"We are waving goodbye to the first 100 years of the music business (from music halls, to radio, MTV and download stores) and racing into what will drive the next 100" - Conrad Withey of the indie-artist service Instrumental, writes in his op-ed for the MBW. He also shares 9 ideas a "modern, data-driven record label founder may want to embrace to free them from the shackles of the past:

No more expensive music videos

No more risky deal

Lower music production costs

No more stressful playlist meetings or New Music Friday-obsession

No more wasted, speculative marketing spend

No expensive office space

No more A&R scouts on your payroll

Don’t worry about reviews

You don’t need to offer an artist tour support – and they certainly don’t need to sign a 360 deal"

Great words by Chris Cohen in GQ about Apple Music Classical, the newly launched Apple service dedicated to, obviously, classical music. "I have been endlessly frustrated with how the big streaming platforms (Spotify, in my case) handle classical music. And after playing around with it for a day, I am ready to issue a snap judgment: Assuming you don’t already have a Lydia Tár-scale collection of rare Decca LPs, Apple Music Classical is the best way to immediately listen and learn... Tthe success of the app hinges on solving a boring, technical problem: metadata. Pop music relies on just a few variables to identify a piece of music: artist, album, song. In the classical world, more pieces of data matter, like the composer, the conductor, the performer, or the dates of composition, recording, and release... A usable classical streaming service needs to figure out how to display all of that information, and make it searchable". That's what Apple Music Classical has done.

Decential shares an interesting outtake from the latest Water & Music academy on global music rights: "To be fully licensed a startup would have to speak to about 150 entities and spend between $500,000 to $750,000 in legal fees. And being licensed then means you have to pass about 85 percent of your revenue straight to the rightsholders – one of the reasons Spotify has such slim margins. So unless you’re a massive platform with a savvy team, there’s not much you can do to disrupt entrenched power dynamics". “Music innovation only stays innovative until they start to touch rights and licensing, Is it any wonder that the last great innovation was Spotify?” - Dan Fowler, director of Open Source Projects at HIFI Labs and author of newsletter Liminal Spaces, said. The solution the academy has offered? Web3.

"Tickets today cost two to three times as much as inflation-adjusted tickets from a few decades ago" - Wren Graves argues in his excellent Consequence text about where the live music industry is heading. "This is hardly the first period of human history with great wealth inequality, but it’s one of the first times that the middle-class and 1% are competing over the same seats... There are only so many seats and many more people who wish to sit in them. In this environment, what does a fair ticket price even look like?".

A great point by Matty Karas in today's newsletter about music being illegal, and weapons legal: "In Tennessee, it will be illegal as of April 1 for male or female impersonators to perform in the presence of children or within 1,000 feet or schools, parks or places of worship. This would include, for example, any male Dolly Parton impersonator who 'appeals to a prurient interest,' as plenty of the Tennessee country queen’s songs do... It’s legal, on the other hand, for most people over the age of 21 to open-carry handguns without a permit almost anywhere in Tennessee".

"Private gigs is an underreported yet booming business that has had great breakdowns. The more I look at the trends though, the more I believe that these gigs say a lot about where music is heading" - Trapital's Dan Runcie points out in his latest memo. While he does approve of the idea, Runcie believes that "for musicians, there’s less correlation than ever between 'who pays me the most' and 'who loves me the most'".

• "Everything gets faster. That’s why TikTok creators are speeding up their songs and visuals.
• Everything gets shorter. That’s why song duration is shrinking—the 3-minute pop song has been replaced by the 2-minute pop song.
• Everything new soon seems old. Trends come and go as users churn through novelties.
• Everything gets dumber. Hey, just look around you.

Music writer Ted Gioia is longing for more substance in our lives in his latest newsletter, as opposed to shots of dopamine served on social media. He compares it to intermittent reinforcement - a theory based on an experiment with rats that showed that they could be manipulated more easily if rewards and punishments were sporadic and unpredictable. Gioia is hopeful - "most people crave something more enriching than a quick dose of dopamine from their handheld Skinner Box. Once they’ve tasted the real thing, a meaningful number of them—a decisive majority, in my opinion—will refuse to give up the riches of their music, books, movies, museums, and other repositories of glory and genius"

"AI’s most groundbreaking role will likely be as a new medium that will shift music into more adaptive, responsive formats" - Oleg Stavitsky of Endel, an AI-powered sound wellness company, writes in his MBW Op/Ed. "Generative AI can provide the next revolution in music mediums. Medium is the message: the way the music is delivered to us today influences the format and music itself" - Stavitsky shares his general idea about the issue, and looks ahead - "AI-powered adaptive functional soundscape version of your favorite music is the future available to us today. It opens up new opportunities for artists to create and monetize their art, for platforms to offer additional revenue streams, and for labels to breathe new life in their catalogs. Best of all: it can peacefully coexist with traditional pre-recorded music that we know and love."

"Starting about 12-18 months ago, something shifted in music consumption patterns" - music writer Ted Gioia takes notice of a change, underpinned by six recent studies showing an unexpected increase in classical music listening. How did this happen? "Maybe that old orchestral and operatic music now sounds fresh to ears raised on electronic sounds. Maybe the dominance of four-chord compositions has created a hunger for four-movement compositions. Maybe young people view getting dressed up for a night at the opera hall as a kind of cosplay event. Or maybe the pandemic had some impact on music consumption... And it’s true, the pandemic did cause a major increase in the purchase of musical instruments. People got serious about music—so much so that they wanted to play it themselves. Perhaps it changed listening habits too".

"A lot of the discussion on music being under-monetized has focused on streaming rates, Spotify’s pricing, and equity stakes in streaming services. It’s all valid, but it’s one piece of the broader opportunity" - Trapital's Dan Runcie points out in his latest memo, adding that artists "have more opportunities to buy and sell products at every level of the demand curve. An artist can release music on Spotify, promote their tour with AEG Presents, sell tickets on Ticketmaster, perform at Rolling Loud, sell an NFT on OpenSea, sell VIP access on Patreon, and host members-only live streams on Twitch. For most artists, each part of their demand curve is supported by a different company". Runcie sees opportunities in gamified features and collectibles, user-generated content, A.I. as a service, and in-app purchases in digital environments.