There’s no doubt that 2020 was an awful year for the live music industry. To combat their losses and reignite interest in live shows, Live Nation is selling $20 concert tickets to nearly 1,000 shows in 40 amphitheaters across the country. The shows are a part of Live Nation’s “Back To Live” initiative announced July 22nd, 2021 to kickstart the return of concerts as we knew them before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2020, the company saw a decrease of $10.76 Billion in comparison to the total revenue in 2019. This loss would be even greater if not for concerts occurring prior to the March of 2020.

Tickets went on sale on July 28th at 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific and are available for a limited time only. Thirty-six artists taking part in the sale, those being: 311, 3 Doors Down, Alanis Morrisette, Alice Cooper, Brad Paisley, Brett Eldridge, Brooks & Dunn, Brothers Osborne, Coheed and Cambria, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Dierks Bentley, Florida Georgia Line, Jason Aldean, Jonas Brothers, Judas Priest, Kings of Leon, KISS, KORN, Lady A, Lil Baby, Lindsey Stirling, Luke Bryan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Maroon 5, Megadeath, NF, Pitbull, Primus, Rise Against, Rod Wave, Slipknot, The Black Crowes, The Doobie Brothers, Thomas Rhett, Trippie Redd, and Zac Brown Band. 

In a new report from TikTok, the popular video network announced that 75% of its users have found new music artists on their platform. As of October 2020, TikTok reports 732 Million monthly users, with news outlets believing that could be an underestimate. In comparison, YouTube has 2 Billion logged-in users every month, yet was found to have less watch time per user than TikTok in a May study conducted by analytics company App Annie. 

TikTok has had a total of 3 Billion downloads across Apple’s App Store and Google Play. In the platform’s new report, 63% of users said they’ve heard new music on the platform prior to listening on streaming apps or on the radio. In an even bigger win for the brand, 72 percent of TikTok’s users agree that they associate certain songs as “TikTok Songs.” One example of this is artist K Camp’s “Lottery”, otherwise known on TikTok for its “Renegade” dance challenge. There are 23.9 Million videos on the app using that song despite not having mainstream radio success.

TikTok’s Global Head of Music, Ole Oberham, has said that “TikTok is the home for music trends that permeate the culture, industry, and charts.” Considering the massive amount of traffic the app is able to generate, it’s no surprise that brands will want to work with the creators or musicians who are able to garner the most attention. Oberham also said “When brands embrace music and partner with artists on the platform, they will see a ‘far reaching halo-effect’ of cultural relevance and brand love.”

In 2020, TikTok reported that 70 artists who went viral on the platform subsequently signed to major music labels.

Read TikTok’s full blog post about their findings here.

Jay-Z Reciting Shakespeare?

The 21st century has already brought massive advances in technology of all kinds with numerous benefits to society. Should we count deepfakes as one of those advances?  It’s now possible to take snippets of an artist’s voice, plug them into a database, and come out with your own song that the artist has no control over whatsoever. How so?

Two of the leading text-to-speech programs are LJ Speech and Tacotron 2, the latter of which was developed by Google. These programs take user uploaded audio snippets and create a synthetic ‘voice’ based on that audio. Once the voice is created, the user can type any sentence into the program and it will speak that sentence in the synthetic voice. Add some background beats and additional words and it’s easy to see how you could make your own song! But what happens when an amateur uses audio clips from a mainstream artist to build the synthetic voice? 

It just so happens that Jay-Z faced this exact issue with YouTube. In 2020, a user uploaded an audio deepfake of Jay-Z reciting Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be,” monologue from Hamlet. YouTube initially took the video down and sent a DMCA claim, but the channel fought back. They argued that Jay-Z didn’t write or perform the monologue, the uploader/synthetic voice did and, therefore, Jay-Z had no claim to the rights. While you seem to be hearing Jay-Z’s voice, the audio is not owned by the rapper in any way. 

The US has laws prohibiting the spread of disinformation through deepfakes, but when it comes to music, there is a large gray area left undecided. Are these types of creations legal or not?

 Another uncertain aspect of this technology is the effect on advertising and sponsorship. If an advertiser can create the sound of a famous musician without needing to pay the big bucks for their direct sponsorship, what’s to stop them from doing that? For example, if someone were to recreate Travis Scott’s vocal sound and use it in a commercial endorsing some product, would it convince fans that the rapper is supporting the product and influence them to buy? In a typical sponsorship/endorsement situation you’d expect Scott to get a cut of the sales but since the text-to-speech system is what created the sound, he wouldn’t. 

What are your thoughts? Do the original artists used by the deepfake creators have rights in the work created by text-to-speech programs? Or is this an instance of freedom of speech and the original artists have no say? At least one thing is for sure: technology always outpaces regulation.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” hits 1 billion streams on Spotify