Martin Clancy’s contributed volume
AI in the context of the music business both increases commercial music artist’s workloads, while also potentially decreasing them. For a start, understanding the ways in which AI tools can enhance and assist music artists’ businesses involves a new and demanding cognitive load. For example, the requirement for artists to be aware of what rights they are granting when they use AI tools is important. Further, the challenges of understanding how artists who are already subject to agreements with record labels and song publishers can use AI in their creative processes increase their workload because there is a need to revisit the terms of their extant agreements. In addition, understanding how to factor AI into the negotiation of new deals with labels, distributors or publishers also increases the artist’s workload; publicity, image and personality rights have come to the fore because artists and their managers and lawyers need to be particularly careful in granting any rights beyond copyright to business partners (see Cooke and Taylor, 2023, p. 12 for more on this). Yet, for all the additional work required in navigating the AI frontier, AI presents music artists and music industry stakeholders opportunities to lighten their workloads as well.
In November 2023, I met Martin Clancy at the Kristiansand Roundtable Conference (KRC) in Norway. Our meeting followed a keynote lecture he gave at the International Music Business Research Days conference at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway the week before the KRC. Over dinner, Clancy put a convincing argument that AI will lessen workloads. While use of AI-based services to generate images and video will theoretically reduce artists’ workloads when it comes to marketing their work via social media for example, Clancy (2022) argued that the ethical use of AI in the music business has the potential to address the value gap; this has profound implications for the music ecosystem and, if realised, it will dramatically decrease the workload involved in having to aggressively negotiate with the dominant corporations in the music business to obtain better terms for music artists.
According to Clancy (2022), there is an opportunity here to show leadership regarding the ethical use of AI. So, what does he mean by the value gap? Basically, the fact that major record labels have deep catalogues and that they invested in services such as Spotify in the first instance means that the revenues from such services are directed towards major stars and major record labels rather than benefiting all musicians in the same manner (Eriksson et al., 2019, p. 3). Spotify’s business model has therefore perpetuated a value gap in the chain of income earned through music streaming. Although Spotify themselves argue that this is changing by regularly publishing their usage data via their Loud & Clear initiative, Dahrooge (2021) articulated this value gap in the following way:
For Clancy (2022), AI presents music artists and other stakeholders in what he calls “the music ecosystem” the opportunity to reduce the value gap that exists between them and services such as Spotify. For him, the posthumanist thought engendered by AI can potentially accelerate the closing of this gap:
It is through the third philosophical approach offered by posthumanism that the term “music ecosystem” comes to life for Clancy. Clancy embraces Actor-Network Theory concepts to consider human and non-human (AI) “member organisms” as being stakeholders of the global music community, including the commercial music industries.
Clancy cited Paul McCartney who argued that “
To realise this ambition of establishing an ethical AI “fair trade” mark, following the publication of the contributed volume being reviewed here, Clancy developed an initiative entitled AI:OK (2024). The AI:OK logo is designed to represent “
The goal of AI:OK aligns with the primary argument Clancy (2022) developed in the conclusion of the contributed volume: AI presents us with an opportunity to create a more sustainable playing field for music artists and music industry stakeholders. Therefore, AI:OK is an initiative that music artists and their representatives can use in the age of generative AI to help close the value gap. AI:OK is a highly commendable initiative that has grown from a highly commendable book.