Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #21 w/ Roe v. WTF just happened 🖕, prompt AI-image generators, Unison Music Rights, F1 Games, and something something Pitchfork.
Dear readers!
I hope this email finds you happy and hopeful.
As it turns out, I haven't been able to upkeep my bi-weekly rhythm of writing this newsletter due to nothing but great stuff.
For our start-up, B2B music licensing platform for advertising agencies and brands Ringo, we spend some time going to Barcelona to attend Sonar. At Sonar, we formally pitched the company for the first time to a group of investors and other start-ups (more on one of them later).
All this while we are finishing up the Wallifornia 2022 accelerator program, which has been mesmerizing above expectations and sees us going out to Liege next week to attend the summit and pitch the company to even more investors.
Meanwhile, we finished up a massive creative music strategy project for a major tech player that should come out in a few weeks, and we attended the land of "rose rose rose" and "fun fun fun" called Cannes (Lions).
Busy times, but after a short delay, here are some thoughts, ideas, and things that made me both happy and angry and I think you'll appreciate.
Marcel
1. AMERICA, THE LAND OF THE FREE? 🇺🇸
It was confusing and awful news and discussed heavily last week: the overturning of Roe V. Wade. This supreme court rule seems to bring the US (all of us) back to a time long-forgotten as Republicans continue to threaten to push the reverse pedal even more.
Amnesty International grabbed the proverbial bull by the horns. They teamed up with Norwegian agency Anorak to create a campaign that underlines the need to protect the right to abortion in the US. The United States is no longer "the land of the free," so states Amnesty International, as they shine a critical light on the current state of women's reproductive rights, as an altered version of "Star-Spangled Banner" plays throughout.
How is it that we are moving backward?
2. Is the future of image generation here?
Over at Sonar, I watched a presentation by an artist called Mario Klingemann, who uses algorithms and artificial intelligence in his work to investigate systems and processes. Even though his works look like handmade digital designs, he does not do any of that; instead, he trains and uses existing neural networks to generate these images.
Now, if this sounds familiar, you’re right! Over the past few weeks, social media has been flooded with AI-generated visuals. Visuals that have been created with a simple text prompt and with the likes of applications like Dall-E 2 from OpenAI, Midjourney, or Craiyon consequently spitting out the images.
To see what this looks like, follow the OpenAiDalle Instagram account. If you want to understand how this works, Vox once again has a great explainer video. More importantly, they have a great video explaining this transition toward AI co-creation as they interview a group of designers to get their take on what this will mean to their creative and professional lives.
Highly recommended watch below or play around with AI yourself here and/or here.
*Sidenote: All images in this newsletter are created with Midjourney. I attached the used prompt in all the captions.
3. Meet the CMO of the future: Unison Music Rights.
As mentioned, Ringo attended Sonar to take part in a pitch competition. Another company that was pitching there is called Unison, and their proposition hit home with us.
A little background: If you write a song, publish that song, someone (you possibly again) records that song, and that song is played on radio, TV, in a commercial, or is listened to on streaming services like Spotify or Deezer… kudos! You stand to make some/a lot of money!
Collecting this money by yourself, however, is impossible! This is where Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) like Buma/Stemra, SACEM, GEMA, and SESAC come in. Almost every country has its own government-appointed CMO, making these organizations more than often monopolies that have been around since forever and have a hard time adapting to a new, vastly evolving digital world.
Enter Unison!
Unison was born in 2017 in Barcelona, thanks to the liberalization of the collective rights management market in the EU. It is the first private and for-profit music copyright management operator in Spain, and it manages 2 million copyrights of over 40 thousand creators in over 30 countries.
Whereas traditional CMOs are still highly manual and can't seem to find a way to reinvent themselves in accordance with current needs and technological opportunities, Unison does just this.
They're tech-driven first, highly transparent, and provide a user interface that in real-time gives artists an overview of where their music is played, how much they stand to make, and when they'll get paid. Making this not only the tool every musician looking to control their income flows but also the company we'll be putting our publishing and, I think, the new threshold for other CMOs to obtain over the coming years. Amazing!
Check out their website if you do anything with music!
4. Here's why a F1 game is gonna make Formula 1 even bigger (and better)!
Avid readers of this newsletter know I love me some Formula 1 racing, and yes, it helps to have a horse in the literal race called Max Verstappen, but that is not all there is to it.Â
I've said it here before. F1 is not a man-to-man (and hopefully at one point man-to-woman) sport; it's not even a team sport; it's an organizational sport competing in a technological space race on wheels, and that's what I love above it all.Â
How and why that is, is well explained by former Vox content creator Cleo Abraham, who describes F1 as the ultimate science experiment in the video below. If you still can't get into F1 after watching it, it's safe to say you never will.Â
F1 Games
We've had F1 racing games for quite some time, which are fantastic. F1 e-racing is an actual sport, with its own championship and e-drivers making tons of money. However, since we just concluded that F1 racing is not a mano-a-(wo)mano sport, e-racing doesn't capture the essence. That essence will be captured in the upcoming F1 management game, aptly titled F1® Manager 2022.Â
In this game, you can choose your team and become a boss with unparalleled authority to develop cars, contract drivers, build and upgrade your headquarters and factory, hire staff, and deal with the board while calling the shots on race day. This game will give the ultimate insights into what I think makes F1 so special and will turn even more team members into heroes with a face as the various race engineers and crew members changing tires in the pitlane are all real licensed characters.Â
F1® Manager 2022 comes out in August; consider me off-line for a while after that. Gameplay run-through below.
5. How Pitchfork magazine was build.
A podcast I've been enjoying a lot is Guy Raz's "How I Built This." Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best-known companies like Paypal, Strava, and Classpass. I was surprised when I saw he interviewed the founder of one of my favorite online magazines, Pitchfork. I quickly learned his name is Ryan Schreiber and that he sold his company to Condé Nast in 2015, one of the most prestigious magazine publishers in the world.
Perfect material for this bi-weekly newsletter!
The story in short.
While working at his local record store at age 20, Ryan Schreiber dreamt that his scrappy music review webpage might one day grow into an influential music publication. Working out of his parent's house, he wrote about indie music because he loved it and recruited like-minded friends to do the same. In 2000, a rhapsodic review of Radiohead's "Kid A" got colossal attention online. Soon, Ryan's site began to attract tens of thousands of users, building a reputation for pointed reviews that could make or break careers.
Great podcast, with what seems a great guy that started a great company that I didn't realize made it that big.
The best analogy made. According to Schreiber, at one point, the company lost focus and tried to do too many things simultaneously. He describes it as "the band's been together for 15 years, and everybody's sort of wants to start their own side projects". Very on point, very recognizable!
That's it for this edition. Hope you enjoyed.
Don't forget to like and subscribe or forward this to a friend.
Enjoy your weekend and talk soon.
Marcel