How Fans Will Shape the Music Economy | Jake Murphy | David Beiner | Greg Bresnitz | Annelisa Moody

[Music] awesome thank you to the Kraken team um just a quick reminder for all of us on social the hashtag this year is eth dender 2025 so hashtag and take photos and share our next panel uh how fans will shape the music economy so please give our panelists a round of a round of applause and I'll hand it off to Lisa bonus from The Washington Post hi everyone um thanks for joining us this afternoon uh I'm going to start by having everyone on the panel introduce themselves to my left is David hi I'm David I'm the founder of Hume uh we create virtual artists team of Engineers and animators think of us like Pixar but we make music artists uh my name is Greg presnet i'm the CEO of FWB or friends with benefits we're the premier emergent Tech digital membership club and we also have an annual festival called Fest that I've seen a few faces out there attend hello I'm Jake Murphy I'm the found and CEO of water and we're bringing the the seasonality and the structures of sport and essentially turning the playlist into a fantasy music team my name is Anna Lisa I'm with the Luxo Foundation I do social and marketing marketing and I am also a Creator and a DJ awesome thank you all for joining me today um so I just want to start by asking each of you like how can fans shape the music industry and how are they already having an impact I guess I'm going first CU I'm at the left uh so I would say labels are dead they are now Banks fans are the true Arbiters of taste uh we've seen this on Tik Tok over the last couple years now over five years of fans basically deciding what's going to go viral I think in our platform in web 3 we've created a system where fans actually vote on what single an artist should release everything has switched from a top down system where there are Chase makers up here that have been put in those positions to decide what everybody's going to listen to and what's going to be popular to a bottom up system where the internet's basically deciding what's going to go viral what's going to get the most attention and uh that's pretty much how the wave goes these days uh our community is made up of a lot of artists and creatives and one of the things that's been super impactful is a direct engagement with fan through feedback monetization and also AB testing so being able to have real-time feedback loes from fans on things that they could either go with this or that way um allows to have real time uh engagement from them and be able to to support what's happening so I think artists that can Embrace fans and fans that can find artists that like listen to them can create a really positive feedback loop for Success though yeah I think the main thing is going to be agency uh and I mean like if you if you think about when stage design essentially was the the stage would be on one side they have the audience on the other very much artist playing to Fan you saw the transition happened where essentially the stage went through the middle of the venue and the idea was essentially giving everybody that was it was present a better experience a different opportunity to enjoy the show and it completely changed the Dynamics of how the artist would perform and I think as we've gone now we look at people have talked about social capital as an asset class and how that's how that's leveraged how we monetize our data what does that data mean I think from a music fan the the roles and responsibilities when we talk about labels that have existed in structures that we always kind of said that is how it is the the sort of anr role in a sort of in a in a building of such everything suddenly becomes into the the individual's responsibility so to the same way if the fan is going to influence what's coming next then it's a very logical opinion to say actually well I I play a pretty pretty prominent role here in in making things move and therefore I want to have more of a sort of upside as that starts to progress awesome we kind of talked about this backstage but uh as we've seen it before traditionally like fans have been very much more passive consumers but what we're seeing now in web 3 is that they're becoming active participants and essential to the artist Journey so for now like what we're seeing in web 3 and also on like Luxo Universal profiles like fans can directly engage they have their own onchain identity the artists can see you know who are their biggest supporters uh they can engage in ways like uh ownership like actually like owning a music nft for example uh governance and also just curation rather than just listening to the artists like on Spotify you're just another number but yeah I love that um you know as you guys are talking about this my wheels are turning like as a fan could I vote for you know the outfit that Taylor Swift might wear at her next concert or who might open for Sabrina Carpenter I'm curious just like as you guys are all music fans I'm sure like wondering from you like what is one thing that if as a fan you would like to see a specific artist do and like how would you go about getting that to happen uh I think for me I don't know how many people know but dojacat kind of did this early in her career where she did it through not web 3 tooling but she just got like a her first 100 fans was like do you like this song Do you like this outfit do you like this look and so her fans are very engaged with her to the point where she didn't really even need the outside systems because she held all the power with them for me I think the where the web 3 becomes interesting is that she could reward those with like day one fan tokens that are soulbound and so when she gets bigger and people want more access to her those people could get unlocked benefits they could have it it doesn't need to be proprietary it could be totally custodial W wallets so as a fan I always think that the people who get there in the beginning don't necessarily get rewarded in the end and so and it doesn't me to be monetary it can be access or just ensuring that they don't get lost in the shuffle the Taylor Swift debacle I think if she just had like 50,000 Swifty tokens to people that was just hooked up to a Ticket Master thing Ticket Master wouldn't have had to go in front of Congress because they couldn't get their grandkids tickets right so I think that there's a world where you take a look at these onchain proof of personhood mechanics apply them to them and the fans who support you are there and the the later ones can just wait in line like everybody else cool well to piggy back off that uh I've seen a lot of really interesting and actually I've talked about a lot of really interesting use cases for this in web 3 uh what I do want to say is uh artists do have complete control over you know how these fans access them uh how they want to engage with their fans and vice versa so uh I've seen through event ticketing or different like web 3 event ticketing experiences uh those are on chain so then you know as these fans are going from concert to concert uh there's like proof of reputation that is like now verifiable and yeah I think it's a really awesome use case I I think look music struggles from like a lack of structure right so it's quite interesting so if if you if you see like behavioral changes in large groups of people where it's a Discord group a telegram group I think first project 2 and a half years ago seeing that and we had 12,000 people in a telegram if you allowed somebody to basically abuse another person in terms of swear of them everybody would start swearing in 5 minutes it was just like there like a really weird thing it's like oh this is cool we'll we'll all do it and I think from from a music standpoint it's kind of happen with new music Friday right when when that came out music was kind people were Distributing songs left right and Center there was no structure and the reality was like music distribution became way easier volume of Music went Skyrocket 150,000 songs a day and it was like yo we should probably like get everyone to send them at least four weeks in advance so we've got time to do the new music Friday bit and we'll refresh the playlist and I think like when you when you look at that's why the stuff that we're doing around and why sport becomes interesting I think the seasonality of sport and the structure of it if if I'm a fan H how do I know how to consistently turn up in a manner where if I'm playing an NBA game if I'm playing football I'm turning up I know my fixtures are on a Saturday I know I'm here I'm going to rock up the week after and the same way it's like it's much easier way to kind of create emotional connections almost as a as a team Dynamic and so I think with with that with that alone I think as this sort of data becomes so prevalent in music and we've got all of it to hand it's a very sort of logical progression where the fan goes you I do want to start predicting the outcome of X I do want to show that I can curate what's coming I do know that she four years ago was going to going to be the artist that she is now all those sort of things I think is is kind of where we move to I'm going to take the other side just to have some fun uh I think on the other side as much as there's this belief especially in web 3 and in this room of like okay the fans have this opportunity to become part of the story to choose what the next angle is to choose what the artist is going to wear I also think it's possible that the majority of fans actually follow an artist and fall in love with an artist for that artist Vision like let's use uh Kendrick as an example at the Super Bowl I think most real hardcore Kendrick Lamar fans just want to know what Kendrick wants to do at his performance and what songs he's going to bring at that performance same thing's probably true for Taylor Swift fans they don't necessarily I think most of the fans might not want to go and vote before the the concert or before a big event they're there because they love the passion Envision that that artist brings so I actually think we might end up seeing a split as all these Technologies evolve and the way social media changes how artists interact with there will be fans who follow artists that create more of this community and then we'll have the kinds of artists with this just incredible artistic vision and people love them for that artistic vision and don't want to influence what they do at all yeah that's a that's a great Point um all right I think we want to shift gear is to talk a little bit about Ai and like AI good or bad for creatives um we've all talked about it a lot I'm a journalist we're constantly talking about whether AI is going to take our jobs any writer is concerned with that AI music kind of bad I don't listen I don't choose to listen to it so just curious your guys's thoughts on the promise and Perils of AI and creativity I'm going to go shortterm complicated long-term good short-term complicated is because a lot of people are going to change need to change how they work and the process in which they work and the idea of maybe starting a song in an AI program and then finishing it outside of that program is something that a lot of people probably don't want to do or think it's bad I do think on a long enough time frame those models are going to get really good and people are going to want to use in this in the situation of actually creating music use parts of AI to maybe get something started but then manually edit it but that process of changing effectively how people create music is going to take some time for those behavioral ships to happen and then on the pure artist side we were talking about this backstage you know let's say you're somebody who you you're you're an artist you've come out you have a specific specific brand and sound that you already do AI could actually allow you to create a another virtual Persona that looks completely different that's anime has a different name post on social media is out there for you and you're still there creating the music but you don't need to worry about the social media and you're able to create an entirely new Sonic identity for yourself so now as an artist you actually get to work on two or three projects versus getting boxed in to one and I think think that on a long enough time frame is where AI is probably the most interesting for artists specifically so sort of like an AI agent for an artist yes get to have three of them so what my thoughts on this so it's a negative side look if we're already released if we've reached a point where there's there's too much music right in circulation I actually met a guy about two weeks ago who sold his business for 10 million making music for pets which is like well done I loved it but but the the logic was he just sat there and made a load of playlists it was like the pets loved it they would just chill out and relax to it very very very clever very sort of specific but the idea was he could make that very quickly he could try a whole load of things see if it's stuck and then it was like the volume of music just ramped up and up and up and up and he can kind of get there way quicker the challenge that that presents like the curation then becomes like critically important right our ability to basically be a taste maker to understand like why why is why is Kendrick an amazing artist is what certain music was of his as like particularly sort of poignant with Kendrick he like he's studied as an MC right he he respects the craft all that sort of stuff so I think curation becomes really powerful with AI in terms of our individual curation which is kind of in our world again I think AI creatively is like look depending on the producer or the writer or the artist some people are very good at getting creative ideas to Market and getting them to sound to a certain level and the amount of demos who are which are amazing which never get released because somebody can't mix is ridiculous so they like whereas good producers will get songs out and they'll get more Cuts because they can they kind of have a balance of making a demo sound of far better quality than it is so I think for creatives I think it will help a lot of people basically look I've got an idea I think it's great I can now get this into a format where someone goes okay cool I'm going to jump on yeah okay I have two thoughts um well number one in my opinion the current state of AI music is pretty much corny like very corny for the most part uh and I think it also it it really depends on the curator it depends on the Builder but uh where I see I mean as a as a DJ or if I'm if I'm going to be making like an edit or a remix I could see myself using AI or those types of tools in order to uh generate a sound or to to just at least like speed up the process versus uh I mean I I could sit down for like 8 hours or I can make it a lot faster in like a 1H hour Sprint but um I do think uh uh AI can be good for music uh but it's there's going to be a I think it's going to take a long time uh before we see some good like AI artists so yeah and since they all covered it so well I'll talk about the other side of it where it's the business of being a musician so creativity aside we can probably debate that to death but as musicians increasingly become their own business their own CEO AI can help them with so much else they can help them write the marketing campaigns organizing tours um creating schedules um writing business plans finding people so it actually instead of where they tend to abdicate those responsibilities and get screwed over by a manager or things like that they now you could go we could open today we could write a business plan for New artists with a few prompts that would be so much extraordinary so powerful for someone to follow so I think Ai and other applications to the music industry for musicians is phenomenal plus plus on everyone we said and all that stuff but I think people miss that side of it which is a real benefit for people who have no train in that to have a better road map you got my wheels turning on that sorry no you got my like wheels turning when he said that let's talk good yeah um okay real quick before we wrap I wonder if there's like an artist in your world who's using technology in a really interesting way that you want to like shout out or recommend to people here I would like to give a shout out to my friend Latasha she was the first rapper that's my girl she's the first rapper and I think women artists to uh come out with a music nft and uh yeah she is amazing so definitely would check her out I was going to say her too but so I'll just shout out ver uh who's also incredible in the space both of which have played FWB Fest so I I can't name names cuz some of the people don't want to admit they're using AI but I think there's a lot of incredible work being done with AI voices kind of like what you were saying around mixers uh in the past so songwriters pitch songs to pop stars all the time but when they're pitching that song it can't sound like the pop star they're pitching to so someone might write a song for dual Lia but when it gets to do a Lea it doesn't actually sound like her now people are using AI voices that they can go record that song and when it actually gets pitched to her it sounds like do a leap on the track and there are a lot of people doing that so I I don't know an artist up top my head I would go down slightly different path but I think for for me like think thinking about it more deeply if you look at like music Discovery I think AI is an amazing tool of Music Discovery cuz if you look at one of the things that I've always been interested in is kind of like this building This Global seismograph of music right so when something break back into the SoundCloud era when you sort of really understand whether people love an artist whether they're just there for a Tik top moment and moving on and then especially as you start to look at specific sub genres around the world in different local markets AI can really sort of help have this Lighthouse effect to kind of basically an emerging emerging artist an emerging song that might not have the the clout or the sort of label back in suddenly has an ability to circulate at a regional level then into as a national level and then actually on a global scale as well so if you think about those those sort of moments where they can be co-signed by an influential artist or a producer or writer I think that's that's probably one of the things that I find most interesting about it cool well interesting ideas from everyone give us a lot to think about and um I think that's it please give us a give the panel a round of applause please come on thank you thank you thank you