The next battle for Austin’s music scene is against the algorithms : NPR

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

Austin, Texas is known as the live music capital of the world. And the podcast Pause/Play from member station KUT explores the city’s live music scene. Its latest season looks at Austin’s music future and how musicians are adapting to our changing world. The pod’s hosts, Miles Bloxson and Elizabeth McQueen, are with me today. Hi, to both of you.

MILES BLOXSON, BYLINE: Hi there.

ELIZABETH MCQUEEN, BYLINE: Hey, thanks for having us.

PFEIFFER: You launched your podcast in 2020, when COVID was still wreaking havoc on live events. Now that we’re past that shutdown stage, what kind of future issues are you looking at?

BLOXSON: Well, right now, no one really knows what the future holds. So much is changing so fast, and awesome musicians are facing uncertainty around AI and frustration with streaming platforms. And these are issues that are relevant to musicians everywhere.

MCQUEEN: Yeah, I mean, right now, there are music generation platforms like Suno and Udio where you can create songs using written prompts. And Udio – they signed a deal with Universal Music Group to launch an AI music generation and streaming platform. So now an AI music company is partnering with the largest record label in the world.

BLOXSON: And we wanted to know how Austin musicians were feeling about the rise of AI. Were they for it or against it?

MCQUEEN: I mean, most people are in the middle, like Zeale. He’s an Austin-based musician and an interdisciplinary artist.

ZEALE: I really wanted to have a clear understanding of what is this doing? What is it impacting? How are artists using this in their workflows to, you know, get from point A to point B? And I do that because I want to understand my – I don’t want to say enemy, but I want to understand this new, very impactful technology as much as possible.

BLOXSON: Even though he uses it, he knows, like, it also poses a threat to musicians in the creative sector. And Zeale has this theory about why that is.

ZEALE: We’ve already been taken advantage of historically, from bad distribution deals, publishing deals, record deals, et cetera. And that just leans more into that theme of all right, well, let’s find a way to monetize on this in the same format that labels did in the past.

PFEIFFER: Miles and Elizabeth, you’ve touched on this, but can you talk a little more about ways that AI is being used by musicians?

MCQUEEN: Well, right now, there are AI bands and artists. So one example that people might have heard of is The Velvet Sundown. They have over 750,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

BLOXSON: And they’re not the only ones. Just last week, Xania Monet became the first AI artist to land on the Billboard charts.

MCQUEEN: Yeah, I mean, it was already hard enough for musicians to make money on streaming platforms before AI artists entered the fray. Like, most people only make a third of a penny per stream.

PFEIFFER: So go back a second. I want to clarify. When you talk about Xania Monet and Velvet Sundown being AI artists, you mean not real human beings, not real bands, but music and musicians generated by AI technology.

MCQUEEN: Yes, exactly.

BLOXSON: That’s exactly what we’re talking about.

PFEIFFER: All right, so you mentioned streaming, and as I was looking at your pod in recent episodes, I saw that there’s one about an artist in Austin who wants to build an alternative to Spotify, which really dominates that space now.

BLOXSON: Yeah, her name is Lauren Bruno. And she wants to build an artist-centered streaming platform. She wants artists to get paid better rates, and she also wants them to have better control over their data.

LAUREN BRUNO: When an artist uploads their music to a platform like Spotify, you know, Spotify – what they use that data for, in simple terms – the granule raw data is to incur more revenue through sponsorship and ad placement. And that granular data holds a lot of power because that’s all about your audience as an artist.

PFEIFFER: You know, it’s always been hard for musicians to make money, most of them, and it seems like streaming and AI are possibly not helping with that. Are there any other survival strategies being developed for the music scene?

BLOXSON: Yeah, absolutely. In Austin, our city government is trying to help Austin musicians by giving them money to put towards their careers. We have a grant program called The Live Music Fund, and this year, musicians can apply for grants of $5,000 or even $20,000. And they can use that money on everything from promoting shows to making records.

PFEIFFER: Kind of a subsidy approach – how common is that in the music world?

MCQUEEN: It’s actually not that common. We’re the first city to do it in the U.S. We might be one of the first in the world. But it is a plan that’s working, and it’s something that also other cities could reproduce.

PFEIFFER: That’s Elizabeth McQueen and Miles Bloxson, hosts of the podcast Pause/Play from KUT and KUTX Studios. Thanks to both of you.

BLOXSON: Thank you.

MCQUEEN: Thanks.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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