Recently, Music Ally attended the Victorian Music Development Office (VMDO) Music Data and Insights Summit. The two-day conference focused on the role of data in Australia’s music industry.
The conference saw the launch of Music Technology Australia, an organisation that may sound like it represents tech companies, but actually is focused on ensuring that new technology supports musicians and their teams rather than replaces or harms them.
Board members Merida Sussex (also CEO of metadata-focused startup MetaGen), Sophie Freeman (a researcher at the University of Melbourne who has studied issues around AI and music), Nick Thorpe (founder of LiveMusicLocator and Unfold Labs) and Andrew Cullen (CTO at MetaGen) discussed some of the big issues that the new body will be tackling.
‘Everyone is blaming each other’
Sussex focused on metadata, and the challenges it raises for artists.
“There’s no easy way for artists to generate, verify, and share information about their music,” she said, describing current systems to create metadata as “designed by the industry for the industry, so it disenfranchises artists from their rights and their data”.
In her research around this topic, Sussex met one artist who described the metadata-creation process as “a never-ending, anti-rewarding horizontal scroll of doom”.
“And that’s exactly what it is! Why do we make it so hard? Why do we disengage the originator of that data, that information, that rich quality?” she said, adding that a particular bugbear for musicians is having to do it multiple times.
“I did it once. I joined that thing. Why do I have to do it again?” was how she characterised that complaint.
Later, Sussex outlined the goal that MetaGen is working towards: of having the majority of tracks that get released on streaming services link their ISRC and ISWC [the codes for recordings and works – compositions].
She cited research suggesting that the percentage of tracks that have this has been as low as 0.1%. “How can we change that from 0.1% to 60%, to 80%?” she said.
“Everyone is blaming each other,” added Sussex. “Spotify and YouTube will talk about the record labels, like: ‘Can they just get it together with the data?’. And then record labels will say ‘How do you get artists to fill out their metadata?’ And then artists will say ‘What’s metadata got to do with me?”
“No one’s made it easy. There’s no UX [user experience], there’s no creative workflow. I should be able to take a photo in a recording studio: face, face, face, face, that’s who just recorded a song. It should be made easy, like every other compliance-heavy infrastructure-siloed system like driver’s licences or tax returns. No one’s made metadata fun!”
Algorithms, streaming… and quotas
Freeman talked about one of the burning topics in the Australian music industry: whether local artists are being marginalised by the algorithms of the big music-streaming services. Her research has included interviewing musicians.
“One independent musician was talking to me about trying to get playlisted, and she described it as ‘like I’m a boat on the ocean, I’m getting pushed about by the waves, I can’t control the tides so I just have to hope that I end up somewhere’,” said Freeman.
“It really struck me, because it is part of a pattern of artists being so disempowered and disenfranchised… Artists are so important to the streaming ecosystem, yet they have the least amount of power.”
Freeman also called for more transparency around how streaming algorithms work, and how that impacts Australian artists.
“It might not necessarily solve this bigger structural issues that are leading to artists not getting discovered and heard, but it will certainly help to address that feeling of feeling disenfranchised and disempowerment.”
Freeman also addressed the idea of quotas: specifying how much Australian music the DSPs should be playlisting and recommending – an idea that those companies have traditionally pushed back on hard.
“One of the interventions that I’m particularly interested in – and I think it’s one that a lot of people in the room are interested in – is streaming quotas,” she said.
“I think that that is certainly one way that we can ensure that streaming has the incentive to include more Australian artists in algorithmically-curated playlists and editorial playlists.”
“They would say that it’s too hard or they don’t have that lever to pull, but I believe that they do,” continued Freeman. “With the existence of something like [Spotify’s] Discovery Mode, we know that there are levers that we can pull. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and do it.”
‘You had to go to 17 different sources’
The third member of the panel (Cullen was moderating) was Nick Thorpe, who talked about the challenges around data on Australia’s live-music industry, from his experience building LiveMusicLocator and gathering information on upcoming concerts.
“You had to go to 17 different sources, such was the silo fragmentation,” he said. “The more people we spoke to, the more people we found who shared this problem… We came to view it as a missing piece of infrastructure for the Australian music industry.”
LiveMusicLocator has been navigating the competitive landscape of different ticketing companies, and the diplomacy required to get them all on board.
“It became really obvious that this had to be a not-for-profit, and it had to be a registered charity to get across the whole of that… we will be doing our absolute level-best to capture every single gig in every single venue… to create a complete dataset.”
Later in the session, Thorpe stressed that the service isn’t just a consumer-facing thing. The goal is also to collect and make available valuable data to music organisations and policymakers who want to better support their local live scenes.
“Unless you have an organisation that’s able to look across all of those data sources, you will never find out information about that… and if you would like to do something which you’re hoping will improve the live-music scene, then you’re going to be doing it without data,” he said.
“Which is to say, congratulations, you have an opinion! Because a lot of the things that are true about the data are counterintuitive, and if you just follow your instinct, you get it entirely wrong.”
LiveMusicLocator’s challenge now is to scale up. Thorpe said that by the end of this year it will have “every single gig in Victoria” thanks to the efforts of its 38 volunteers who research the concerts and enter them into the system. “We need another 20 of those…”
