Category: Business models

Generative music AI models may be upending attribution as we know it in the music business.

It took nearly one whole year for the independent music community to see some initial fruits from Epic Games’ acquisition of Bandcamp.

Several tools exist today that allow artists and brands alike to generate high-quality, convincing AI voices with just minutes of training data.

Hint: Yes, it really is about the music.

Addressing artists’ legal questions about creative AI and ownership, through the lens of AI tools’ terms of use.

A comprehensive, first-of-its-kind framework for understanding the music AI tooling landscape, including greater transparency into tech stacks, use cases, and business models for all stakeholders in the music AI value chain.

Following the growing interest in music and gaming, we’re excited to announce a new format for The Score: A monthly newsletter distributed for free to all Water & Music newsletter subscribers. Each issue will round up and analyze the biggest music and gaming stories of the month, through Water & Music’s unique industry lens — forever curious about the latest tech innovations and eager to dive into the weeds, while also pulling out actionable insights grounded in music-industry needs and challenges.

10 new AI models for music and audio generation have been unveiled in the last month alone. Some of these are home-grown models from anonymous contributors; others are part of master’s theses; still others have come from AI research groups at big-tech juggernauts like Google and ByteDance.

Last week, our community got an inside look at bleeding-edge music AI tools from Harmonai, the open-source music AI arm of Stability.ai, and Pollinations, a company focused on creating more accessible interfaces for existing AI models.

After interviewing several music AI startup founders, key differences have emerged in how music AI companies are building out their tech stacks compared to companies building visual- or text-based AI tools.

2022 closed with a dynamic debate in the #web3 channel of the Water & Music Discord server about the role of aggregation and traditional IP law in the music NFT landscape.

Outlining the challenges we’ve faced in attempting to build a public database of music marketing ROI benchmarks, and what they reveal about the way the music industry measures growth and success.