've discovered about 100 fairly unknown composers through YouTube that I consider quite good, but many of them are missing from Idagio, or are listed with one or two works. Their catalog also lacks discoverability. There's nothing to relate Karl Goldmark to Brahms. I also dislike the subscription model, heavily.
So, I still buy albums (mostly from prestomusic, in case someone wants to know).
> the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies.
That could never change. Streaming will make it worse, though.
The 20th century was a golden age for recorded music. Maybe there is no coming back but I don't think (or I didn't think then) that streaming services are in a very strong position in the long run: consumers like them because the current deal is that you pay a single subscription and you have access to basically all the music (a very nice proposition indeed). But the streaming services own no content, the day the content owners find a more lucrative way to sell music they will move part of their catalog out of the streaming services and at the same time, make the product less and less attractive. At least, that was the theory.
Now, I think Spotify in particular, has built a strong moat due to their ubiquity (all devices support Spotify). It's getting late for pop music. For Classical, I don't know but 6 years ago, I was convinced there was still a strong possibility to save the old model since it was still making money on the traditional channels.
> Streaming will make it worse, though.
It has been the case for a while now.
Paul Baxter from Delphian Records said it best years ago:
"There's no way that a record company could operate on the fees from streaming alone. It's absolutely impossible. There are too many zeros in front of the amount-per-stream figure."
Spotify's power comes from more than its ubiquity. Pop music, the kind that charts (and the only kind labels care about), is way more commodified than TV shows. If Sony were to make a streaming service with just their music and leave Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon/etc, their artists would simply fail to chart ever again.
The advantage of a single streaming service with all the songs is also much greater than one with all the shows or movies. Nobody puts Netflix on "shuffle" or lets it play random episodes based on what they've watched in the past, but those are some of Spotify's biggest features. Its user shareable playlists also increase lock-in, along with other network effects. It's such a huge advantage to be able to play anything (or almost anything), I don't see how a service with a limited selection could compete.
I don't see any way for the labels to get out of the streaming age beyond serious anticompetitive collusion, and even then people would go back to piracy. Frankly, it couldn't happen to a nicer group of folks.
I mostly agree with you there. If you look at pop music as a whole, it's impossible to attack them directly.
But I don't think that the moat could never be broken. You have many people that consume music as background noises. But you also have many people that are passionate about the music they listen to and would like to have another way to support their artist of choices other than going to concerts (see vinyl revival etc).
My recipe to break the moat:
- choose a genre some people care strongly about (for me, that was classical)
- make a platform that offer a better UX for that genre, and have them pay for their music (those consumer are happy because better UX and they feel they actually support the artist they like)
- progressively signup labels by showing there is more money on your platform than on streaming services, they will progressively remove more and more of their catalog from streaming services if they were on them.
- once the model is proven on that genre, move to another (jazz, serious pop etc)
- as time goes by, the value of your service increase and while the value of the streaming services is lowered due to their catalog shrinking.
While this might be a fantasy, the truth is that today system continue to reward popular artists only, niche genre artists can't make a living from streaming. If a solution arises for them, they will come progressively, and over time it will weaken the streaming service moat.
> make a platform that offer a better UX for that genre, and have them pay for their music (those consumer are happy because better UX and they feel they actually support the artist they like)
Why would consumers not just pay for physical media like CDs/Vinyl/etc. if they prefer owning things?
I also lack the vision to see what could ultimately replace streaming as the primary delivery mechanism for music. It delivers an ongoing revenue stream, the monthly nature of which beats the old "put it out in a new format every few years so everyone has to rebuy everything" in terms of cash flow, although obviously not in overall revenue.
I could definitely see streaming wars in music happening like they are in video, although so far the music labels are content to watch the video labels hurt each other. But consider: Spotify's payouts are infamously low, lower than Google's or Apple's and I can imagine some labels deciding they can do better by providing their own streaming app. Since it's only a few labels, each will believe they have enough of a library to draw subscribers, and away we'll go.
But still: aside from the margins and market share concerns, what delivers a steadier income than streaming?
Streaming doesn't mean they can't experiment with additional revenue streams, including physical media sales and licensing opportunities, but it's hard to imagine something displacing streaming as a concept to the degree which streaming has displaced physical media sales.
The idea was to create a true streaming service in term of UX. All the same features as you are used to, except you start with the empty catalog and you purchase individual albums and you get the streaming service for free forever (no subscription). The service operating cost being funded by newer purchase. That's why I'm talking about Steam as the model, it's how they operate: you have access to your library forever even if you only pay for games once. (And mostly, you never play much to most of your purchases).
The steady income of subscription service is nice for the streaming platform but it's not nice for the classical music artists: they receive nothing.
I think bandcamp shows that there are people who still want to purchase and download a digital version and contribute directly to artists (on top of purchasing physical media).
I personally, want a lossless version that I can archive, have on my offline portable music player, stream to my phone, and stream through jellyfin to my stereo.
That fits better to the style of music I listen to, and how _I_ listen to music (I don't shuffle and listen to full albums only)
> Pop music, the kind that charts (and the only kind labels care about), is way more commodified than TV shows.
> Nobody puts Netflix on "shuffle" or lets it play random episodes based on what they've watched in the past
Not convinced. People used to watch TV the way they listened to the radio - turn it on to whatever's on and mostly ignore it. It's not the current dynamic but I don't think that's an immutable law of nature.
That’s been said about almost every style and genre of art. What’s so funny, is that it’s never happened; quite the opposite. Look at the renaissance of early music, as only one example. Sadly, 99% of all music that has ever been made was not written down or recorded. I think there’s a lot of opportunities to hunt down and discover lost, unrecognized, or forgotten music and bring it back to forefront. I was just listening to Indian classical bansuri (bamboo flute) music by Ronu Majumdar and Ajeet Pathak on Naxos. The album features 12th century ragas in the Hindustani tradition. What’s amazing about it, is you can hear how this style greatly influenced rock and roll from the mid-1960s to the mid 1970s, particularly the long and winding guitar solos that were famous during that era. And if you read about that time, it turns out that rock musicians were indeed listening to this music and getting ideas from it. There isn’t any AI around that is going to make deep connections like this. We are still very much in human-driven territory. What will certainly become common, however, is for human musicians to augment their compositional skills with the help of AI, not to replace it altogether.
> I suspect that purchasing music files to own will seem increasingly strange and inconvenient to younger people, though.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
As a fan of blues, I've noticed that there are a lot of grey songs in my Spotify playlists. There's just no practical way to be able to listen to the music I want to hear besides owning it (Youtube is hit-or-miss as well).
For people who want to listen to pop, they're probably fine. But anything that's even a little niche is trouble. Or that's my experience, anyhow.
> I guess the idea is, why would you long tail when you can Pareto Principle?
IMO, that's not a great point. The music is already made - that's the hard part. It just needs to be licensed.
Maybe there are other channels that are more profitable than streaming, but I'm guessing that a lot of older/niche music is just locked away for no good reason.
At a certain point, I have to imagine that most artists would prefer their music be listened to if they aren't going to make money either way.
I got into blues via dancing, which has heavily influenced my tastes.
In no particular order:
* Will Wilde
* Sugarray Rayford
* Smokehouse
* Etta James
* Gordon Webster
* The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn
* Tin Pan
* Asylum Street Spankers
* Hugh Laurie
* Legendary Rhythm and Blues Revue
* Preservation Hall Jazz Band
* The Marsalis Family
* Katie Webster
* John Lee Hooker
* Keb Mo
* Son House
* Joe Bonamassa
* ZZ Ward
* Kevin Selfe
* Allen Toussaint
* Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown
* Bill Withers
* Nina Simone
* Buddy Guy
* Lightning Hopkins
* Howlin' Wolf
* Brother Yusef
There's probably a whole lot more - these are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. You probably know a lot of them, but I didn't want to guess which ones you know, so I just wrote out a bunch of people I like.
Yes, that's what I wanted to address and in the same way Steam address it with video games. You buy albums but you get the convenience of streaming services with no additional fees forever. Same as with Steam, I expected users to keep buying album regularity even if they didn't listen to them much. (cue seasonal sales etc...)
Mostly because the goal was to offer a premium experience targeted at the classical music enthusiast. UX was close to what you can see with Apple Classical or Idagio. On the business side, the model was really Steam and not any music store, seasonal sales included. Anyway, I only had a few month to try to raise some capital and I failed, so it's history now.
I can definitely see why they passed. In 2017, it was already clear that streaming options render any music-purchasing platform niche at best, and a shrinking niche at that. Sad, but true.
It's only true as long as the content owner play with it.
The day the content owner stop wanting to license their catalog, the platforms die. The majors let themselves go into that trap because they failed at finding a viable digital model and the streaming platform showed them a way to keep making some money. Show them a better model that works and they will follow the money.
In 2017, the classical music market was shrinking but still worth half a billion a year with 50% of that still being physical sales. I'm still convinced there was a market to capture.
For classical, streaming is not an option: most content on streaming services are old (albeit often great) records from the past coming from the majors catalog (which they don't care much about). That's 4 or 5 catalog. All the independents rejected the model because they can't make any money there.
Streaming is the death of the classical recording industry. Simply. There is no money in streaming. The sad part is that the average classical music consumer has generally a lot of disposable income available but no way to spend it on a good modern product, in a way that support that industry.
I don't know much about it, but it's probably true of Jazz too.
What are your thoughts on apps like the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall, or DG's Stage+? Those are streaming services at a more premium price, with smaller catalogs, but featuring new works and newly recorded works and generally high quality recordings.
As an end consumer of classical music, a streaming app like this one or the two I named make discoverability much easier in a way that is very appealing compared to direct sales. Even if there is a smaller total library available to me, I am much more easily able to explore that library and build my tastes. I think ideally, I would want an app that allows me to explore the streaming catalog of classical music in a discoverable, personalizable way, but that offers a way to buy these direct sale-exclusive recordings you're talking about once I'm confident about what I might enjoy. My Berlin Phil membership completely changed my understanding of classical, because it was so easy to just give something a try and the performances are so well-curated, often with a spoken introduction for context.
I'm a big jazz fan, and I know that Blue Note for instance seems to have done very well selling a lot of physical media with their vinyl series, including newly recorded albums. I've probably heard as much recently recorded jazz music on vinyl as on digital - and now that I think of it, there's a discoverability element there: if Blue Note bothers to press it to wax, it's probably pretty good. Most of the newly composed jazz I hear is performed live, though, and that seems to be the best way for most performers in the genre to make some income from it.
> What are your thoughts on apps like the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall, or DG's Stage+?
I can't comment too much on their content as I haven't tried any of them. You make want to check them out though.
But commercially, it's mostly about 2 of the most recognizable names in the classical industry leveraging their notoriety. It's good for them but it won't really help the industry thrive again. The Berliner Philharmoniker or DG would be the last ones to struggle, premium subscription service or not.
I don't think a service will make a dent in the industry woes unless it becomes an industry standard. That's why my target business model was Steam and video games and not any music service.
I wonder if a key element is direct connections with fans. My 13-yo daughter is obsessed with classical music and her favourite performers seem to have strong YouTube presences.
Outside the classical world, if you look at a site like Bandcamp, that idea seems core. The business model also seems exactly like what you are talking about, both for performers and for the site. I see a lot of very obscure, niche electronic stuff that is supported by hundreds of people. That may only be thousands of dollars, not tens of thousands. However, it’s an economy. And compare earning $10 for the sale of a single album to the number of streams you need to earn that much revenue. We are talking orders of magnitude difference.
I have long wanted to build a combination of: Bandcamp, GitHub, and Steam for musicians.
Basically, a platform for musicians to produce music (and associated videos, artworks, etc), managing their assets securely, sharing and collaborating; then engagement with fans, promotion, merch, and touring support; and finally a simple platform for sales (streaming, downloads, and physical good) where the store takes a reasonable fee, but the bulk of the revenue goes to the creator.
I was kinda hoping Bandcamp would evolve in this direction, but I think that's not likely now.
> Streaming is the death of the classical recording industry.
Apple seems to disagree, so I guess we'll see. It clear that the best days are behind us, at any rate.
Bottom line: you might have been right that there was still a market to capture in 2017, but YC was also right to see that it was a shrinking market, not exactly the sort of thing in which they're most interested. It's hard to imagine a world in which the market for classical music is bigger today than it was in 2017, regardless of how well you--or anyone else--executed.
I have a Spotify Premium account and stream a lot of classical. Some of the things I've discovered that are different about that experience than other genres of music:
1/ It's hit or miss whether the major labels will put all their content on streaming platforms. Sure, you can find the most popular classic recordings, but more obscure stuff isn't there.
2/ A lot of classical music is still listened to on CD format, and some of the streaming stuff is clearly CD quality audio.
3/ I also scrobble all my music via Lastfm. But the problem with doing that with classical as opposed to pop formats is that so often the album art just isn't there. Apparently the company that sources the album art doesn't care about classical music.
Orchestral music has always depended largely on essentially donations, back to the patronage that kept many of the great composers at least fed, if not rich.
Not always, though. You had church funding and then patronage from the state.
Beethoven famously ushered in a new era with his 5th symphony when he secured am advance from the bank to produce it, being the first large work to be produced through commercial investment.
Individual patronage continued through the 19th century with notable examples like Tchaikovsky, though increasingly commercial aspects were present.
Coming the 20th century funding for academia became the norm. Older composers became teachers and younger composers secured funding for their thesis compositions.
At the same time the recording industry exploded. Even avant garde cumposers could make good money by starting their own companies to press and publish their records.
Over time interest in orchestral music has plummeted. I guess there's a mix of reasons for this. But today it will prove very difficult to gather the funds for a large scale composition, preformance or recording, never mind all three.
There are a few composers I support on Patreon who also do their own production via extensive combinations of plugins and soundfonts in applications I've barely ever heard of before. The result is hard to distinguish from a human orchestra, save in the nature of the occasional errors, which are always of composition rather than execution.
This would I think be a lot more common were it not such a niche interest. Even the composers I mention support themselves primarily through orchestration of video game music and the like, using that to subsidize their original work.
I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff, too; I'm no less susceptible to nostalgia than anyone, or maybe somewhat more so. But my point is that, while the technical bar appears fairly high, it is currently within the possible for a composer also to provide the orchestra. It seems likely the technical bar could be lowered, or for that matter that a new production industry could develop in support of those not able to access the more traditional one.
I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff
The stigma against video game music can’t go away soon enough! Composers are creating some really amazing stuff for video games and gamers themselves are an enormous audience for the wider classical music industry to draw upon.
To their credit, a lot of orchestras have recognized this and have been performing video game music for years. Along with film scores (a trend started by John Williams), video game music has breathed an incredible amount of new life into an industry that might otherwise be in far worse shape now.
1. Go find any of the text commentaries that Austin Wintory has done about the Journey soundtrack.
2. Clear an hour off your schedule, close your eyes and listen.
Edit: On second thought, keep your eyes open and enjoy the beautiful artwork by Matt Nava (taken from his book on Journey) as well as a selection of fan art which is equally stunning considering most of the people are probably not professional graphic designers.
Fuck...it's so good it makes me emotional just typing this sentence.
Also worthy of note: Tan Dun and Yo Yo Ma's recording of the Crouching Tiger soundtrack and his recordings of the Bach solos.
Alas, I must end with the complaint that the current recordings of the original Star Wars soundtracks use track listings that are out of order with their "appearances" in the films.
Thanks so much for sharing this with me! Austin's score is deeply moving. Now I can't stop thinking about it.
I think I played the game a long time ago but I believe I was visiting a friend (who had already played through it) at the time and I wasn't in the right frame of mind to experience it. Now I want to track down a PS4 and play it again.
This reminded me of another score I love: Endless Legend by Arnaud Roy. Similar instrumentation to Journey (albeit with lots of human voices). It has a different feel though, for a radically different game (a turn-based strategy game).
Film scores are so completely in the shitter and have been for going on two decades, that maybe they could stand to take some cues from video games. I miss films having memorable, distinctive music. At least for title themes. Even mid-budget films often had that, in the Olden Times of 2+ decades ago. It's one of my kids' favorite things about older movies—they noticed, without prompting, and they love it. Marvel managed, what, a single run of a half-dozen kinda-almost-memorable notes, over 40+ films? What a joke. It's so bad that their deciding halfway in to simply score everything with pop music was kinda an improvement, but is still a form of just giving up.
Where I think orchestras will continue to win out is for live performances. What amplification can do is complete crap compared to pure acoustic much less trying to record and reproduce something without a million dollar sound system.
This is also a case of good old AI automating things that a great many humans enjoy doing saving us from the drudgery of human expression.
You missed the word "dying" in the OP. The popularity of orchestral music has waned to the point where what you are loosely calling "essentially donations" gets a lot less bang for the buck these days.
Just for a single example-- the count who funded the Mannheim school got musical rockets in return, ones that became the envy of all of Europe. Of course orchestral developments were happening in other locations as well; in general this set off a kind of orchestral space race. You can track it through history all the way to Bayreuth and beyond.
Hell, there's probably a line from those orchestral crescendos to the "orchestra hit" General MIDI instrument.
At the height of all that orchestral fervor you've got, for example, an opera composer as a member of Italy's first parliament. How many people on HN can even name a living composer?
Now imagine $living_orchestral_composer at the helm of a nationalist movement in the U.S.
I've read the preceding sentence three times and brain just outright refuses to come up with imagery for that.
So while I guess you can squint and see the historical funding of orchestras as "essentially donations," there's a big difference between donating to a historical society and donating to the red cross. The 19th century funding of orchestras was much more like the latter-- funding for something that is essential to living (or at least in the U.S., essentially to being taken seriously by Europe). Today it's like building model trains for your ears.
For actual classical musicians, I'm not sure how much they would ever realistically make off of album sales. Most are funded through donations AFAIK and then through ticket sales. There's a reason why almost no one in the classical scene cares about piracy aside from maybe sheet music (even then, the photocopier is used pretty heavily).
I don't know what OP's business model looked like exactly. However, classical music is often composed and performed as full works, such as symphonies, operas, and concertos, rather than individual songs or tracks. These works are often intended to be listened to in their entirety and are structured in a way that builds upon and develops themes throughout the piece.
Another problem is that the way classical music is divided into tracks is sometimes not universal. For example, there are some recordings of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 that are divided into five separate tracks (one for each movement) while others divide it into just two tracks (one for the first three movements and another for the final two movements).
While there are many modern music albums that were intended to be listened to as full albums (e.g. "The Wall", "American Idiot" or "To Pimp a Butterfly"), I guess the track-based listening experience just won over in that part of the music world. That said, people often also just listen to a single sonata, aria, etc. in classical music too, of course, instead of always going for the 2 hour experience.
Although in many cases the album experience is annoying, eg a violin concerto followed by a couple of short pieces to fill time. I don’t usually want to listen to all of them and end up making playlists to separate them again.
The idea was to make the product "the album" again. In the past, the buying experience of a physical product was important to make it a powerful and personal experience: you had nice artwork, leaflet with information about the music you bought, bio of the performers etc. I wanted to try to recover some of that.
Given the enduring niche of physical media, why would a person choose non physical media for the artwork and leaflet experience? Would there be a UI that afforded the user thumbing through stacks, sliding the carton out, admiring the art as it is opened and an artifact unsleeved to be mated to a player?
I suppose something like that would be possible with NFC (with write durability improvements). The NFC holds a token allowing for the play of a particular album. For each non-cached play, a new token is generated and sent to the NFC. The album represented by the NFC can then be loaned or resold like the old way of physical media. Maybe even let the NFCs go bad after a few thousand token rewrites just like how vinyl and tapes wear out. It would have no improvement over old media other than having a large and fragile IT infrastructure.
Vinyl record sales outperformed CDs in the US for the first time since 1987, according to a new report. Just over 41 million vinyl records were sold in 2022, to the tune of $1.2bn (£.99bn). Only 33 million CDs were sold, amounting to $483m.
One of the plan was to offer a bundled experience to the labels: you sell a physical media and the customer gets a code to add the album to their streaming library so they can also consume it digitally.
Edit/PS: It really feels strange arguing for an idea, I've given up on so long ago...
Honestly, this is a lot of what I like about bandcamp. (I really hope that epic buying them isn't a bad sign, on that note...)
It's nice to get a cd or a cassette, with some fancy holofoil cover on it, a little artifact of a band I like, and still have it on my phone, in my browser, whenever I want to listen to it. I could dig out the actual equipment to play those things directly, but usually that's a pain, and I just want to have them as a totem or something.
To think of a totally different possible trajectory of a technology is a bit like reading counterhistorical fiction. The interesting part isn’t just the assertion of something different but in considering the various second order effects.
Classical works very often come as a whole, with 3-4 particular "tracks" marking parts of that whole. It would be like selling a books by chapter.
OTOH maybe it would work. The Moonlight sonata underwent this, and the first track of the album is well-known and iconic, the third track is also widely recognized, but the second track is much more obscure.
It's interesting how despite classical music having such a surge of listenership (thanks largely in part due to video games), they've been unable to do much about it. You contrast this with the likes of the vinyl industry, which has capitalized on its revival through packaging and branding to the point of outpacing CDs... it's a pure shock that this step by Apple is really the only thing being done.
Just like vinyl, I don't think the solution is digital!
Has the sector ever survived other than thanks to public and private subsidies? Even in its heyday it was funded by Princes and Bishops and so on. Maybe the right approach is to lean into that. There are a lot of very wealthy people in China for example and many of them love classical music.
It is sadly true however that the West increasingly appears to have no interest in maintaining its own culture.
My wife composes choral music and "new music". (what many here would consider classical) and has been using Bandcamp since 2009 with pretty good success.
But even that gets tricky, as she is not the performer for any of the recordings.
It's a strange world though, when so many people focus on centuries-old music by dead German men, that's going to be harder to market. My first glance at Apple Classical a few weeks ago suggests that it's trying to cater to that crowd.
Bandcamp is better for living composers (and preforming musicians) than a lot of other traditional options. For example, if you have a successful performance is a piece, Parma Records will reach out to you and offer to do a "professional" recording. They'll ask for $20,000 and you'll get a box of CDs (not sure if they do that last part anymore but I would not be surprised). A surprising amount of musicians go this route, because they don't know any better.
I think I see what you mean in relation to what audiences Apple is presumably trying to cater to, though I have no market knowledge as to how “classical“ music audiences truly segment. Apple Classical becomes similar to Apple Music a way to (re-) discover both old catalog and new releases. Listening to Toscanini this morning, the performance and music sounds as fresh in 2022 as it always did.
I know an artist who has a bandcamp profile, but doesn't make a lot of money over it. It's mostly a business card for getting booked. But that might apply to Spotify for not very well known artists, too.
Bandcamp isn't nearly as well organized as this new service, but its feed of new releases sorted by genre exposes me to lots of indie classical music recordings.
I love how patient classical music fans are when people ask THE SAME QUESTION over and over and over again on forums as to why there’s a need for a separate classical music app. You classical music fans rock…
I think most classical music, by virtue of having been written along time ago and having been recorded rather well already, has no need to keep being re-recorded.
I blame the nature of digital assets for this; all we gotta do is keep copying all those files into brand new digital media and we can listen to what's been already recorded forever.
> But unfortunately, this wont change the fact that the classical recording industry is dying and that the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies.
Bet $100 that all classical music will be AI generated (synthesized and composed) in just three years. Supply side will be infinite.
I would bet heavily against that any such generated music to become popular (except maybe as bad filler music for video games music etc).
The truth is that classical music fan are very very picky about what they like.
Computers have been "better" musician than human for a long time: a midi file is always played "perfectly". Yet it's sounds horrible, mechanised to our ears. The controlled imperfection of a real human musician is what makes the music beautiful.
I don't see any computer composing anything worth listening to in the foreseeable future (and I'm bullish on generative ai).
What I'm saying: take a classical score as is and input it perfectly as a midi file and you are guaranteed to have a terrible output. Yet on paper, it's perfectly rendered as the composer wrote it.
This is why the act of playing music by a human is called a "performance", an "interpretation" in some languages. The musician is not just playing a score exactly as it is written, the musician gives a part of his/her into the act and make the music his/her own to make art.
And you don't think AI can't be programmed to "interpret" too? You haven't been paying attention much, in the last few weeks in particular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX9J4RIsvOA
So the performers are following some learned patterns of what they need to do with the written score to make it sound not-terrible to you. I disagree that's only possible for a human to achieve.
I don't have a stake in whether AI could or could not interpret a score, but it's still more than "learned patterns". Some performers imbue an interpretation depending on:
- the instrument
- the room or hall
- their personal experiences
- their personal philosophy of music (e.g., Gould and his anti-hedonistic philosophy)
- cultural norms and explicit respect paid thereof (e.g., in the interpretation of a Chopin mazurka)
- available recording technology and expertise
- available audio engineering technology and expertise
- what emotion they want to invoke or evoke to contextualize the music
- their patience
- their willingness to experiment
- etc.
It is not at all farfetched that a performer is taking most of these into account, directly or indirectly, to render a live or recorded performance.
It's not as if there's just this tradition of unwritten rules about interpreting a score that music students learn from their teachers, rather, it's that an interpretation is an amalgamation of experience, context, and on-the-spot reactive decision-making.
For an AI to successfully achieve this, they'll need the same variety of inputs and contexts to learn from.
>Why would anyone want to listen to it then? what would be the point? The acoustic equivalent of a screensaver?
Isn't that exactly how music is consumed nowadays by most people? They put something when driving, cooking, doing homework, etc. It's used mainly for mood/focus and they're not exactly paying close attention to it the same way one would to a audiobook of, say, an abstract algebra textbook. Especially considering how cheap and easy it is to steam music nowadays. I suspect focused, attentive listening only makes up a small minority of the total streams.
>I suspect focused, attentive listening only makes up a small minority of the total streams
The inverse is likely true with the classical audience. Just like with jazz, although there will be a portion of users seeking “vibey jazz” sort of playlists to use in the background while working, the majority of jazz fans consume jazz as albums and are still concerned with things like personnel and liner notes, perhaps even who mastered this recording. Classical fans are similar except I would say even more picky IME (worked in a jazz and classical CD store/venue for a number of years)
I wouldn't call myself a classical music fan, but if we're looking at Spotify stream numbers I wouldn't be surprised if a big chunk of classical is background noise too. Whenever I'm trying to get work done in a noisy environment I go for classical playlists - unless I'm doing something mindless like cleaning I find it very hard to focus with most music. Might just be that lyrics (especially in English) distract me, but classical is an easy go to for studying time IMO.
It might be useful, in both cases, to distinguish "fans" and "consumers" of those styles. Yes, the people who most consciously identify as fans of the styles are picky, but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of classical play counts by volume are consumed for muzakish purposes. Mozart for babies, Vivaldi for malls, etc.
The same may be true for Jazz, though in that genre there may be a bit more of a separation between jazzy background mood music and jazz as consumed by fans. There are some overlaps ("The Girl from Ipanema", "Take Five", etc), but they may not be quite as central to the canon as their classical counterparts.
these are fair points, I suppose I was more addressing this with the "classical fan" user in mind given the context of the discussion, idea of a platform that serves these users. It definitely is true though that a huge portion of music listeners in general would rather throw a random playlist on than select an album and it would be interesting to somehow see how many classical listeners on say Spotify are doing so through playlists vs selected albums.
> I suspect focused, attentive listening only makes up a small minority of the total streams.
You haven't justified your assertion of the dichotomy between pure blind consumption and active, focussed listening. You must actually argue that the negation of one implies the other. Your comment is totally meaningless as it stands
> Why would anyone want to listen to it then? what would be the point? The acoustic equivalent of a screensaver?
I would think they would want to listen to it for the same reason they listen to human generated music.
Is your thought here that AI generated art is not art? Is it the nature of the creator that determines the listeners enjoyment? If the music generated by a computer is indistinguishable from human made music, how can this be possible? Moreover, at what point would the computer generation be sufficient to shift it from art to “screensaver”? Would it be one simulated member of an otherwise human orchestra? Would it take 50%. If you can’t draw a line, doesn’t that further indicate it’s irrelevant?
It's way less complicated than that. Music and art in general belong to the social context that produced them. A lot of our appreciation doesn't really come from the technical prowess of the artist or the music theory behind that, but from the cultural hooks we can find in it.
If you want a quick example of what I'm saying, look online for Music for Installations by Brian Eno. It's a "almost-generative-but-not-really" music album made for audiovisual installations. It's... kinda nice but it's 6 hours long and literally gets boring after less than 30 minutes.
I can't imagine listening to something even more abstracted from a human composer for more than 20 minutes. I mean, I'm pretty sure you can generate something even quite pleasant with AIs. Most people will just listen for 15 min, say "uh, cool", and go back to regular music.
Brian Eno was 100% right about ambient music, but he was just wrong about what form it would take. Basically, his music is so unintrusive to the point of being sleep-inducing for many, thus at least a little more intensity is needed. What really became the ambient music was 24/7 lofi hiphop streams. That kind of music is still very abstracted from a human composer, it just happens to have slightly different sonic qualities and sociocultural context than Eno, so it appeals to a wider audience.
EDIT: Should note that Eno's music is still very influential for a lot of people doing work. He composed Neroli after a lot of people doing intellectual work asked him for a new piece geared specifically towards it. Also, Discreet Music was historically used on many maternity wards. In general it is not as if he failed in the popular sphere, Eno is an extremely popular musician
Totally agree with this, but I think it's very likely we'll see AI-written pop hits. They've basically been churned out factory style for years anyway.
And if that does happen, expect a far more exciting backlash movement, like alternative rock in the 90s was to garbage excesses of the 80s.
Many people are so starved of any kind of creative education that they see art in purely a utilitarian point of view. It doesn't matter to them if a human made it, the outcome is the same. To them, yeah pretty much all art is like a screensaver
Relating to it as a creative process. Connecting directly with the artist, mind to mind, through the art. Being liberated from my current perspective. Story telling. Revolutionary mental states. New synergistic paradigms. All the actual reasons why people have been making art for many 1000s of years.
You should not admire artists, but I'm sad for you that art is just a product for you, and not a source of your own expression. Some people naturally gravitate to a subservient, non-creative position.
It already exists, and is known as elevator music or muzak. I can certainly see the value in generating endless copyright-free background music, because so many human effort has been put into composing it already.
Alright, but why would I actually spend time to actively listen to it? Op was specifically talking about Classic music being replaced by AI in listening events, not about staying on hold on a phone calls or waiting on a parking spot.
You wouldn't actively listening, and that's why generated muzak would be okay. "The acoustic equivalent of a screensaver", as someone in the thread called it. The idea that classical performances would be replace human composers in concert context is quite ridiculous. Maybe as a novelty, once, but that's all.
No one with enough bored capital to patronize the arts is going to go to see and be seen at a performance of a synthetic symphony - or not more than once or twice, anyway, for the sake of the thing. Philharmonics need not fear for their concert halls, or not at least for this reason.
Perhaps I should. An infinite future of the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan, producing performances only slightly more perfectly machined, needs some antidote.
Given that you’re “building the future AI cloud production studio”, it seems you have a business interest in this coming true.
Maybe there’s more to art than business though. I bet there will still be a market for unique and novel interpretations of classical works played by real humans capable of being moved by the compositions they’re playing.
I'd have to disagree. Classical music would be the LAST thing AI could do well. Hard to but technique, nuance, opinion, interpretation, style and the greatest utterances of our troubled civilization into an algorithm. Pop, dance, rap, blaalads....maybe. Classical and Jazz? Never going to happen.
Lmao, classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music. Without any lyrics to generate its basically just generating some simple patterns in basic instruments.
> classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music
Uh, have you actually listened to any of it? At all?
There are some non-Western traditional types of music I'd agree can have a level of complexity not usually encountered within the Western classical or jazz genres, but it's fair to say all over forms of Western music are vastly simpler in terms of harmonic language, tonality, form/ structure, instrumentation etc.
None of which I believe would make it harder for AIs to generate, as computers can manage complexity rather well.
What I expect AIs to not be good at is to conjure a truly original and distinct sound world significantly different to anything that's come before, but that still captivates audiences. Which is arguably what the greatest human composers & musicians have generally achieved, in any genre.
The "over" was a typo for "other" (hope that was obvious!). But that primarily refers to the pop/rock/folk genres.
One point I'd agree on is that it will take longer for AI technology to produce a satisfying simulation of the human singing voice than it will for purely instrumental music. In fact despite the leaps and bounds in speech synthesis I've yet to hear any sort of convincing demonstration of synthesized singing. But I can't see why there's any real reason it won't happen sooner or later.
Classical and jazz are actually the primary Western music genres where you encounter some deep music theory.
EG: Read something like George Russell's "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization" (the basis from which modal jazz sprung, which includes one of the most famous jazz albums of all time, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"). Now add to the theory the ability to improvise around it as good as a Miles Davis level jazz performer can. It's not technically easy at all.
Even if other music genres are much technically easier, so much of music is the social experience anyways.
Take punk music. Though some parts got more technical later, much of it (particularly the late 1970s / early 1980s stuff) is, in my opinion, very technically easy; not too challenging to play, with very basic music structure (which was half the point, a return to rock's garage roots).
I'm guessing an AI can probably be developed (especially with today's fairly realistic sounding guitar VSTs) to make some "technically correct" old school punk rock, certainly much easier than it can be programmed to make "technically correct" modal jazz. An AI, however, cannot replicate the human parts, eg the social or community aspects of a music scene. Which with a lot of music is a huge portion of the point (certainly for punk it was).
You probably will be able to get imitation in the not too distant future. But a world where we just listen to imitations of 50s and 60s derivatives of bebop is a sad one. The most loved musicians are ones who are pushing things forward and don't just imitate Trane endlessly or whatever.
AI would need to be able to do something like create The Bad Plus in 1995. That's an even bigger mountain to climb.
We have the tech to be licensed (melodyne or zynaptiq for the polyphonic pitch data extraction), python libs for the analysis. Just needs the brains to execute it at this point...and someone to pay for this kind of compute
I don't think it is completely unreasonable in the future. But I'm personally good with what we've got in this style. We don't need another A Love Supreme. We've already got it. It was fun when Both Directions at Once was discovered, but it isn't like it was something that we needed in 2018.
People will still want to create their sound, and that'll lead to new music over time that isn't just imitation.
I have think you have defined the terms of battle. An improvisational jazz solo from a master vs one that is AI generated. I don't know this but I suspect that Monk had no idea where his solos were going when he started to play them. I like where they went, I'm just saying there were no directions.
It's how commerce works. As soon as AI can generate a commercially viable product, in less time and for less cost, human content ceases to have any commercial value, and as AI becomes ubiquitous it becomes normalized in pop culture. Appreciation comes with the inevitable cycle of one generation being born native to a paradigm shift rejecting the standards of the old guard.
And it won't just be classical, it will be all genres and all creative media. And it will probably take longer than three years. But it will happen.
> As soon as AI can generate a commercially viable product, in less time and for less cost, human content ceases to have any commercial value
Ever been to a craft show? An artist can sell a handmade bowl for $100 even though you can find an identical manufactured one at Target for $1.
Other examples: Chick-Fil-A markets their milkshakes as “hand spun”. Or when Dreamweaver started automating the layout of webpages, web devs started calling their websites “handmade”. It’s been possible to automate call centers for a long time now, but companies advertise the ability to speak to a human representative as a differentiating feature of their business.
There is value in having humans in the loop, despite automation. People just don’t trust robots.
We have machines that can produce clothing, yet there are people out there that buy custom tailored clothing. AI can generate images, yet people will go out there and buy something custom made. I think manufactories will become much more important and expand into more areas. Which means that hand-made music will just be much more expensive, and your "off-the-shelf"-production will be way cheaper.
Exactly - in fact, once AIs/automation are capable of achieving all the necessary production of goods/services for a universally high material standard of living, then I'd imagine choosing to handcraft works of art and share them with others (potentially in exchange for money) will become as popular as it's ever been, if not more so.
We do not have machines that produce clothing. All clothing in the entire world is handmade, which is why developing countries like Bangladesh specialize in it.
The idea that Bach composed the Well tempered clavier and similar works merely in a mechanical process is basically a fairy tale, and it's kind obvious once you read the music sheets.
No harm done. Chalk it up to appreciating the music in near perfect ignorance of its contemporary social context - I had no idea that'd been a controversial point until I went looking for why something I'd thought a harmless joke had crossed people.
Bach's oeuvre is practically inexhaustible and after a while gets to feel a bit samey in places. This led me to make a joke that, judging by a sibling comment of yours, has not landed well among Bach fans, who seem to have a history [1] of being annoyed by such badinage.
Apparently there's something about his work that's seen [2] as uniquely susceptible to automation, and I suppose I can see where the irritation would come from. Doesn't bother me any, but then I've always preferred Beethoven anyway.
I would have disagreed with you 5 years ago but actually I think you could be right. There are adjacent examples of transcendent human experiences being synthesized - eg people falling in love with that Replika chatbot.
I feel grateful that I heard the Mahler symphonies before the great flood of AI content, at least I will always have that. But perhaps AI could complete his 10th symphony…
You could make the argument that charting pop music will be AI generated, or Spotify will be pushing AI generated music through all their popular playlists to avoid paying music royalties - these don't seem to be too far from what happens currently.
But to bet that some of the fussiest and most discerning music listeners would prefer this seems foolish.
The issue is that while it's nice to have a UX tailored for classical, this won't likely help the classical industry to thrive again.
To simplify a bit, the classical music industry is composed of:
- the majors labels (Universal Music, Sony, Warner and EMI)
- A dozen large independent labels (Naxos being the largest)
- hundreds of small labels
The majors mostly care about promoting a few star performers and milking their huge existing catalog. They have no problem with putting everything on subscription services for pennies. This what you find on all subscription services.
The larger independent labels also have significant catalog and some will also put part of it on subscription services but mostly won't.
However, it is totally financially impossible for the smaller labels which are actually recording most of the interesting new records to survive on the pennies they would get from subscription services. Most of them have rejected that model and caters to the increasingly niche market of audiophile still ready to buy new high quality music.
As a classical music fan, I'm happy to see that there will finally be an offering offering a good experience and massively increasing discoverability (which is terrible in mainstream services).
But unfortunately, this wont change the fact that the classical recording industry is dying and that the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies.