The Red team works hard to develop peerless insight and forecasts around the wider technology landscape. When put alongside Red’s inimitable network of board members and colleagues across Abbey Road Studios, Universal Music Group and the wider music and technology industries, as well as its unique mentor network, Red can bet effectively which lanes promising new technologies will emerge in and look for emerging start-up matches for the music industry.
At
Demo Day 2023, the Red team presented recent learnings from incubation as well as trend forecasts from their research drive. Some of these trend insights included:
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are the runaway trend of 2023: LLM iterations are in a rapid, progressive race with a semblance of contained chaos where key tech industry players are both acting and re-acting to the cultural fuse lit by
OpenAI’s GPT-3 Model.
Text-to-music instances have already emerged and while a music-first LLM trained on a licensed set of music and music-contextual data could be the new synthesiser, in a precarious LLM landscape artist first technology platforms like Red participant DAACI are deploying AI into supervised, artist-first tools which place rights protection and tracking at their core while providing extraordinary power-ups to artists, songwriters and composers from compositional tools to new revenue streams as well as encouraging them to assess and enhance their own tech-decoupled approaches to creativity.
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Toiling the technology soils: across other trends 2023 is a year of foundation toiling and slow roll outs in which AR will cede momentarily to VR; the burgeoning metaverse will be developed and accessed on traditional channels and apps from games consoles to mobile devices; the hardware sector will need to figure out how to move past peak earbud;
Matter’s common framework will pave the path to true music IoT; in-car will roll-out premium subscription access features slowly; down-rounds and squeezing post-pandemic digital margins alongside the crypto-crash will force many companies and start-ups into defensive and careful development with emerging start-ups finding it harder to commit investors; and in general a year where incremental innovation may define music tech, aside from the AI lane.
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Within the music space we will also look at:
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Music’s healing power: the next wave of musical pharmaceutical companies, like Red’s graduating start-up MediMusic, will see music add to its bow as an already established medium for wellness therapy as a tool for medical healing.
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Music’s gaming metaverse: smart money against a backdrop of AR hardware delays is on music’s metaverse being accessed by console and mobile first platforms/apps, the latter like Red’s XONE, with some in premium VR; at the same time intelligent and conversational AI will start to drive avatar behaviour and engagement.
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Long live the creator tool: creator tools and ecosystems have moved past digital audio workstation (DAW) 1.0 and even 2.0 into a post 3.0 landscape of new breed tools and ecosystems where new music creation platforms are designed with ease of use in mind; where blurred lines exist between offline and mobile; where all-in-one ecosystems offer every solution from the point of creation to distribution including offline and mobile DAWs, automated mastering, beat pack sales and distribution; where near real-time remote collaboration is made possible by high quality low-bandwidth streaming tools like Abbey Road’s
Audiomovers; and where fans become fan creators remixing artist content and moving to points of engagement with the artist well before more traditional points of marketing and distribution.
