It’s 2020 and the stories are well worn. The newspaper industry, media, forever changed by the advent of the internet. The introduction of the iPhone changed the photography industry in immeasurable ways. Old technology meets new technology.

Of course, its all still evolving

Over the last three years, as an organization, we’ve been studying emerging technologies. First, virtual and augmented reality, then, blockchain and crypto and most recently artificial intelligence. It’s been a fascinating journey of learning, exploration, prototypes and proof of concepts.

We’ve built teams to explore and along the way, crafted tools, components and apis to support the research and development.

In 2019, we decided to narrow our market focus to media and entertainment with a concentration on music. Of course, with, there is a ton of crossover with culture and social.

With the investment in video on the rise and more streams than ever, the music industry has quietly progressed without much fanfare. The biggest influence, the confluence of video plus user generated content which carry music’s reach further however, without much innovation. Same songs, plus dance, on video.

That’s about to change

On June 11th, OpenAI announced its latest api, running models with weights from the GPT-3 family. As one begins to explore the versatility of this api, once can quickly see the future. Combine with past efforts like OpenAI Jukebox and parallel efforts with Magenta TensorFlow, music creation is about to have a moment.

A Cambrian explosion of new music

Artificial intelligence over the next 5 years is going to have its media moment, its photo moment, an explosion of new content, new music. No need for a recording studio, fancy software, just your mobile device, or computer, ones ability to create moving music, for each mood or moment, limited only by imagination.

Enter blockchains

With music reduced to bits, pushed thru ai models, instead of playing thru a traditional music service, a new model is set to emerge.

Each new song, plus its metadata like attribution, multimedia companions and more, start to shape into crypto tokens. These crypto tokens travel across the blockchains, data stored within the tokens and collected within user wallets.

The user wallets of the future look much different than the blockchain wallets of today. We’ll soon carry all of our information within wallets with various enhancing function, like media players, ai mods, bots and more.

Before going too far, let’s focus back into music

Music token standards emerge and any organization can create a playback mechanism, likely an encoder, decoder model, across blockchains, across token types.

Playback isn’t just music, its multimedia and social. Business models, structurally blockchain unique, create an entirely new, burgeoning ecosystem of creators and collectors, commerce models for artists, industry alike.

This is just scratching the surface

At the same time, so much work to be done. New standards, players are needed, ai has to make music people want to listen to, no easy tasks. However, as the foundations are set, it paves the way for web plus new immersive UIs.

In the future, we can expect augmented and virtual reality interfaces, leveraging the above models, to evolve the concept of the music experience. Visual, collaborative moments, singing dancing, making music, here, there and everywhere.

The next 5 to 10 years in the music industry, its likely to expand and change more than the last century combined. There is room for everyone, the stage is set, get ready for the next act.

Originally published July 2020 on adventure.pizza