Music & Tech, I love you, me neither
There is an inherent tension within the music industry, and it is precisely what gives it its spice for entrepreneurs running a music tech project.
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The music industry navigates between two requirements that are hard to reconcile: the need to be profitable, structured and even, at times, standardised (the famous metadata, to give just one example)… but also the need to preserve artistic authenticity and to celebrate creative risk-taking.
As a result, many music tech projects have to find their way, most of the time between solving a functional issue to improve how the sector works:
– Streamlining concert ticket purchasing
– Building algorithms for programming, discoverability and marketing
– Creating digital spaces to bring fan communities together
– Offering music libraries and music creation tools
… and preserving a creative, customisable space in which to express one’s individuality:
– Every artist wants to offer an experience in tune with their universe
– Every programmer uses their own sensitivity alongside factual data
– Every manager or tour promoter wants productions and collaborations for their artist that strengthen their brand, based on artistic stances that are often intangible
– Every label manager detects talent largely thanks to their intuition, trying to anticipate the public’s tastes.
In short, a trade-based approach grounded in experience and gut feeling is sometimes hard to take into account, and can even turn into a headache when designing a technological solution! It is head first into this knot that we welcome Alex Stevens, founder of Bookr.fm, to PIX on 4 April: a curator of international festivals for more than 20 years, Alex develops solutions for festivals and puts technology at the service of programming… He knows better than anyone that structuring an activity of the sector through technology must preserve the essence of the craft.
How can we create unique, authentic experiences and tools while collecting, automating, analysing and making recommendations through digital interfaces? How can we balance human intuition with attention to data? Perhaps this is the ultimate problem every music tech project has to solve.