Rob Abelow:
All of your fans or listeners at most of the places that you finally do acquire attention, all those people are anonymous to you. You don't know who the people are that are streaming you. You don't even necessarily know who the people are who buy tickets to your show through some third-party ticketing platform. You don't really know anybody who even follows you on Instagram or Twitter, wherever else.
You have approximate knowledge of who they are. But what I'm working on a larger sense is trying to have new technological platforms or ways where that's not the case.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. But I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution of today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.
All right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend Rob Abelow. Rob is the founder of Where is Music Going, which is the platform that helps artists and builders to be able to grow more connected audiences through new technology.
The client's community include leaders in cutting edge music tech, music executives, venture capitalists, and independent artists and team members. I actually discovered Rob because I was following him on Twitter and he's consistently releasing and posting really good updates about what is happening right now currently with music.
Yes. I'm recording this. A big piece of that is AI and we also have experienced some ups and downs through things like music NFTs as well. I'm really excited to connect with him because, yeah, I've seen him share his perspective in a lot of ways. I think that the conversation we're about to have right now is really on the cutting edge of what it means to be a modern musician.
Rob, the final thing I'm going to say here is he has spent over 15 years in the trenches with artists. He has represented artists, he performed around the globe. He's picked up billions of streams with his artists, Billboard Top 40 albums along the way. Yeah. I'm really excited to have him on the podcast today. Rob, thank you for taking the time to be here.

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Maybe to kick things off, for anyone who is their first time connecting with you, could you share a little bit about yourself and your story and how they started Where's Music Going?

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. Yeah. You did a great background for me there. It's like you said, I've been managing bands and working in the trenches with artists for 15 plus years. I started working in the music industry when I was in college. I was working in the music business ... sorry, in business school. Wasn't sure where exactly I was going to go. I had some friends' bands who started doing okay. In our minds, they were on the road to stardom and they asked me to manage them and it just clicked for me.
It was like, "Okay. I'm a huge music fan, failed musician, all my friends are great musicians, this is a great merging of these things." Just dove in head first. The day I graduated from college, I started working at a small booking agency. But I knew I really wanted to be on the management side because that is, to me, the closest you can be to an artist. You're like the most fully aligned.
I always look at it as a marriage, you want to be together for as long as possible and it was just exciting to me. Every area of the business you're involved in as a manager, everything else you're involved in one specific sector of the business. After only about two years of working at that agency, I started managing an artist by the name Pete Francis, who's one of the singers in a band called Dispatch.
I was managing a solo career and I left and I started my own management company. After a few years of doing that, picking up other clients, going pretty well, I started a label through by accident through a necessity because I had some artists that nobody wanted to sign. Started that, a few of those releases went well and I was approached by Warner Music Group to bring the label into their system and it was a pretty cool thing at first actually it was a farm system for them.
It was like anything I signed, they could upstream to Warner Atlantic, but I learned a ton, had some great resources and access, did that for a few years until I realized, like many artists do at major labels, my kind of people who brought me in left, I was no longer the championed thing of focus and I was hard to get people to work on my bands.
I left and then ran it independent totally for the next eight years or so. With both of those two things, the way I always ran things was this sustainable approach to fan building. We would utilize everything that's out there, streaming, sync publicity, but it was all about creating deep relationships with fans and just slowly giving them more value than you're getting, having close proximity to them, great contact with them and building a community around what you're doing.
It may take a lot longer to build that way, but you're building a career, not a moment. I did that for a long time. A few years ago, I did start getting a little bit jaded to how difficult it could be for me as a label sometimes to actually help emerging artists break through because it was just like you're playing the Spotify or TikTok algorithm slot machine, but it was just waiting for that to happen.
I really wanted to start working on how could we make things better for the working artist on the one-to-many scale instead of one-to-one. I started consulting for a lot of music tech companies that were trying to take the right approach into this. I ended up starting one that were in the process of, we sold off most of the IP for and then now for the last few months I've been both writing on the subject and consulting for others in the space. That's how I got here.

Michael Walker:
Super cool. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. There's definitely something that I could sense was your both understanding of the roots of what being successful as an artist, especially an independent artist is all about, which is like you described, it's the relationship, it's the connection with fans and it's not necessarily sometimes the superficial numbers, the metrics they look good on the surface, but ultimately it's really the real connections, the relationships that make the biggest impact as well as what you described with the tech is and what's coming, literally it's called Where's Music Going.
One thing that you got to be curious about is having 15 plus years of experience now in the music industry, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges that artists are struggling with right now as it relates to being able to build community or an audience around their music?

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. For one, there's just so much out there. It's a sea of music and artists and it's just very hard to break through the noise. There's a lot of strategy and thought that can go into that, but they're going to be the biggest problem for anybody. But I think even then beyond that, it's that all of your fans or listeners at most of the places that you finally do acquire attention, all those people are anonymous to you.
You don't know who the people are that are streaming you. You don't even necessarily know who the people are who buy tickets to your show through some third-party ticketing platform. You don't really know anybody who even follows you on Instagram or Twitter, wherever else. You have approximate knowledge of who they are and that is a really big challenge that there's ways you can make that better.
You can use tools that get people closer. It's a lot of effort. But what I'm working on in a larger sense is trying to have new technological platforms or ways where that's not the case where you have more control over who that audience is and the relationship and communication channel. I think those things are really big.
Then the other is just value out of what you're putting out in the world. Recorded music I think has just become a commodity in most ways. It's paying hopefully 10 bucks a month for all the music in the entire world. I was just looking at it today, it's a full year of having access to every single song that's ever been released, costs less money than one ticket to a Taylor Swift show, maybe about one-fifth.
That just shows how much of a commodity the music has become, but how important the experience or something that's active or interactive has become. I think it's a challenge for artists to find their way into that second part because of the first two parts that I just mentioned.

Michael Walker:
Oh, man. So well-articulated. We should definitely catch up after this interview a little bit on our platform street team, which is essentially the exact thing that you're describing. But one thing that you just brought up that I think is really interesting and I'd love to hear your thoughts on. Right now, we're experiencing the after effects of a bubble that was burst around NFTs.
To be fair, some of the things that were happening with NFTs are pretty ridiculous, like millions of dollars going to things that really didn't hold any artistic value. In my opinion, there's still a long-term revolution that is in progress as it relates to music, specifically around NFTs. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts around the state of "Web3" and NFTs and where you think music is going as it relates to those platforms.

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. You're right. There was some really crazy things happening. NFTs in general, they are correlated to some really bad branding that shows what certain examples of them are that are just ... NFTs are really the technology behind something. But people think NFTs are pictures of apes that rich people sell to show how rich they are.

Michael Walker:
Or pictures of Donald Trump ...

Rob Abelow:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
... dressed like a superhero.

Rob Abelow:
But I think to some degree the initial elements of music NFTs, some of them tried to be a parallel to that and I never really was a big believer in that being the use case for it. I love to see the value of music in some ways going up like, "There is a mindset of this is fine art. Can there be a fine art approach to there's only a certain amount of these and I want to show that I own that."
I like that and I support it. But what I have found is potentially really valuable with blockchain technology and music and NFTs is talking about the identity. I know actions that people have taken around me as an artist, I call it sometimes proof of fandom. I know that you bought tickets to that concert. I know that you bought this t-shirt, stream that thing, or a member of my fan club.
That by doing all of these things, I can reward you, it can be like this gamified thing and I have me and you control that relationship wherever it goes for whatever platform it goes to. Not those platforms owning that data. I think that's really interesting, but it's less sexy and it's less right now and it's less something I could sell to you for 10 times what I bought yesterday.
It's much more of this infrastructural thing that may take a lot of time. I look at, "Okay. There's a band called Avenged Sevenfold and they're really pioneers in exploring how you can use Web3 in the way that I'm talking about." They have a fan club where they sold music NFT passes to become members of the fan club.
Once you bought it, that unlocked things, it unlocked chat rooms and things like that where you could experience things with the band. But then they partnered with Ticketmaster to do the very first token-gated presale of their shows. Instead of using some password to get in that anybody could share, it was you showed that you were a member of their fan club by connecting your wallet.
Ticketmaster read that and said, "Oh, this is legitimately a fan of this band. They should get access to buy tickets before anybody else." That's just like a breadcrumb to where we could go eventually where everything is blockchain-enabled and you could always just enable your wallet, which is maybe your Apple Wallet and it just shows who you are and what you've done and who you're a fan of and that could change your experience.
There's other ways of using music NFTs and I think artists are like, there's a lot of different experiments out there now, but it's almost every buyer who's in there for music NFTs is a crypto native ... I don't want to say non-music fan. But they're like crypto first person and the mindset is very much I'm going to buy this and sell this for more than had it previously. I think we need to move away from that into how does this make a music fan's experience better?

Michael Walker:
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Really well said.

Rob Abelow:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
It sounds like you think that the angle, or at least one angle where NFTs could provide more value is around identity and uniquely identifying the relationship between a fan and the artist and therefore providing access to the artist and/or exclusive experiences. Yeah. We definitely need to connect on the stuff that we're building with street team and with the membership, the inner circle stuff.
But this actually leads really nicely into maybe a tangential but definitely connected, really conversation around AI. Because I agree, it seems like identity is something that is going to become so important and verification. Verification of identities is going to be so important in a world where it's going to be so easy to generate misinformation and AI generated deep fakes in music.
Maybe you could describe a little bit like your experience or what you're seeing right now for someone who's here right now. I feel like, I don't know, you'd have to have your head buried under the sand to some degree if you haven't heard yet about AI or heard some ripples of ChatGPT and some of these different tools. Maybe if you're well up-to-date, you might have heard of some of the voice models that are coming out around famous artists.
But maybe you could share a quick, to bring people up to date if they're on the outskirts so they're not really fully aware of what's the landscape right now as it relates to AI and music generation.

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. It's pretty crazy how fast things are happening. Most things, it's been happening for a long time and then overnight there's these big moments that make it part of all the conversation or it all comes together. We've had lots of assistive AI over the years in bits and pieces and a lot of everybody probably uses it to some degree in their production maybe without even knowing it sometimes.
But now there's a lot more generative AI, which can be something like you literally just go to Google, just launch their music LM, and you can go in there and you could just with text prompts, tell it the type and vibe of music you want it to generate and it'll pump something out to you. That level of generative music AI is okay. It's not taking your job yet, maybe not for a very long time.
It's more for idea generation and playing with, it'll get better. But another thing that's happening is this voice cloning AI and what's happening is you can take not even that much, maybe 30 minutes now of a say famous singer's voice, plug it into a model and then now what I can do as a, maybe not even a real singer, just as a casual person, I can have a song that I've made, I can sing on it and then I can use a plugin to change my voice into Drake's voice or Michael Jackson's voice.
In fact, there's a bunch of apps that have popped up just in the last few weeks that are upload an MP3 and then select from this menu of artists you want it to sound like, and within five minutes or less you're getting it back.

Michael Walker:
Oh, my God.

Rob Abelow:
While in the short-term these things are gimmicky and trendy, there's a few that have gone viral. One of them tried to release to Spotify and commercialize, it was a rip-off of Drake in the weekend and that got taken down. What this is mainly caused is just everybody to reckon with, "Okay. What's about to happen here? How do we deal with this? What AI is good AI. What AI needs to be outlawed? Can we even do that? Can we just say we don't want this to exist?"
Because when the music industry tried to do that with illegal downloads and file sharing, that was the worst possible route to take. What it did was destroy the music market because that all existed in the legal market and that's where everybody went because there was no acceptable monetized legal way.
I think what's really happening right now is figuring out how do we coexist with this in ways that artists benefit and monetize it. There's a lot of people in the music industry working to figure out, "Okay. Do we have licensed versions of these vocal and other AI models that there's consent and people can use it and they're paying for the right to use it and if they are allowed to commercially release it that the original artists are monetized."

Michael Walker:
Yeah.

Rob Abelow:
Sorry. That's hard to follow. There's so much going on. I'm trying to bottle it a little bit into this moment.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. I heard obviously the Drake and the weekend one was pretty amazing. Just the virality that it had was interesting. But then also I heard one with the Beatles, it was a John Lennon and Paul McCartney, it was a new Beatles song and it sounded just like them. There was one where Paul McCartney, one of his newer songs, but they modeled it based on his younger Beatles.
It just got me thinking like, "Man, I want to write a song with John Lennon and Paul McCartney just for my own personal fun. If I don't release it, I want to do a duet on a song." It sounds like it's basically possible right now we can go. You'll probably do this is ... I'm going to do this for sure.
But you brought up a really important point, which is how do we properly license or have copyrights and royalties based on using the likeness of someone else's voice? Which seems like that's a broader issue with AI in general right now though.

Rob Abelow:
Oh, yeah.

Michael Walker:
Data and who owns the final output. You also referenced the time in history where this happened with illegal downloads and then here comes along iTunes store and creates accessible, easier legal way to do it and then people naturally went towards that. In your opinion, what do you think is the best solution to best ... Obviously, we're all discovering this together. But in your mind, where do you think that this is headed in terms of creating a real coexistence with this type of technology?

Rob Abelow:
I think the big thing is figuring out what that licensing infrastructure is. An artist who's paving the way really early on is Grimes. She's got a big audience. She is not signed to a label right now. She had some freedom and she said, "Anybody who creates a song using a model of my voice, I'll split royalties with you 50-50." A lot of people have now ... They actually made a model and you can go down ... This is all taped together really quick by her and her great management team.
You can go, you download the stems and use their modeler. You can make a song with her voice. You upload it back into her system and you actually release, distribute it through her white labeled distro kid and then you're splitting royalties. This isn't perfect. This can be violated. But what I like about this, the spirit of it is if you give positive incentives and a real system for people to use things, that works better than giving negative incentives like saying "We're going to sue you."
Because if somebody wants to work with this stuff, they're going to find ways to do it. They want to say, "Hey listen, if I use this and I go the right path and I use ... Grimes told me I could do it. If I use this system and I release it with this and it's branded in the way that she likes it says Grimes AI that has its own page. I know by her rules where it's allowed to be released. I know what the splits are." I'm more likely to do that because I know when I release it won't be taken down. It won't be a waste of my time.
I think of this as the music industry at large creates this system that now you have these people who maybe would've been bad actors or operating outside of this system, now they're hopefully operating inside the system and actually is really beneficial for everybody. I say call it growing the pie. You mentioned you'd really like to do a song with Paul McCartney and John Lennons. Think about that. Monetizing consumption has been very hard.
People have attached themselves to paying just more than zero, a little more than zero. We're willing to pay, it's $10 a month and it's hard to get people to pay more super fans will buy vinyl, et cetera. But people will pay a lot of money to do something that's active and engaging with something and creating on it.
I think with AI you can actually give the ability for a lot more people that aren't aspiring professional musicians but just want to interact with their favorite artists music in some cool way and not even necessarily release it commercially. Maybe there's apps, games, there are closed ecosystems or who knows what they are that says, "Hey, you can mess around with something and make your voice sound like John Lennon." Or like you said, sing along.
I think that potentially there's ways to tap it. The way I look at it is I just want all that money going back to the artist instead of it being these new generated stuff that some tech companies making money on and no artist now. I think that's the thing where it's who knows what directions this going to go. But I'm like, "If we can build the right way fast, I think more artists can benefit."

Michael Walker:
A hundred percent.

Rob Abelow:
You mentioned Web3. Web3 can be really potentially really good for tracking ownership and identity of these things as they move from place to place.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. Yeah. As you're describing that one thing that came to mind was I want John Lennon to write me a song for my new baby that was just born. John Lennon writes the song, describes the details, and boom, it outputs a song with John Lennon singing to your daughter. It seems like that's as crazy as it sounds, we're actually probably really close to being able to do something like that.
I'm here to hear your thoughts around, it seems like one of the trends with AI that was unexpected was that some of the roles or the jobs that it does a really good job at are things that we thought would be the last things for AI to do, things like creative work and generating artwork and music and books. It seems like that's one of the ... We're still so early on, too. It's not going to ... like you mentioned, it's not going to our replace us right now or anytime soon, hopefully.
But where do you think that we're headed in terms of generative, being able to using prompts, generate a full track that's really good. That just sounds like it's the artist that wrote it. How far away do you think that we are from something like that and what do you think the implications are for music overall? You mentioned a little bit about how fans can actually be more interactive and maybe more creative, but certainly it seems like this would level the playing field in terms of who is a music creator.

Rob Abelow:
Totally. Yeah. It's the lines of who's a creator and consumer I think will get really bloody. That's already happened. I mean we have to some degree. I think it's been more people who really want to be a musician, but we have, what, millions and millions of artists and you can make a good point. AI has been interesting because it's really gone after the knowledge workers more than anything manual, the software developers, the people most at risk.
With a lot of these things that it's coming into, I think what happens is the people who are the most skilled, the skill ends up becoming in the decision making and the curation of how to use that tool and take what that tool gives back to you and evolve it or decide what to take or keep that goes from writing to music or a photo journalist, anything like that.
I think AI ends up actually making the top X percent be that much more efficient and actually increase how much probably better they are than the bottom percent. I think I take it out of music and think of copywriters. Anybody who's putting out really mediocre stuff just to do it for SEO, AI can do that now. But if you're someone who's an incredible writer, AI may just be a tool for you to help organize your thoughts. It's not going to replace your writing and your style.
I think the same thing for music. I think music is also significantly more complex than almost all the other creative things AI is dealing with. For instance, photos and art, it's like there already. It can do an incredible. You want to do album artwork on mid-journey, you can go do that right now. Music, I think, is going to be further down the line.
I think on the fully generative stuff, it's mostly going to be the uses that are less about fandom and are more functional. This is happening already. But in a music behind a YouTube video where music isn't central or in other synchronized use cases, a lot of corporate stuff, there's actually this really funny irony that Warner Music made this huge statement about taking down that Drake in the weekend song and about AI.
But they also were a big investor in this AI company that touts that you can get cheaper music from them than essentially real artists as background music for corporations. I think a lot of that stuff is going to be going away and it kind of sucks because it's this nine to five income for a lot of working musicians. I think there's also ... I think of the '80s and there was all this Casio overproduced synth music and hairbands as well.
Then all of a sudden in the '90s there was this pushback to that where it was like we want grunge, we want attitude and emotion and raw. I think we're going to see that, but there's going to be people who are like, "I want the most humanity and the least amount of production on a lot of stuff," that connection and that authenticity is going to be important.
I actually think it's a good thing because I think we've lost some of that even before AI, which just the way people experience music on a playlist not chosen for them, they may not know the artist's name. The context is ripped away. I think taking that up a level will have this reverse response of, "No. I want to know who this person is." Maybe that's just a hope.
Then there's another outcome that I think will be just like with any other technological advance, there's going to be the artists who know how to use it well and create new types of music or sounds and genres and people who love that because they're like, "That's really pushing the boundaries of what's possible." Because a few different things and it's impossible to know exactly what's there, but I think there's going to be a mix.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. Yeah. One thing that really strikes me is just how you described at the beginning, just how quickly it's evolving and how this is a matter of months. Open AI was the fastest growing company in human history. Is that right?

Rob Abelow:
The fastest, 2 million subscribers ever. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Wow. It seems, yeah, every week there's just another big breakthrough. Now there's calls to slow down on AI, to put a pause on it. I don't know if that's going to happen or not. But certainly, it seems like something on the order of magnitude of the internet that's happening with AI. One point that you brought up was around in this world where the functional pieces that maybe used to be obstacles or hold people back or they just took time to create or record everything.
Now that those are gone, it's easier to be prolific, it's easier to create stuff, to be creative and to create new content, but it does seem like there's a counter force like you described around the need for human connection, especially in the world of AI and amazing quality music. It does seem like one thing that I don't think you can replace with the robot is the feeling of authenticity or connection. I don't know. There's therapist bots that seem like they do a pretty good job of asking questions.

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. The most dystopian are these AI chatbots that apparently even in the music world, people love even though they know it's not actually the artist. I'm like, "That's so dystopian to me."

Michael Walker:
Oh, man. It certainly brings up some interesting questions around what does it mean to be human and what is intelligence, what is consciousness? There's a lot of conversation happening around AI. One criticism of the models right now, at least with the text generative ones, is that they're just really good at predicting the next word in a sequence, but they're not really intelligent like we are. But then if I'm really honest with myself, how does my brain function?

Rob Abelow:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
I don't know what I'm going to say 10 words from now. Literally, it's just happening in a string in front of me. It creates this sense of coherence after when we look back at it. But the truth is this is just happening and I think anyone who's listening to this who's tried meditating for 10 minutes and notices what happens, your brain, it goes. You're not thinking. It happens.

Rob Abelow:
That's actually really interesting. I never thought about it that way through meditation. Because I've thought about this, when you're meditating and you sometimes realize that your body or whatever it is, is throwing a million different ideas at you, essentially. These thought things bubble up and you can either take them and roll with it, unconsciously not knowing it, or sometimes you could say, "Wait a minute. I don't want to take that."
You're almost like if you're in control, you're like the curator of these incredible amount of impulses, emotions and thoughts that come up and it does act like that. It's like that's what it's suggesting to you easily are all these different things well-formed, thought out and you need to be the curator of those things.
Something that's terrifying and interesting is we have Open AI is trained on everything pre-2022, so pre in existing and putting content out. But as these AI models continue into the next few years, they're going to be retraining themselves on all the information out there publicly, much of which they will be putting out themselves and at an increasing rate.
They will then be continually training off of themselves and getting into this recursive thing that's very weird. But what's real and human, I think that's the purpose of art and the purpose of music is to have that connection both with the artist but also to other people. I got so into music because my favorite bands growing up were Phish, a band called My Morning Jacket, and I always love live music whenever I listen to something.
It was like, "What is this going to feel like when I'm at the show with other people?" There's a feeling when you're watching it and you're loving it and you're feeling so good and you look around and everybody in the room feels the same way as you do, and you don't even know all these people. You feel close and high five somebody, whatever it is.
That feeling that music can create, that to me, it's hard to see knowingly this came from AI where that is a very difficult thing to replace. I think it's going to be a tool in the tool belt. It's hard for me to ever see something even close to fully generative that isn't totally controlled as a tool by the artist to ever replace that type of experience.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah. It's super interesting. One thing that comes to mind related to this idea that we're talking about of how our brains think themselves, but it seems like a lot of the most prolific or the most creative artist of all time acknowledge that when they're in the flow or in this state that it's almost like they're channeling this creative force through themselves, and sometimes they don't even really take credit for it.
It's just they feel like a conduit to this creative force. It does seem like playing piano, when you first start learning to play piano, you have to really think a lot about where do my fingers go and which notes, what's happening here? Then eventually when you become skilled enough with just how the patterns and how to use it, then you think less and less about the actual ... oh, how did you describe it earlier? The functional components of here's how my fingers move in this way.
But what doesn't change is that the thought and being able to channel or point or curate where that goes. To your point, maybe AI is always going to be a way to channel, or it can be a way to channel a creative expression, but that's really the essence of art itself is channeling that. The one thing that you brought up, too, that I think is really interesting was around the experience, the experience of being at a show and connected and in a moment with all these people around you who are in the same space.
It does seem like there's maybe a movement, and this is a movement that's always been there, but maybe because of the lack of live connection live shows has been subjugated. Is that the right word for it? To just listening to music on the background, not really knowing who the artists are. But it does seem there's this essence of live music and being live and being here in a moment together in this eternal live experience that maybe this is something.
I'm rambling here. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on maybe the metaverse and how it relates to ... or just live experiences in general and where you think music is heading in terms of the future of live music.

Rob Abelow:
I think in general, people have just so much value for anything that does get them together, that has an ephemeral quality. I think people put maybe more than ever in the last decade or so, just the value of doing things over owning things, which is really cool. Live Nation just put out some data the other day that their first quarter earnings and it showed that they had more ticket sales and ticket revenue than ever before in a Q1.
There's a lot of caveats with that. They just acquired a bunch of companies in the last couple years, how apples to apples is it? Then also when I talk to some agent friends, they keep telling me there's more arena tours and stadium tours. I mean, essentially big venues that can ... artists that can sell out those venues than ever before.
But I've been trying to get more and more into data on, it's harder to get the data on small to mid-sized venues and how those are really performing because I do feel like it's harder for artists to break through on an early level than it has been in a long time. In terms of the metaverse, I don't know if there's been an experience yet that I've seen that is incredibly compelling and that to me really works.
But I do think we're going to get there in some way, shape, or form. We all think of a metaverse, we think of meta and how that's failed with Facebook. But with Roblox and Fortnite, if you look at the metaverse that way, and with younger kids who get to ... What's important is they live in these places, they experience it and they get to build on it. I do think there's potentially something powerful there for music experiences for people to go play in. It's not apparent to me if those are concerts or what form that really takes.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Yeah. Really well said. Are you familiar with Neuralink, the company Elon Musk is working on?

Rob Abelow:
More from a headline perspective, but not the details?

Michael Walker:
Yeah. I feel like that's on the level of just totally game changing to what it means to be human or that shapes our experience of reality, and when I think of the metaverse, to your point around, we usually think of meta. It's in their name now, the metaverse that they're creating. We might have an idea of what that is and be skeptical of it, or not skeptical.
But it does seem like if we had some version of a Neuralink or a brain interface that unlocked the ability to interface more directly with digital intelligence or AI, then we could hypothetically create a really lifelike simulated environment, maybe as lifelike as what we're experiencing right now. If we were in that environment and we had one of these Neuralinks that maybe there'd be no gap between what we think or imagine and the thing happening. You're think, "I'm going to fly right now like, "Whoosh. Now I'm flying." Yeah.

Rob Abelow:
I think also augmented reality, maybe before we get to that as well is something that we feel like a little more comfortable with, especially if it's not perfect. I see a lot of this using your phone as the intermediate thing or to some physical object and you're putting your phone over it to have it display more things or perhaps like a concert that's in your living room rather than you being fully in the concert. I could see things like that also taking shape.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. That's a good point. That's certainly going to happen before people decide to get brain surgery put in their body. Yeah. Super interesting. I know Apple has their augmented glasses that they're working on. Gosh. They might be talking about it today.

Rob Abelow:
It's we, right.

Michael Walker:
It's today at the June WWDC. But yeah, super interesting. That seems like that could have some implications for live music and being able to experience it. But I agree. I think right now, we just haven't really had that level of experience where it's fully encapsulated what it'll be like. But I do think if we could imagine a world where it's like this, but it's a digital environment and we can teleport to hang out with friends or do anything.
I used to be in this game Warcraft III, and it was a super geeky game. I'm like announcing, declaring myself as a nerd. But one of the coolest things that they had these custom maps where people could create their own spins of the game and there's so many creative things that people generated and there's this whole marketplace or this world of free games.
You could just hop in the room and be like, "Huh. What's this game that someone created?" You're meeting people around the world playing these creative games. I wonder if there'll be something similar where it's like we can scroll through all these different environments and be like, "Oh, I'm going to go explore what it's like to be in a world where there's no gravity around or I'm going to tune into this one." Yeah.

Rob Abelow:
You walking into this artist's curated experience and then this fans edit of that artist's curated experience could be interesting.

Michael Walker:
Totally. Yeah. Fan fictions or reach a new level. Gosh. There was a video I saw that was VR, a VR environment with someone who was talking with basically instances of ChatGPT, but in the form of humans. You would say something and it would take some time to respond. But something clicked where I was like, "Man, there's going to be ... It's going to change everything for RPGs for character models."

Rob Abelow:
Oh, you may have seen this a similar thing because I saw ... I was using non-person characters and essentially they don't have these wrote scripts, but they're interacting with whatever you've done so far in the game, whatever you say to them. Like you mentioned, there's a lag. But that's going to go away rather quick.
The development of all these things happen. Like I mentioned, it takes 30 minutes of somebody's voice to create a model. The reality is that's what it was a month ago. I've talked to people this week who are like, "We can do it in about 10 minutes, maybe 7 minutes now. We haven't released that yet. That's how fast all these things are going.
Yeah. I mean, for stuff like that in a video game to make it totally immersive and believable, people are going to end up, I think of the book Infinite Jest, which is entertainment is so good that you never leave it and it's like this, you die in your chair because you haven't fed yourself. Yes. Hopefully that's not the future of it.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. There's a lot of sci-fi or dystopian things or that's the direction. Then there's people like Elon Musk who think that we're in some simulation already, which is also interesting. But yeah, it certainly seems like the AI models that's going to change everything with the ability to, rather than them having scripted lines in games, being able to just have develop a character model and then you interact with that character model, but you'd still need some kind of narrative themes or you need to have still a direction that people are going in.
Yeah. It makes you think as it relates to music, how it could be a further step down the line of creating AI-generated voice models of ... But if you could actually interact or sit in a room with AI Drake and be able to co-write a song with AI Drake or co-write a song with Paul McCartney. There's a whole can of worms around. What about when that happens? Is it AI Drake going to be more prolific than normal Drake and do record labels to ...

Rob Abelow:
It has to be, right?

Michael Walker:
... one use.

Rob Abelow:
He almost already is. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Yeah.

Rob Abelow:
I don't know what the answer is there, but I think of it as, yeah, it's so hard to grasp things as they're happening and things are more exponential than they've ever been. But any time any new tech was involved in music, there was always this fear when the drum machine was brought in. It's like, "All right. That's the death of all drummers. Is that what we want to have happen?"
That's just a way that happens or a sampling, which then became a norm. We found ways to make sure that was monetized or there's a way to license it. I think of who's the most covered band ever, and it's the Beatles. Is that good or bad for them? It's good. It's an important part of the legacy. Who's the most sampled artist ever? It's James Brown. That's an incredible thing for him.
At some point, it's like you want to be the most covered, you want to be the most sampled because that is your legacy. It shows your influence and that your ideas and who you are is essentially a meme. It's such a powerful one, an important one that it gets repetitively copied to other people and that brings you back into the culture and brings importance back to who you were as an artist.
Is this the next evolution of that, or is it that it's at such an incredible rate and it's actually mimicking you that for the first time there's a really actually a negative outcome to it? That's why I think it's important to make sure it's delineated what's real, what's not real. I will say from my anecdotal conversations, both directly or through other people who've spoken to a lot of representatives of major artists who passed away that they are the most excited on average about this because they see monetization strategies of, just as an example, this isn't one, but Frank Sinatra.
It's like we want music and the style of Frank Sinatra sang by Frank Sinatra, maybe on this Frank Sinatra hologram. What I start looking at is the challenge for up-and-coming musicians is much harder to tap into the benefits of that than already existing famous musicians, and then you're already competing more so with catalog music than ever before on streaming.
What happens when Michael Jackson can come out with a new song and perform? It's just now, you're actively competing with a history of stars. That to me is an interesting thing to navigate.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. It is super interesting. The first thing that comes to mind is because if all we have is the existing stars and existing familiar voices, then it would probably start to get, I don't know, a bit monotonous or old. If you imagine all these up-and-coming artists having the access to be able to record duets or record featured songs and work with these established artists, then it seems like there's maybe this angle where they're going to be able to connect with this existing audience, with this existing DNA and attach what's unique to them that cloud of nature could be interesting to watch.

Rob Abelow:
Totally. There's a platform called Pixel Links that's just coming online right now. It's metaverse AI, Web3. The way it's starting is with DNA, Dead Mouse is one of the founders, and the initial one is you create this AI companion and you go around and you collect things, and you essentially collecting is different pieces of like artist DNA that you can put into your companion model to then make more and better music. It's based off of Dead Mouse.
Eventually, I can go collect DNA from this other artist and it all has a pathway back to that artist so I can create music, put it into the ecosystem, maybe release. It's successful, and that art, it's all a direct line to pay back who that artist was. Then someone could even take something I've released and collect it and put it into what they're building, and it has a pathway back to you as the creator and then back to Dead Mouse.
They're experimenting and it's super new. But I'm like that there's something interesting there with that level of DNA.

Michael Walker:
Wow. Up until this point, the only way you could collect samples of your favorite artist DNA was to have sex with them.

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. Yes. Now it just leads to the continued asexuality of the younger generations that have been happening.

Michael Walker:
Oh, man. Hey, with that, man, this has been ...

Rob Abelow:
... me end there.

Michael Walker:
That's about the last place I expect this to end. But I feel like it's a fitting end here. The life itself has been about the passing of DNA. It does seem like there's ... what defines who we are. You described the meme nature of our ideas and to be able to pass that forward credit legacy, it seems. Yeah. Identity is super interesting. We lived in some pretty awesome times.
Rob, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on here. This has been one of my favorite conversations I've had in a long time about this stuff.

Rob Abelow:
Sure.

Michael Walker:
Thanks for being on the cutting edge and helping to shine a light on some of these new developments that are happening. For anyone here right now who's interested in learning more or diving deeper, where would you recommend that they go to connect more with you?

Rob Abelow:
Yeah. If they want to follow my newsletter, which comes out once a week, they can go to wheremusicsgoing.com. Essentially, what I do there is I talk ideas at the top for, honestly, two minutes, and then I usually get into tools and strategies that you can use to help you connect with your audience. Also, if anybody's on Twitter, they can follow with there, @AbelowRob.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Well, like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. Yeah. Appreciate your time.

Rob Abelow:
Thanks for having me.

Michael Walker:
Hey. It's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. If you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit Subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us that really helps us out.
Third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music careers to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now. I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.