Author Archives: ratpie

A Pigouvian Pollution Tax on ChatGPT!

If one had to characterise the state of mind among knowledge and creative workers, musicians included, in 2022, worries about meeting demand for quantity or variety of content would not figure high. Misinformation, provenance, and the difficulties of making a … Continue reading

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Fair Shares, Fair Markets. Can Music Have Both?

The music we listen to on music services has many creators, facilitators, and distributors. Everyone wants to be paid fairly for their work, and get a fair share of any future revenue. But are any of the different types of … Continue reading

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AI Will Help and Hurt Music. Here’s How.

Computers have been helping us make and store music for many years. Music AI is not so new either; already by the early 1990s there was widely available software runing on consumer grade desktop computers which could generate and regenerate … Continue reading

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Hypercompetition. How Platforms Destroy Markets.

The first rule of platform business success: increase supply as far beyond the market’s ability to sustain the suppliers as possible. It doesn’t really matter how – and many tactics have been tried. It doesn’t matter what it costs either … Continue reading

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Platformed! Music’s New ‘Disempowerment’ Business Model

In his book, Noise, Jacques Attali makes a startling assertion – that music is the vanguard of revolution. Changes, he says, in the relationship between music and the economic and social structures that govern its position and remuneration prefigure fundamental … Continue reading

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A Truth-Based Alternative to Spotify’s Danceability Index

When Spotify bought Echonest, several years ago, they added a set of skills and knowledge in how computing can be used to analyse music. This field of work is fundamental to recommendation systems. Conventionally researchers had taken one of two … Continue reading

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The Public Interest in Music

The UK music industry is going through a period of internal arguments, and as sometimes happens some of us are reaching out for an adjudicator, or referee. January 2021 saw the UK’s law makers brought into the ring in a … Continue reading

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Music’s Dissonant Value Gap

At the time of writing, a Google video search for ‘crushed by the wheels of industry’ delivers as its first result a YouTube upload with the plea, ‘NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED’ from a user which calls itself ‘mrrockwithmebaby’. Try it … Continue reading

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An Act for the Encouragement of…

The Statute of Anne, enacted in England in 1710, opens with a statement of intent: An Act for the Encouragement of Learning I have argued elsewhere that it succeeded. Whether by the mechanisms intended, essentially the first modern copyright, or … Continue reading

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Net Neutrality Won’t Help Music. Here’s Why…

With the best intentions, some in the music industry are adding their voices to protest the US FCC’s rollback of net neutrality regulations. Keeping them won’t help the music industry; pretending it will means the real threats to open and … Continue reading

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