CD Baby, what are you thinking? Re: DIY Musician Podcast

CD Baby are one of the big three self-serve online music distributors today – in another time, they were best known as a pioneer in indie music e-commerce. Many a Vancouver jazz musician's website is bejeweled with dead links to their now-defunct CD Baby Store page.

Appropriately, CD Baby have one of the longest-running and most impactful music business podcasts (hey I have one of those!), the DIY Musician Podcast.

Hosted by two company men, Kevin Breuner and Chris Robley (who are both also musicians), the DIY Musician Podcast is consistent and inclusive of listener Q&A, but it's often an exercise in how to waste your time. I've learned much from it as a counterexample.

On the latest episode, "Music Predictions for 2023", Kevin and Chris talk about other things for over 15 minutes before getting into what the title promises.

And when they got around to making five identifiable predictions, I found them to be terrible, actually.

Here they are:

1) NFT mania will return with the bull market

If you're out of the loop on the wold of crypto-derived non-fungible tokens (NFTs), you've missed hardly anything but a series of scams. I poked around some projects that promised NFTs would revolutionize the industry and drive more power to artists – all talk.

There's also the feeling I have that we're nowhere near a bull market and won't be for the entire year...

But notwithstanding how the economy might go, NFTs are not coming back to the hype they briefly enjoyed. Not among our communities or the broader community of musicians, that's for sure.

2) Sync licensing is a growing field (Peloton)

Sync licensing is where you license your songs for use in visual media, traditionally movies and TV. Kevin and Chris brought up Peloton, the tech-fueled stationary bike and fitness company, as an example of how sync is growing – that's another library of music, licensed by Peloton for new purposes.

But speaking of the economy, using Peloton as an example of growth is way behind the curve.

Peloton's stock price peaked in December 2020 (two years ago) at just over $150 a share. It's now down 94%, to under ten dollars a share. Ouch.

3) An AI reckoning around who controls generated music will occur

Text and photo-generating artificial intelligence was the big story of 2022 in tech; it'd be a lot to catch you up on, but if you like I can get into that in a future Update. All you need to know is that AI is more effective than ever and that people are wondering what happens when language-trained AI can do anything we want it to do.

Knowing that much, the question is: what will happen when AI can make music for us based on our written prompts? Well, it probably already can; I just don't have access to or awareness of those tools.

And who controls the copyright for the output? That's actually not the biggest controversy – it'd make sense that it was the person who gave the prompt, much like the person who takes a photo owns the photo. (In that analogy the AI is the camera.)

No, the real controversy is: has the AI trained itself on my existing catalogue of music, how do I know whether or not it has, and will I be compensated for that?

So, the DIY Musician Pod guys missed the point.

To learn more about new horizons in AI with a music/arts lens, I recommend the Interdependence podcast. I know at least one other highly tech-literate Update reader would as well!

4) Non-English music will become just as important commercially as English music

This is actually correct – the miss is that it has already happened, it's not new or upcoming for 2023. Bad Bunny, performing in Spanish, is arguably the most popular solo artist in the world; BTS, performing in Korean, is the biggest band. (Kevin and Chris drive the show from a popular music perspective, not from our creative music view.)

5) Video components will become more expected for all music releases

This prediction is based on a thing called Spotify Canvas that has been gaining prominence in Spotify's artist relations and on the app itself. Here is how Spotify describes Canvas:

Canvas is an 8-second visual loop that shows in a vertical format to fill the screen. It appears in the Now Playing View instead of your album artwork.

You can add a Canvas to any track, including upcoming releases.

Spotify users, as an example here's a track of mine that has a Canvas. It is only visible in-app and not in the browser/desktop.

But no, I don't think Spotify is ushering in a new level of video engagement for all music releases – I don't think everyone needs to have a Canvas for every track. (If they do and they enjoy that, though, all good!)

Instead, this is a desperation move by Spotify to differentiate as they continue dropping. It doesn't top Peloton's 90%+ crash, but Spotify shares are down over 60% through the past year.

When it comes to streaming, I believe people don't care to watch these little videos all that much. Instead, they stream in the background while doing other things, and they don't look at the screen.

There's other stuff of course from the DIY Musician Podcast episode that I've not bothered to respond to, because it was too vague.

Anyway, I have my own prediction to make here, and it contradicts almost all of what Kevin and Chris said:

My prediction

Offline is cool.

It's the first time that this will ever have been true, because as soon as online became a thing, it was cool – at least in concentric circles of nerdiness, starting from the super-nerds and expanding to everyone. But we're tapping out, demographically speaking.

This coming fall (September 2023, nine months from now) people born around 2010 will enter high school. Soon enough, they will pop up in our scene as the youngest students and participants. These people (your kids, for some of you?) spent their childhood on TikTok.

Also, people born around 2005 will enter university. This cohort spent their childhood on Instagram and their high-school years on TikTok.

They will both need to do something else to be cool.

You have your own story about where social media hit you in your life. You're probably not trying to be cool, though – you're trying to stay sane, to not get overwhelmed.

The only prediction I'm passionate about in 2023 is: this thing that the younger cohorts will lean on to be cool, and the path we'll take to keep up with life, is going to run further offline than ever.

The coolest things to do will be to put your phone away, keep your screen time down, watch gigs without taking tons of Stories, and not post so much. Especially not publicly!

Posting, as we know it, is now the busywork of squares.