Music & technology. Is the future already here?

[Music] hello and welcome to the next panel of the international music forum selector pro 2022 today we are talking about music and technology and asking if the future is in fact already here so this talk is brought to you by the british council ukraine and music export ukraine with the aim to strengthen connections between the music sectors of the united kingdom ukraine south carcasses western balkans and central asia to create relevant educational opportunities for artists managers as well as music event organizers and to support growth of new talent and promote effective business processes in the music industry my name is jennifer lucy allen i'm a writer and broadcaster from the uk where the specialism in experimental underground music not very much industry where i'm from i write for the wire the guardian and the quietus and host late junction on bbc radio 3. so my three panelists for today very welcome all of you um i've got jotty who is the voice of saturday mornings on winterfell and a dj has played internationally performing at field day the tower fest in the uk plus applesap novobatida melt and many many other places and she's been the rinser fm host for six years with her regular shows clocking up uh over 50 000 plays and she's also run workshops and talk courses at the south bank center plus for red bull and sisu dj workshop and there's loads of her mixes online and uh her boiler room debut uh it's one of my favorites it's uh all killer name filler and it's a really really joyful one and if you haven't seen that definitely check it out so i've also got done a close here from 5g festival in the uk which is a 5g powered digital immersive hybrid festival experiences that showcases creative talent blended with the power of advanced digital technologies it's broadcast live directly to audiences at remote locations from world leading venues and there's also immersive in-venue experiences so donna is a strategic consultant with 25 years experience of leadership in arts and culture working in local government higher education and arts organizations she was head of arts at brighton hove city council artistic director and producer of the city's white knight festival associate producer at brighton festival and one of the founding trustees of the award winning brighton open air theatre and that's just a small bit of her cv she spent eight years as project producer for zack zappa creating outdoor arts festivals nationally and in europe his senior research fellow at the university of brighton and a fellow of the royal society of arts so really glad to have you with us my third panelist is anton volovic chief business officer at reface in ukraine so reface is a leader in applying artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies for personalized content creation so the reface app if you haven't used it already i think you're in a minority it hit number one in the app store soon after it's released was listed among the best apps of 2020 by google play used by celebrities including elon musk justin bieber snoop dogg and miley cyrus and as of october 2021 the refuse app has been installed 180 million times and users have generated more than four billion pieces of synthetic media not many then so welcome to all of you i'm going to dive right in with questions because we're talking about really big topics and i want to get into some of the nuts and bolts of what's happening uh both for audiences and behind the scenes in the industry so the first thing that i want to talk about um is kind of what's right in front of us at the moment which is the uh world of sort of post covered live events so and specifically the sort of growth or emergence of um hybrid online and in-person events are so donna i want to start with you as somebody who's got a massive amount of experience in this area so when uh what are the main challenges that you see when putting together live events uh that are have a hybrid online element great thanks thanks very much and jennifer so so yeah i mean i'm um i'm actually working as a digital culture associate with brighton doing brighton festival as part of the 5g festival as well so so um brighton dome is obviously it's a it's an arts and cultural venue in brighton and that was running you know during the covid as well and experience all of those things that the venues were across the country uh also a festival and a music service as well so it's very much part of the motivation for um the being part of the 5g festival was to explore really about how technology can can can help reach new audiences i mean that's essentially what our sort of like a core uh ethos is is how do we work with artists to create new types of experience and also reach the borders broadest um possible audience and um um so the 5g festival started it's um it will culminate in march this year and it's actually been running for about a year and a half so very very interestingly it's sort of tracked along the sort of covered thing as we've been trying to continue running a a venue we've run two festivals during that time as well and so so the the hybrid streaming live um uh you know um portfolio has really been part of what we've been um been thinking about and learning a lot and it's been it's been it's been really interesting to also observe about how as we started to have these moments where we've got almost back to normal about how audiences are sort of responding to to to that uh we've you know we've seen um you know a bit of a drop off in our engagement with with with live live um with the streaming and side of things and a real hunger for people to come back to the live experience and i think what's exciting about the 5g festival what we're aspiring to do is it was always about actually you know really trying to understand about how you can bring those things together so how how you can use technology to create um an experience um for a live audience in a venue that is using live streaming technology um to really sort of create that sense of sort of liveness but also creating new experiences for people who might not be able to attend for whatever reason as well um uh and that's been i mean it's a research project you know it's not it's not just been something that we could just plug in and play we've been developing the technology developing the sort of like creative design of it um all the way through it over the the you know the last year and a half as well um so it's been it's been really interesting what we're learning and i think this like idea about what is liveness you know what makes live events special i mean we i think we all sort of we all sort of know that you know it's actually a sort of magic that happens isn't it you know and some of that is around the spontaneity of like not quite knowing what's going to happen some of that is around the communication that you feel with the artist some of it is around the communication you feel with those other people in the in the room with you you know that being in the same time and place um and uh what we're exploring is about whether 5g with its reduced latency can really try and at least try and create some of those aspects you know that feeling of immediacy that feeling of being connected so um connection has become a real sort of uh watch word um for us so so so i would say you know in terms of like hybrid events i think that that that spontaneity that connection and also that creativity you know because because actually you know what it's really really about is whether it's a an artist that you want to see an experience that you want to be part of is there an element where um there's technologies coming around the corner that weren't there before covid for for the sort of stuff that you're looking to put on yeah there is as well and we're trying not to be destruct distracted from that too much because a lot of what we're doing in the 5g festival is actually applying a lot of the technologies that you might be familiar with from from live events uh audio and visual technology and then just seeing about how we can um make that immediate over physical distance you know so so a lot of the 5g festival is really about that and actually where the creative innovation is coming in is through the artists we're working with so we're working with the artists make amplify uh who are like a vj an artist designer and we're working with uh videographer nick driftwood and we're working with them really to see how they can push that that existing technology into these sort of new spaces these new sort of hybrid and physically remote spaces but then sort of outside of that i think it's been very interesting someone once said to me that covert has been like um dog years in terms of technology adoption and i think that's really true isn't it so we've seen nine years of experiments uh over the you know over the last the last year and and i think where we have started to see really interesting growth as in is it is in the metaverse and in in those vr vr events and um and i expect to see a bit more of that in the future once our sort of live you know a hunger for live events has been stated a little bit i think we'll we'll we'll start to explore a bit more about what's happening in these vr spaces either with um musical you know with with gigs and and artistic experiences in existing game worlds or actually just creating whole new sort of um spaces i thought lost horizon at the beginning of lockdown which was the the guys behind shangri-la in glastonbury i thought that was a like an incredible vr uh experience and so i think vr is a real one to watch and then the other part that i think we've seen a lot of development in in particular in our world in terms of um artists is working with ar as well and augmented reality is really really interesting for us as a venue and festival not just because of the creative possibilities but also for the um you know additional layers of engagement it offers and and the opportunities it might give for audiences with disabilities for example to to engage with with live events and experiences yeah so i want to um before we sort of get on to like ar and machine learning and the way these sort of technologies are coming in i want to talk to jotty about um because you're a sort of performer and a dj and i want to ask you what your experience of um either streamed events or hybrid events has been and what are the things that you've learned um as someone who really started out in in hybrid events actually and what are the things you know about like sort of do's and don'ts and what is your sort of thinking about how you play to an online and an in-person audience yeah it's been it's been amazing for me i guess um i was also just as the rest of the world um so used to just getting on a plane walking into a venue doing a sound check seeing a number of people doing a set how you do a set and then going home and then maybe over the next few weeks you see videos and clips and pictures online put up by other people sometimes there's an audio recording sometimes there's a sometimes there's a film set like for example the boiler room but that's then you know a special occasion or we consider it immediately a press set because it has been filmed so it's part of you know your your your press tour at that moment and from one day to another i was just i got a phone call from my manager saying i think you need to prepare for not djing in real life for two years at least he had done immediately a whole research on pandemic i'm glad he said that because even now i mean i'm supposed to be playing france and austria and belgium and the netherlands for the next these four weeks so i'm not working for four weeks because all those four countries have closed their clubs and i'm okay because i prepared myself for this to go on for about two years so it didn't take long before i thought hmm ig live i've spoken on it before but i'm in my living room i've got my decks at home let's see what we can do and then out of pure boredom and just longing to connect with people without risking anybody's health or mine and i started doing these dj sets on ig live we called it club georgiana on saturdays and it became a whole thing people could dial in and do a show with me and we had people requesting for songs and you know because you can type on ig you could tell i didn't even have to always look at the screen and pay attention to what was going on then soon after i discovered twitch which is mostly known as a gaming platform i guess and i started a lot of i started seeing a lot of american djs like jazzy jeff they were streaming dj sets on twitch and i think after about six months on ig live and getting taken down because of you know copyright issues etc i moved to twitch where the chat function is times a hundred and all of a sudden i noticed that this was connecting people from all around the world during one of my sets at the same time without having to be in the same place or in the same time zone and what it did was it made me realize that there's this whole group of potential um listeners and p just humans i can connect with over the same interest that we have that not only um i can't connect with physically because of the pandemic but some of my very loyal twitch followers are um parents they have uh two kids already recently uh on one of my sunday streams our favorite couple in the chat announced they have a third one on the way and you know it's been a year and a half so we're really invested in their lives and i don't know what they look like but i can tell you the color of their fridge because they always talk about their fancy new fridge and we're all really excited and them being in their 20s and having a third kid even if i were to come to their city they can't afford a babysitter and i also have people in the church who are bound to wheelchair i also have people who do not live in one of the main big cities of where you would play when you visit a certain country and that really made me want to connect with my listeners in a way that i normally wouldn't even do physically because when you play a set in a club what it means americans love to talk on the microphone i however i'm a very european dj i like i like the music to do the talking so i'm not actually speaking to people you you feel a really close connection and you hope that the message is coming across whereas when you're doing virtually you can actually play how however you want to play you can sit down at your kitchen table that's what we do on the sundays you can grab the microphone and you can ask how people's days were you can ask what happened at that job interview and all of a sudden you're so much deeper into someone's life and what i notice now is also everything that i do outside of music these people are very involved and they care because we've built this very intimate friendship without a facetime or an actual phone line but we have the feeling that we've gone through this pandemic together and throughout this pandemic we've all kept each other sane and i think that's the main different way of connecting to your audience if you were with them in the club space where the music is super loud even if you were to say something people can't hear you um not always but a lot of people can be intoxicated and there's it's dark very often and there's different rooms all these things that we had kind of accepted as normal but now that has completely changed for me to the point where when now i'm back on the road again djing and i ask i get my manager to ask promoters can she stream this set and it doesn't feel the same because during those streams i'm still actually djing in a club so i'm not shouting down the microphone what i had for dinner and there's a fundamental difference there with your sort of uh rinse shows in that you're in conversation so you're getting like immediate responses from a community rather than an audience talking about you in a chat room i guess yeah it's it's it's so funny i think what this has done is has broken it's broken down all the different ways of output that we have and how we can diversify them and how every different outlet serves a different purpose so now for me the rinse the online stream and the physical dj set are completely separate entities and i go into preparing but also afterwards analyzing them in a completely different way and i have different um almost analytics i'm looking for different statistics different numbers it's not oh did we sell out the last release in in 24 hours but it's more what what did people you know say to me in a private message on the streaming platform afterwards it might have it's not the 500 tickets you were looking for but it's that heartfelt message and now with the radio it's a different thing i'm looking for him i'm wondering if people are asking for track ids and sending emails about certain songs i've played so that's really different do you think that um those sort of technological aspects that have developed these different communities then affect um you sort of creatively so do you feel like you can perhaps experiment or play more out there stuff whereas you have more of a remit in your other places or you you know you're in a club with people so you you know you've got to play the big tune sort of thing yeah there's definitely i think what it's done it's it's gone both ways one for example when i'm live streaming we have all the freedom in the world so if i want to focus on the entire saturday afternoon on a specific genre that's emerging from south africa and have moments where i talk way longer than i would on my radio show i mean i'm on a radio show you can be quite educational as well but the stream is all you and if people don't like it they just close their laptop they close the tab like it's not a big deal and but what it's also done is i have become a lot more comfortable with storytelling on the streams and i'm kind of implementing it a little bit more in my live sets as well because a lot of people now are also aware of the stream so they've caught at least one so nothing really catches them by surprise um and it is interesting i think it's as you know a dj compared to maybe another version of a talent in the music industry it's definitely given me more opportunities of how to storytell because i don't make music so it's never my own music telling the story i'm using other people's music to tell the story and i think this gives it an extra dimension of how deep i can go so there's two there's uh two things i want to pick up from this and actually um probably the thing that i want to um ask both donna and justine about is this the challenges of monetizing the sort of streamed content um and whether you see certain communities uh up for sort of paying for content which ones don't what technologies are helping you do that in a better or more efficient way and what models um are working for you and then maybe and maybe anton if you um have any comments on this i know like you have quite a lot of knowledge about this then feel free to chip in yeah sure actually i mean it's a it's uh such a good question and jennifer and i think it's the other thing that's been part of the learning isn't it's not just been about the technology and the engagement it's also been about the monetizing aspect of it so there's a there's a strand of the 5g festival that's specifically looking at that actually because it's a research project and that's led by one of the partners which is warner so of course you know they they really know their they know their stuff um about that and how it compares to to to other models the other thing i'd sort of highlight is um there was a really good report that the music venue trust produced over the um pandemic uh which was really sort of looking about um some of the challenges around streaming and about monetizing it you know and licensing i mean we've seen a lot of like crazy stuff when you think about it you know when prs um you know produced that really big sort of um you know uh um tax on um live streaming and there's particular regulation around it i mean it's complex legally and financially um and i think you know gosh you've got to be an optimist didn't you because it does feel to me like there is an opportunity maybe to see if there can be a bit more equitable um you know funding model and ownership licensing model um around um streaming events that that benefits our artists a bit more it'd be interesting to see how that um uh emerges um and the same with the you know the metaverse stuff i was talking about as well you know um it's been really interesting to see how many um you know how much money is going into that and that's being seen as a new sort of like licensed licensed platform as well but i really like what um um georgie was saying about like um you know they it it's good to understand from your own perspective as an artist about what the benefit is from each of these different things actually you know because sometimes sometimes it's it's not about the direct monetizing in the instance sometimes it's about building a community that that will have you know um uh it will have financial benefit for you elsewhere you know either by increasing um people who will will buy your stuff or create new contracts for you or people who come to your gigs as well so um i don't think we should just see it as transactional all the time because i think it's um i think it's complicated but but gosh you know that's that's greater mines than my the miner sort of i'm struggling with that at the moment be really interesting to see what pans out over the next few months if i remember rightly that music venue trust report which was made by for anyone who's not sure what that is there's a organization called the music venue trust in the uk and they do a lot of supporting of sort of grassroots music and music venues and things like that and the my main takeaway from that report was uh that the monetization is a real problem for emerging artists if you have a brand and a name already people will tune into your set but if you're the support then um it's really hard to get engagement and to monetize your content but jotty do you have any uh yeah i can definitely um vouch for that it is something i'm still trying to figure out because i mean the first year was great because the whole world wasn't locked down so every stream uh was busy and i know that i've been talking a lot about twitch but for example there's also platforms like mix cloud live and i guess miss cloud live actually is the most um copyright issue free of all because they have i used to work at miss cloud actually when we went into the pandemic so i was there at the start of the development of that platform um but what i uh and they have a blanket license don't they unlike soundcloud and other platforms so you can play whatever you want yeah they have deals with all the major um labels in this the the umbrellas basically that are above any type of um bigger corporation you could get involved with essentially and but i think what i immediately struggled with at the start was um the fact that you can tune in without having to pay and so then how do you get comfortable telling someone that it would be great if they either tip for one off or subscribe for a monthly amount because when you're playing somewhere in real life they've already done that and you you don't have to have that conversation with anybody and that's already dealt with on your behalf or else you wouldn't be there at that point basically and this is now that we've come out of the global lockdown and you know there's one six so one fourth of the amount of people that normally would be in a stream and you also know that people are also going back to clubbing and spending their money in a physical space so then and i'm also not as reliable i'm not doing the same type of streams three times a week because i'm on the road and i actually uh to be completely transparent this is something i'm struggling with because i want to continue to stream i don't want to give up on streaming point line that's one thing i've learned i am my manager and i have agreed on this it's a great thing for my mental health as well and you can still play music and be connected to people without traveling i'm type 1 diabetic so this lifestyle i've chosen is not great for my health and this doesn't offer solutions where you could say for example once you're big enough big enough hey i'm going to take one week of every month off because that's the week i stream but when you're not you know a carl cox where if you announce you're doing a stream 500 000 people want to see you no matter what time of day it's really difficult and i actually haven't figured that out yet so that's also why i find conversations like this really interesting because we aren't moving away from this model anymore so how do we incorporate this into a substantial way of surviving off of your work because it is you know it can cost a lot of money you do have to invest in it i wonder if anton knew as sort of chief business officer at reface and uh what you as a company have learned about these sorts of and what technology offers in terms of different funding models which ones you find work which ones don't yeah yeah thank you for the question so actually it's very interesting to hear uh different perspectives right because i'm coming from the tech world and we're thinking more kind of from the company's standpoint how we can kind of empower all the creatives in the world because basically the original mission of free face is to empower content creation within all technologies because we believe that uh many more people are creative but uh it's hard for people to get into the creative mood because the barriers are too high and they're therefore with ml technologies and currently over the last year and a half that we've been existed we've been playing more with the video content but we're kind of simplifying people uh the entrance to the creative economy which is extremely interesting and uh what we see kind of from strategic company perspective is two problems so the first one is that uh over the last years uh the platforms get too much power over the industry overall and it's a very big problem right because uh basically uh music creates a lot of value because people want to pay for it people want to spend time on it it's it's a big part of the intention economy but the thing is that most of the money still stays with facebook's googles of the world right as the first big problem the second one is also this uh big uh label houses which also uh build their monetization model in such a way that actually the person who creates the music and who performs gets peanuts of what's been earned right and uh what's happening now i think uh also with the help of quite abundant capital and venture capital space is that many people are trying to tackle these problems from different fronts and i think it's we see improvement there because every year more and more new companies emerge which help artists for example to record to manage their finances uh to go direct to fans i think very good example is substack which is a newsletter it's not very music related but it enables journalists for example to spin off from the big houses and earn directly with the engagement of the funds kind of bypassing the strong platform intermediaries and i think the industry is changing for the better uh but there is still a lot to be done right the thing with we see is that uh the big platforms at least trying to launch launch creators funds which kind of help a little bit but still doesn't solve a problem because they do not allow different creators not just the musical ones to make a living they just help a little bit uh and the other thing is also kind of the very big inequality in probably every crater space right so the the top one percent gets 99 of what's been earned and i think this is the the other problem that either the startups or the big companies which would be pressed by the ways of the startups should change going forward yeah are there any specific startups uh you're talking about like lots of uh people looking to solve these different um issues from different fronts and are there any in particular that you have seen that perhaps like is in music might not be aware of that are relevant to the music space yeah so one one quite interesting which we're trying to collaborate with it's also an andreessen horowitz backed company it's called united artists or united masters i also i always messed this up but basically the idea is that this company helps you manage your work and it covers a lot of things which label usually covers for the artists and obviously the fees are way lower and there is a there is a much basically lower paycheck that you need to pay them that to the industry incumbent nice um so the uh there's something that i i want to try and talk about access before we go but also i'm aware that we're talking about the future of technology um so an anton um i was reading about reface yesterday and i came across your ai generated musician so can you tell us about that what it was about and also i'm interested in with this machine learning which artists did the ai create that you had to put in the bin yeah so rephase first is giving the artist a very big distributional platform and again we were created first of all in mind to entertain the casual creator not the creator like joti for example so it's a very different use case but uh the big musicians are also benefiting from our platform uh so we have around 20 million monthly active users who come to reface to enjoy different machine learning techniques how they can modify content and many artists i think over the 100 already uh reached out to reface and uh launched their like piece of a clip or a video on the platform where the fans can come and interact with this video and it's been very effective uh we're in our platform basically the the idea is that uh a piece of video can be modified with the different types of machine learning technologies so original one is the face walk where when you basically have face swap on a video the other one is the animate image where we can make the kind of like in harry potter the painting paintings start to move uh the other one is the lip sync and basically with all the help of this ml toolbox a fan can come and interact with the piece of creation of the artists they like and it's very viral as well and helps artists to create the content create engagement and spread out to different social media uh actually the co-creation with the funds which is probably much more useful just uh versus like another post from the artist right because you engage with the funds on a much more personal level by contributing to co-creation and of course we're still in a pretty rudimentary level of machine learning technologies you can do a couple of techniques at three phase i think we have seven now but going forward the the technology is scaling a lot and therefore i think uh if just to imagine in simple terms you can create like kind of interactive game like experience with your funds and it's the other way to kind of stay relevant and uh create value for the funds which you can potentially also monetize and just be happy as you're giving something to the funds more than just the music what what sort of ways do you see it like in the future in sort of perhaps five years um ai and machine learning technology how do you see it being used by musicians and djs so it's very interesting it's very hard to predict because even uh 20 years ago the futurologist predicted that by 2020 we would have robots doing everything it didn't happen so it's very hard to make these predictions uh what i hope will happen will happen is that ai would help people live more meaningful line lives online and at least my opinion is that i don't want people to spend more time online than they do now but i want this time to be more of a high quality an opportunity to interact better and stuff like this so this is the first point and the second point is obviously of anything which happens in the world there's a good and bad side and what i really don't want to happen is ai taking over creative passion of people who currently produce music who think about the new songs the lyrics and stuff like this so this stuff i hope will not pick up or at least will not get a very big uh spread but on the engagement side i think ai can do a lot of things and also uh going back to donna's point about metaverse i think a lot of things would be actually evolving in the 3d game like worlds as we call it metaverse yeah in what way is sort of ai or machine learning technology coming into what you do at the moment donna is interesting actually because we're sort of starting to explore some partnerships uh with with um because i mean what's been really interesting is um listening to anton then as well was this whole thing about like you know the importance of trying to find ways for creators and artists to engage with the stuff and i think ai and machine learning is a really interesting area because you you know obviously one of the challenges around it is it's it carries forward a lot of the biases from wider society and particularly from the tech industry in terms of diversity you know on on all levels and and i always feel that like actually the way that you counteract that is by getting the widest possible sort of community of artists the diverse amount of artists divers in every sort of sense of the word to engage with it and to challenge it and to shape it as well you know and that's where i really see a role for something like like the brighton dome brighton festival um is to try and put together the partnerships and the funding so that we can create actually rather than just making rather than just having the sort of attitude of the spec you know the technologies they're just going to use it is to try and create sort of programs where we can take um like curated diverse asses through learning and creating work in this uh in ai and machine learning so so we're looking at a couple of um partnerships to do that as our next project after the 5g festival actually because i think it is a really interesting area particularly in terms of like thinking about the sort of world we want to live in i guess you know and that future world has like you said it's there's a really crucial thing that there's an artist called jennifer walsh who talks about this a lot which is that if we want to sort of create the sort of future we want to see with ai and machine learning actually the past is really important because we're feeding in those bodies of knowledge with which those algorithms are training and if you feed in a biased body of knowledge which is kind of present a lot of present day bodies you know if you train something to with like beethoven it's going to make beethoven but if you train it with a very diverse range of composers you're going to come out with something which is uh much more interesting and potentially like um diversity musical and in the way it sounds and and there's much more potential for invention there so it's about these the way we deal with the past has a lot of bearing on the way we deal with the future comes out in terms of these ai and machine learning uh technologies yeah and it's very it's very interesting as well and anton you'll probably correct me if i'm wrong on this as well but because i'm not i'm not a tech i'm not not from a tech background but but because i've done a lot of work in terms of thinking about technology and the impact of sort of technology as well you know by by definition it's quite binary you know so it is about you know one of the problems with ai machine learning is it is you know it's adverse you know adversarial it's it's binary and there's a really brilliant artist called jake elworth who did a fantastic project around face recognition which which was focused on drag queens because it was confusing he had to train it that there was these things called drag queens that weren't a man or a woman you know because because a.i can be quite reductive in terms of like its interpretation i think that it's really you know the more you can create artists you can engage with artists you play in that sort of space conceptually as well as technically um you know the more interesting it is for everyone yeah don't a very good point just just to follow up i think ai is really good in uh sort of kind environments where you just need to analyze the data and produce the result and music like business decisions it's weak environments where you have a lot of variables moving on you cannot actually analyze everything precisely so it's not pure math and here obviously ai doesn't perform as good as in the other the other environment so there's something else um i want to pick up on a bit before we sort of uh i want to wrap up with a nice positive question but um to ask you uh all about access because uh it seems to me one of the um most important developments that was um sort of accelerated by covid uh and live events becoming online events or hybrid events um was access and jutty you touched on this that like people who wouldn't usually be able to come to shows for whatever reason now can engage and can actually see a dj set in a way that that was um there was only a handful of them around before or the technology hadn't really um caught up with live streaming so um i uh is that access something i suppose i asked donna first like um what are those things you've learned about access and are you looking to sort of keep them and what what is the feedback from audiences being yeah i mean 100 100 and i think access is you know i think that is a real area where you hear a lot about how technology can sort of change the world and make the world a better place and i think access really is the space where you can start seeing that happen or already and that's where the people who can't or don't want to attend the event i mean the other thing we've learned during covid is that maybe we can function without jumping on planes every five minutes you know there is a climate emergency you know maybe we do need to think about like how can we take part in things without actually physically going to those spaces so you know there's that aspect of it as well there's the access for people who aren't physically able to to uh attend a um uh you know events for for their other reasons but but um i think i mentioned earlier as well i'm really interested about the possibility of sort of uh access technologies within physical spaces as well you know the the immediacy of having sir titling for example or or like haptic technology that enables people who who may be uh deaf or hard of hearing to feel the music there's some really interesting startups and technology out there which which are are really focused on that like how can we level the playing field in terms of the opportunity for for everyone to to experience this the same quality of thing even if it's a slightly different thing i think it's a it's a massive massive area of growth and importance it's really it's really important to our it really important to us and it's why we've continued to do streaming is exactly because of the um the you know the impact it has on people who aren't able physically to come to the venue because of disabilities yeah jesse do you see that sort of learning trickling down into physical club spaces as well yeah definitely i think we could already start seeing this pre pandemic i mean um but even take it outside of music we were seeing this in sport a lot you know you had tiered ways of taking in a big football match you could be inside the stadium i was at one of the champions league finals outside the madrid stadium i mean i was in the city but i couldn't make it in so i was outside and then there's also the option of seeing it from myself in london and i think um actually exactly what donna just said it's not only about the technology that's become available to us to connect people who are and nowhere near each other in the physical space but also who might be in the physical space but not do not normally get these the full experience how can we um enlarge in or just like spruce the experience for them and this could be in so many ways whether that has to do with you know certain disabilities but also um what can we explore like maybe someone like myself who is able-bodied and can hear fine maybe there are some extra ways to enhance what i could potentially feel i'm the short person so if i'm not at the front at a concert i don't see anything what are some ways that we could bring technology into you know these things that we never really had to think about until we're forced to be in these positions and i also think you know again pre-pandemic there was already rumors going around uh the internet that boiler room had bought a vr club clubbing space it never came to exist but those conversations were there and i wholly agree with anton that with everything that's great there's gonna be you know someone's gonna abuse it to a certain point um but i think we can't escape that one so instead of worrying about that too much i think how far we have come since i was a kid and a first you know not starting because i became a thing and how we you know and we've turned those all into kind of business models that can work for people if we hone in and zone in on the positive effects it can have for creators just like how tick tock has created some of the biggest artists i mean bbc's artist of 2022 is pink panthers it's a 19 year old girl who made 90 second songs on tik tok that went viral and three months ago i was at her concert around the corner and i for me that was i could understand it but i could only think take take what's happened to her which is not so much to do with the metaverse or with vr and to combine the two combined what she's already done with machine learning and with you know she she doesn't know how to maybe produce her own music to a certain extent she it only started off as a joke maybe these are all technologies that could help an artist like that i mean she's under a major already but what if she didn't want to these are all things that could help someone like a pink panthers have probably more control and ease herself into this big scary world of the professional music industry and then also in the same way connect with her fans who found her online to continue keep finding her online but also get closer to her online so i think this is a whole world out there that is so exciting and if we find that right recipe it could bring power control and money back into the hands of these creators which i guess is what anton was just touching on as well um and it's an ever learning experience and procedure for all of us i went to a very interesting talk five years ago about radio and ai when streaming out playlist algorithms became really big and the question was will someone like yourself become you know no longer needed because someone can you know the algorithm on spotify knows what this person will like and the thing is no that will never happen because the algorithm won't speak to you about a song the way i speak to you about it because that's just made up on the spot and that comes from my feelings and no algorithm can tell you how i felt when i heard the song at 3am on a romantic walk in paris as soon as i mentioned that that whole song is already different to you so i think we need to not worry about the dark sides because we can't escape them but we can not choose to focus on them and make them work for us and obviously also around the corner in terms of the monetary stuff it's sort of blockchain technologies and a lot of web3 stuff which is in uh i don't know maybe it's closer than we think um but um just to finish up um i would like you all to recommend one piece of technology that is essential to your tool kit that you think more people should be using or should be using better gosh that's a hard one jennifer i'm not gonna i i'm gonna or is there anything that you've that you've heard about that you are excited to see develop yeah i'm gonna give a shout out instead to a really really brilliant pre-start-up you know absolutely like mono if that's okay yeah so fantastic artist in brighton called mathjay alvarez who's um set up a vr startup an all-female collective where they've taught themselves code as well as a way to try and sort of empower themselves to create things and they've created um two projects which are really worth checking out stickybits is one of them uh which is a sort of vr space where which is absolutely around creating a space where people can come and be part of that vr space and create and engage and community they run game shows in there it's fantastic but also more relevant to this and a new project called audelicious with the artist bunty looping they've been co-developing it together and it's a it's a it's a vr sort of musical like soundscape that bunty creates live and then you in vr walk through it and uh so i'm gonna give a shout out to that because i'm gonna spend a bit of time trying to um see how we can build them up a bit more so limbic fish is her website but that's that's my shout out i don't have um a very clear cut answer to this but i think the most realistic one is i think for everyone watching if you have even a little smidge of interest in this world and you are either a broadcaster a dj or a musician or even like a podcaster please look into this world because i have seen people find their happiness their audiences they kept their sanity but also just kick-started their entire careers and there's you're never too young you're never too old i barely understand some of the stuff i'm doing but i i learn on while i'm doing it and i'm having fun and i i think the more you fight it and the more you might miss out on really great opportunities and i think don't be afraid of it not being real and losing you know this human connection because um we're we're currently living in a world where we've never been more far apart but we've also never been so close to each other and just because it removes you from the people that you're physically closer to it brings you closer to people that you normally never get to be in a room with and um educate yourself on this because i think this is it's not the future it's actually now and so many exciting things are happening i mean i'm even you know the whole like travis scott and fortnight concert that blew my mind i had never had more interest of djing in a game until i saw that and you know i would you you couldn't have sold that to me two years ago and now it's what i want so if anyone's watching hit me up but i think yeah educate yourself on this we have so many tools available there's just go on youtube there's so many people explaining this into into detail um and find what works for you um yeah find what works for you i think it's key thanks yeah and i i i really want to to continue judges thought i think people generally risk averse and they like doing things that they have been doing for ages but actually the most exciting growth opportunities new experiences are coming from the territory which a lot of people still hesitant to kind of believe and and explore uh so yeah i completely completely agree with the advice of uh try to dedicate some time uh for exploring new things and it will pay off 100 in terms of emotions happiness and even uh monetary results as well great oh finally one more can i throw one more shout out so i've just been on what jotty was saying as well also part of the 5g festival of course because all the best festivals have an alternative stage we know that that's where the best the most exciting thing is happening and we have alternative stage at the brighton uh the 5g festival which isn't which is basically it's almost like the great escape modeled um in vr so it's five different bright music venues uh in vr um um where josh you can come and dj we've got loads of like uh um talent who will be appearing in that in that space great i'm there front left come and find me all right so uh massive thanks to uh my panelists donna jotty and anton um and thanks to you all for tuning in and this has been uh i've been jennifer luciano music and technology thanks very much everybody bye thank you bye [Music] you

2022-02-23 18:53

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