Ken Kobori:
But the people that know how to utilize technology to be current with their sound, and if AI is the norm and it has a specific sound that kids like or that the audience likes, and you can't replicate that by the traditional ways of using samples, you just can't get that sound, I'm sure a lot of producers are going to start using AI. It depends really what the audience wants, and us as creators, how to express ourselves.

Michael Walker:
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All right. I'm excited to be here today with Ken Kobori. Ken is the CEO of Surf Music, a digital tool and marketplace for creators to sell their unreleased music to buyers across the global entertainment industry. I am really excited to talk with him today about a few different topics around AI and technology and musical collaboration, and sort of the future of the music industry and how tech can help bring us together as artists, and in the case of Surf, as bringing together unreleased music to people who are looking for it. Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Ken Kobori:
It's a pleasure. Thank you, Michael, for having me.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. At the time we're recording this, it's 4:00 PM my time, and it's what, 5:00 AM there in Tokyo?

Ken Kobori:
It's 5:00 AM in Tokyo.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. But he's an early riser, so that's great in the morning. I would love to hear a little bit before we dive into Surf, maybe you share some details about yourself and how you discovered Surf, and got to where you are today.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah. My name's Ken Kobori. I've been a music producer for 20 years now, and I've been working primarily in the Japanese music industry, but I've produced the likes of Earth, Wind and Fire and so forth in the States too. I started off my career in 2002, worked at Sony Music at studios in New York, then started my own production company the next year in 2003, and from there I've been making music and for many different artists.
And I was assigned to a big management company for a long time, but when I left the management company, I was having difficulty finding new clientele to work with just because I'd lock myself in the studio and just be writing music all day, and I think a lot of producers do the same. And for me especially, I was really bad at self-promotion, so I wasn't on social media, didn't do anything like that, and I was just a simple idea where, what if I had a page where I could upload all my unreleased songs, and record labels from around the world could be able to choose songs from my catalog to exclusively place it with their artists.
And from there, we've developed Surf Music and what it is right now, which is a B2B marketplace that connects anybody who makes music in the world to record labels, publishers, and artists around the world for exclusive placements. And yeah, we've built Surf Music out as the ultimate tool for the creator community, and really focusing on the word community right there and cross collaborations, and using AI to discover new people to work with.
On the buyer's end, we developed it into more of a B2B tool where an artist can get their daily tasks done, most of their tasks done within our platform, in terms of looking for music for their artists or connectivity with their team, being able to do, being able to have music recommended to them by our AI on a weekly basis, having our AI recommend creators for them to follow that will match their taste of music. So that was pretty much how Surf Music got started.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. So if I'm understanding it then, the marketplace is basically for people who are songwriters primarily to be able to upload ideas for songs or demos, and get matched up with artists who are looking for songs. Is that right?

Ken Kobori:
Yes, it could be artists, but right now on our buyer's side, we've just been onboarding the major labels first, and from there we'll be onboarding indie labels, and essentially we would love the artist to have our app when it comes out later this year on their phone, so that they will be able to search for music and tell their record labels, "Oh, I'm interested in this song," or a record label or an A&R looking for a song for their artist, being able to send them a suggestion right away and be like, "We think this is cool for your album," yay or nay, easy communication that's really efficient in terms of their workflow.
Because right now a lot of it is just the traditional, very analog emailing back and forth, texting, sending zip files, all this and all... When you're working on an... I used to look at Universal for two years as a director. Everything is all over the place, and your iTunes, even though you put it in on iTunes, nothing is tagged, so going back to find that one song is always, it was always a hassle. So basically we were trying to make life easier.

Michael Walker:
It sounds like a huge need, the ability to organize and structure all of those songs and create a database around it. But it sounds like right now, it's currently mostly for connecting the... So as a songwriter, is it also published or uploading the song ideas, or is it primarily like the songwriters themselves?

Ken Kobori:
Yes, so we have a variety of people that use it for the creator's side. So obviously if you're a creator and you have original music, you could open a page and upload it. But also creators managements, we have a management portal where managers can now have their whole roster on one, on their page, and being able to organize their roster and pitch it in different regions that they don't have a reach to.
And sometimes they go through brokers to pitch in other regions and whatnot. Sometimes they sign sub pub deals to try to get placements in different regions as an alternative and as a tool for them to use. We are here for the management sides, and on top of that, one of our first investors was Fuji Pacific, which is one of the biggest publishing houses in Japan. And they've been using us actively to place music, unreleased music from their signed writers, but also we'll be working on a solution for their administered catalog also. So there's different tiers of subscriptions for the creator side in terms of either you're an individual or you're a business that's managing the creators.

Michael Walker:
Got it. Oh man, super interesting.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
So yeah, a lot of the people who are going to be listening to this or watching this right now fall into that realm of independent singer-songwriter, artists, songwriter. So yeah, obviously there's different levels and different kind of aggregations, I guess, might not be the best way, but different ways these get organized and grouped. But it is really interesting in general just hearing the thought process around organizing and creating a better streamlined system to connect, to connect those two different aspects of the industry.
So to take things down a slightly different path, I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts around AI as it relates to creators especially, and just the music industry as a whole. At the time of recording right now, there's some pretty big waves happening with AI and some of the roles that we thought that were probably going to be the safest from AI or would take the longest to recreate, the things that were more creative-based or thought-based work, seems to be like those are some of the things that the AI is really helping to facilitate or amplify. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts in terms of AI as a service for musicians, and as it relates to this whole process of writing songs and getting those songs, or from the flip side of people who want to use those songs, maybe in TV and film is one area, maybe it's more along the lines of using it for their artists as well.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah, I think we cannot stop technology and it's progress and it's innovations and whatnot, and I think AI is a great tool as long as it's obviously used responsibly. And I think it should be used as a tool to assist you, to inspire you to... Obviously there are going to be people that are going to make AI write the entire song, and the question will be, is that original now? And that debate's going on even in the art world with AI generated art. What is the AI learning from in order to create this? And it's obviously other people's previous art from different people, and I think music's the same way. Obviously there's a certain level of machine learning that has to happen, and what data sets are you putting into this to make it smarter? And that's obviously music that's been released by other artists.
So that debate is, I think that in that sense, the legality of it and how it can be used in film and other placements, that is an issue that has to really be seriously considered. Maybe it might be a world where there is a detection system where, I'm sure there's a detection system where it's fully generated by AI, then it might not be considered completely original. Or it might be something where all the data, the AI can tell you, these are the inspirations I took from in order to create this; the people that the inspiration was taken from can be compensated in some way. I don't know what the right answer is. If you look at music and the creation of music and how it's been progressing over this past 20 years, even from my career, in the beginning we were using boards, right?
We had to go into studios to record vocals, to record pretty much whatever we wanted to do. And there was no, there's really no big sample libraries that you, unlimited sorts of sample libraries available back then. You'd go into the music store and look at sample CDs and be like, okay, I'll try this one out. You go home, you love the 20 sounds that you've purchased, and then you're just hoping something's good in there.
From the moment that we started using cleared samples in our songs, you could technically say that performance was not done by you. Then you have a guitar riff that you find on Splice or a Loop cloud or anywhere like that, and you put it into your track, the old 20-year-old me 20 years ago, I'd be, I would say, "Oh, that's not original music. You didn't create that riff that's the theme, the center of your song."
But now it's like, you don't use samples? What's wrong with you? It's kids right now, they depend on this. And I think, just as there was an evolution in music making in the past 20 years, in the next five years, it's accelerating now to a pretty crazy and scary level where AI can write out lyrics for you, can give you chord progressions, you can plug in whatever chat GPT writes out on the lyrics and into another software, and you can have Eminem singing. I mean, all these different things, it's okay.
So then we get into, if you start making famous artists sing it and they didn't really say it, is that okay? There's so many issues, and I don't think there's one right answer. One thing I truly believe is that music will always be there, and people will find a way to create more music.
And whether it's with AI or whether it's a traditional, let me go learn a musical instrument and create something, or whether it's just like, I could build my whole song out of samples. I think, I'm not against AI at all. My son who is six years old right now, he's written three songs already using Loop Cloud, and one of his songs was actually, we had interest from a major label here in Japan, and when they asked, "This song is good, maybe if we could just change their top line?" They're like, "Who's this producer?" And I'm like, "His name's DJ Dean?" And they're like, "Who's DJ Dean?" I'm like, "He's my son." And it's like, "What? Your six-year-old son?" I'm like, "Yeah, this is him." They're like, "Wow, kids can make music now." And without samples, sample libraries like this, my son would not have been able to make the music he does.
But that, in a sense, if you put it into, compare it into painting, I would say the palette of paint is basically the sample library, and what you choose to put on your canvas is really your art, is how I see it now after 20 years of doing this and being such a purist of, everything needs to be recorded again, and everything... I can't put a drum loop in there because I want to split it up to be able to tune the kick and this and that. A lot of the sounds that are on these sample sites are ready to go. It's compressed, it's eq'd, you just plug and play. And I think technology will enable the younger generation of producers to really be able to enter music making with a very low barrier. And from there, as they're making music, either AI gets better and they get lazier and they just keep on relying on these technologies, or they might start actually programming things on their own.
They couldn't find the right sample, okay, let's get my friend that's a guitarist to play on this. And it's a good starting point, but every producer is different, and I think every genre requires different sets, a sense of musicians or samples or even AI. But I think the key to this is, let's use it responsibly, and as more and more AI generated songs are created, we really have to think seriously about, what's ownership? Who owns this song if an AI generates it 100%? If you don't have your DAW up and you're actually, you're not painting, painting on your canvas, on your DAW canvas, and then you're just having on the website, just typing in a song like, Alicia Keys sung by this, and bam, it comes up. I don't know your thoughts about it. I'd like to hear your thoughts about this.

Michael Walker:
Oh man, there's so much good stuff there to unpack. Yeah, the bottom line is right now, it's anyone's best guess, but I totally agree. I think that there's a lot to unpack around ownership and copyright that we don't fully understand yet. It's really interesting too, just to consider how as humans, how do we create new things? We have influences, and we're inspired by previous data that we've absorbed in different ways.

Ken Kobori:
Exactly, exactly.

Michael Walker:
And that being said, maybe there actually is a path to creating attribution for... Imagine if we were walking around and we were able to write a song and then we're like, 0.25% of that song I just came up with was actually inspired by my favorite artist when I was growing up. If our brains out a mechanism to be able to actually determine that, then maybe it would be a more fair model to actually compensate that. But then it's, where did those people get inspired from? It's like race to the unpack the roots.

Ken Kobori:
And also from my experience too, if you're going to give credit for inspiration... I actually did a song for the Coca-Cola campaign in Japan, and basically the prerequisite for the song was to sample a song from a different era, and make it into a modern interpretation of that, and have a young artist sing it.
And the song that Coca-Cola chose, Marvin Gay's Ain't No Mountain High Enough. So we used just the ain't no mountain high enough, just that one phrase we used that in the hook, changed the entire song, and then we went to go get the song cleared, and they took a 100% of the royalties. It's Marvin Gay though. And that's how, if AI starts spitting out their inspirations, they've probably learned from the greats. And if they start giving credit to the greats, anybody who makes AI generated music, the person that directed it probably won't get much left if we start giving credit out to big artists.
Those are things to consider, and as you said, a very viable point was, us as musicians, we're where we are because we've been inspired by different music. And from us being able to generate something original because we've had all these musical influences in our life, we're able to do what we do. Do we give credit to them? In this case, no, but when a machine does it, you consider a machine that's learning something, it's not like a human learning something, so that's a differentiation of where we draw the line, I think. But there is no right answer, and I am really excited to see how all this comes together.

Michael Walker:
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Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much that we still don't understand about our brains too, and just how we function. And one analogy that I've heard quite a bit is around our brains function in a lot of ways similar to a computer with random long-term storage and memory.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
It's just the most advanced computer that we have. Theoretically, if we were able to design an AI or computer that could replicate our brains, then that'd be a pretty big step towards the end of the world as we know it.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah, and there's even technology right now that you can just scan your body and basically be in a music video without being there, and it could do the whole lip, it could also match the words to your lips and this and that. What if you just suddenly dress up your AI and put your avatar on it, and can making it's Ken version 2.0 in web3 making this song, not Ken in real life. All these things, possibilities are endless.

Michael Walker:
Totally, yeah. The point that you brought up around people featuring like celebrities and featuring famous musicians on their records and creating AI versions of them, avatars of them that can, Eminem raps, and it sounds like Eminem, but it's not actually Eminem, but he's rapping in the style Eminem. And obviously we're at the very beginning of this, but you could probably, for a lot of cases you'd be like, okay, Eminem wouldn't say it exactly like that, but some of these examples that they're throwing together are pretty dang close, and it's hard to know the difference. And, oh my gosh, as it relates to political systems and media and truth and understanding what's true and what's not, that's going to be a whole thing to unpack together.
I wonder, if we could train our own avatar of ourself as a songwriter, if we had enough data. So using Surf for example, one of the first things that came to mind as I was thinking about your data set and what you're collecting, and I don't know the finer detail of how the database works. If you're collecting all of these different tags and metadata around these songs and the lyrics and the melodies and the music, then to me that also is potentially a huge asset or resource to doing something like this and creating an avatar of an artist that they can use for themselves, even, to brainstorm new ideas. What's should I write next?

Ken Kobori:
Yeah, and I think all this data will be valuable and in determining also how we progress with the development of our platform. You really want to know what the creators and buyers are using and are not using. Just, we could put as many things as we want in this platform. Just as how Amazon started with book, Surf Music is starting with exclusive placements and the community building aspect.
And once we reach our goal of being able to create this transparent marketplace that actually protects creators in placing songs globally, and really focus on mentoring the next generation of producers on our platform, I think these are the things that Surf Music will be using that data for. And also being able to predict the trends of what kind of songs are going to be hitting in the next three months, because we'll essentially have all the unreleased music on our platform. So there's different things we could do with the data, and obviously we value privacy very, we consider privacy very seriously on our platform just because we are basically a bank of some of the greatest songs, unreleased songs there, and it needs to be protected, and our creators need to be protected too at the same time.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Yeah, that sounds like a really good perspective to have on that type of resource, and seems like in a world with where AI and technology is growing so quickly, that community is more important than ever, and bring people together and creating that transparency is more important than ever.
And yeah, I could totally see someone who is either a record label or a publisher being able to based on their own data set, even if that's not trained on other people's songs, be able to look at that and say, "Yeah, what are five ideas, recommendations for songs that kind of fit in the same vein of all of these other songs that I've written as an artist?" And then be able to have a list of 10 ideas for songs. Oh my gosh, like what a valuable tool, even just as a brainstorming freak, so they never have that blank page syndrome.

Ken Kobori:
And I think that that kind of system, an AI-generated inspiration thing is pretty cool. But I think for our application of AI, what we're trying to let it do is be the brain of our whole platform so that we can scale to millions of users, but still have a lean team in each region. And right now we have, our team is dispersed around. We have a team in London, New York, California, Japan, and Korea, and our first three markets we're penetrating right now is Japan, US, and Korea. And we are currently, all the majors are using us in Japan right now, all the majors in Korea are using us, some labels in the US are using us. We have over 6,000 unreleased songs with 600 of the top producers right now as early adopters. So what we're doing right now is we're slowly collecting all this data, and learning the habits of these directors.
So essentially, right now we manually curate and pitch, obviously using our AI to create initial playlists for us, but our goal is to be able to have this AI learn each individual A&R like search habits and whatnot, and analyze all the music that is uploaded by the creators. So when a creator uploads his catalog, automatically everything is tagged out. So the genre's tagged, bpm, the moods, the key, so forth and so on, so that when a director is looking for a song like Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars, they'll just go to the YouTube page, cut and paste the URL link, put it into our search engine, and they'll find the closest match in our marketplace to Bruno Mars Uptown Funk. And by doing this, we can learn obviously different search habits of the directors, but also being able to recommend them to follow new artists and new creators that they've never heard of.
And I think our dream story utilizing AI is being able to find that kid that's making music out in the boonies nowhere near a record label. After he's done with the song, what does he do? Is he going to move to LA or New York to go pitch it? Probably not. If he's an elementary kid, definitely not. Are their parents going to go try to get them a record deal or publishing deal? I don't think so. Their best solution, I believe, is to join Surf and have our team and our AI being able to pull their songs. Whenever a song request comes in that fits the criteria and they have something in their catalog, it should automatically be pitching it for them. So it's a 24-hour pitching machine, if you want to put it that way. But I believe half of our value at Surf is the people behind it.
And we have a 12 person team right now that's dispersed, as I said, and everyone is bilingual. Everyone speaks English and another language, depending on what region they're in. And we just really want to create this ecosystem and this community where AI can live in harmony with what the users and buyers, and obviously, moving down the line, maybe incorporating some tools, like you said, of having AI generate ideas that you can start writing towards. That might be something cool too, because essentially we go through Splice sometimes just looking for ideas. Not necessarily, oh, I want to find a full song on Splice to put it together and just sell it. No, you find a cool guitar riff and you're like, "Oh, that's like, let me work with that and see what I can build around it." I think any form of inspiration, whether it's AI generated, or it's from samples, or even going to a live show and being inspired, any form of inspiration for creators is valuable, and I have nothing against any of those.

Michael Walker:
Beautiful. Yeah, really well put. Yeah, it's definitely interesting as a progression of... Yeah, I don't want to go down to deep of a rabbit hole here. But yeah, I feel like the role of technology over time has always been about decreasing the gap between a thought, and the realization of the thought.
So basically if we look around right now that is around us, that was at least human created, started out as a thought or an idea, and then through a process of time and through a process of energy and action, it turned from the thought into an actual thing. And it seems like all technology and entrepreneurship is about decreasing the gap, or bringing someone from point A to point B.
And things like airplanes, for example. The idea, "I want to travel across the world" used to take maybe a whole lifetime, and now technology can take that thought and we can do it in a matter of hours because of airplanes. And I wonder where we're headed in terms of, it seems like some of the technology is just shortening the gap between, we have this idea, we have this thought, and then usually there's a period of time and energy and action before can actually, it comes to fruition. But man, I wonder if we're ever going to reach that point where we have neural links installed in our brains. We have a thought, and instantly we create it, and can make... It's crazy.

Ken Kobori:
And I think it's definitely going to be there, and I think the application of AI in certain synthesizers within your DAW, being able to upload a sound and make it find the closest keyboard sound to that in its library. For me, sound selection probably takes the longest time. Writing the music, playing the music, that's easy. It's finding that right kick, that right snare, that bass sound, like all these things.
I don't like to reuse sounds. I think some producers have templates, when they open it it's their go-to kicks, their go-to basses, but I start every single song on a blank canvas because I don't want to depend or have all my songs sound the same, is the way I've been working. But I think having these tools and applications, if we already have these AI features within our DAW that finds the right sounds for you, what's going to make it to the next level is, you put in, say you put in a song, now you could split everything, right?
You could put in a two track, and you'll split it up into stems. You could use Audioshake, or there's many different applications that could do that. And from there you could literally take, say the piano line, and if it's a major song, put it into Melodyne and then click transform into minor, and then instantly it's original, but you aren't playing it. The person that's playing it might be a really famous pianist, but that wasn't what he played. Does that still constitute as him playing it? These kind of questions. It really, thank God to Splice and all those, these which made the average musician think that you can sell, it's okay for people to sample your music as long as you get compensated for it. Before it'd be more of, "Oh, that's my piano in there, I deserve some performing rights on it."
It's becoming simplified. I think a lot of things have been become simplified, and so as AI progresses too, there's going to be a huge movement of what's machine created, and debates on whether, as I said before, ownership's going to be a huge topic of how this is going to be. AI should be here to help us, and as the guys at Open AI say, "It's AI for a better world," that's what I'm hoping for.
But I think it's also important for us to stay on top of technology and not, I don't want to do that, that's not my thing. You're going to be left behind. It's a lot of the engineers when Pro Tools came out, they're like, "No, that sounds so bad, it's digital, we're still going to record this on tape and I'm not going to learn Pro Tools."
Those engineers are out of jobs, unfortunately, a lot of them are. But the people that know how to utilize technology to be current with their sound, and if AI is the norm and it has a specific sound that kids or that the audience likes, then you can't replicate that by the traditional ways of using samples, you just can't get that sound, I'm sure a lot of producers are going to start using AI. It depends really what the audience wants, and us as creators, how to express ourselves. And using AI is definitely, if it inspires you and if it could help you, I think go for it. And until there's laws that are put and strict rules put against it, put upon those things, I think it's pretty much, use all you can right now while you can.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think you're really going to [inaudible 00:33:04] this analogy. This is one of my favorite analogies, but it works really well for you because of your name is Surf Music. But as it relates to that idea of keeping on the current wave, essentially keeping on the current, cutting edge of what's working, one way I like to think about it is we're all surfers, and we have, there's these new waves.
And it's really easy to look at... What most people are doing is, we're trying to chase a wave that's already passed. Because we saw it pass, where it's like, oh, these people got successful doing this thing, and so a lot of people are trying to swim up and catch the wave, but that wave's already passed, and the opportunity isn't quite there. And so what the people who are really primed to make the most out of the current wave, what they're doing is they're actually sitting back and they're looking behind them, and they're seeing what's approaching right now, what's the wave that's starting to crest? And then starting to swim along with it so that as that momentum hits, they capture that wave and they can actually surf on top of it. And there's that opportunity to get that huge momentum from it, and it certainly seems like AI is like a tidal wave of sorts, and being able to capture that momentum is important.

Ken Kobori:
And I think whatever wave you can catch, you should catch it, at least try and ride it out and see how you like it. Not every wave is going to be right. There's been hypes, and last year we saw the NFT music, a couple years ago the NFT music scene going up, but now people aren't talking about it as much. There's different waves of things, but I think the most impactful ones are the sustainable waves, the waves that you ride that for some reason it's supposed to be gone by now, but you're still riding it. A sustainable wave will be ideal.

Michael Walker:
The internet, that was a wave that was certainly a lot of... And there was dot com crash, right? There was a bubble.

Ken Kobori:
Definitely.

Michael Walker:
Sometimes it takes, these waves crash, and then it's like you have to learn how to settle with a new normal. I don't know if you're up-to-date on some of the announcements that Adobe made recently around how they're using AI for their graphic design suite. But it was so funny, we have a video producer for my band that probably about 10 years ago shared this video with us, and it's a YouTube video, you can still find it, it's like a niche, like a smaller one, but it was way ahead of its time. I think it was called the edit button. And the whole video is like a satire or parody where it's like one of those screen-share style tutorials, and the person's like, "All right, let's load up the edit button tutorial for the software."
And there's basically a bar where he just types in, all right, two guys smoking cigarettes by a car, and then they pop up on the screen and they're talking, and he's like, "But actually I want this guy to be wearing a hat," and he types in a hat, and he's doing all these things using this magical edit button.
My favorite part is, he clicks a button and he is like, "All right, it's going to want you to render this, but just click on, let's skip the render. You don't need to do that." He just skips it and just immediately it loads. But the funny thing about it was just, that in contrast with what just came out from Adobe, which was essentially a real life edit button using AI where you type in, similar to Midjourney where you type in a prompt and it generates amazing artwork, and then you can edit it and you can tweak it using your graphic design skills. But man, it seems, I don't know if it's kind of grabbed that idea yet or fully mastered it, but it seems like generative music is something that's got to be right around the corner, where it's, I want a track that's similar to Bruno Mars, that sounds like this, and you click the button, and then it generates it from scratch, and you can write a top line on top of it or something.

Ken Kobori:
I think there are certain softwares that do that. Or, I don't know about the quality, but I've heard that it does generate chord progressions for you, even plays it out for you. I haven't really gone down that avenue, because I am the CEO of a tech company, but I am not too tech-savvy. Anything to help my life, I will try. I just started using chat GPT two weeks ago, but that's how slow I am.
But I think any kind of AI to assist in creators, we definitely should take a deep, deeper look into it. And there's definitely going to be whistleblowers coming out very soon, especially the instant there's a hit song. And you remember how the old Country Road, that song, they took a beat from BeatStars and from there BeatStars blew up, and the rest is history. All it will take is for one AI-generated song to be a number one, and the producers sing, "AI did this for me, but I am the conductor, I am the director of this," basically.
There's jobs where there are chat GPT specialists now where people that know how to prompt Chat GPT get a job, and the six-figure job. It's like, there's new jobs coming out. You never know in the music industry, there might be newer jobs. If AI's replacing some jobs in the music industry, obviously those people are going to have to pivot and find something else, and I think a lot of different jobs and genres would appear too. I think it'd be very interesting.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. As it relates to chat GPT, one thing that we've rolled out internally to our team this week, is what we're calling Artist AI. And essentially it is, it's built on Open AI, so same thing as Chat GPT, but it's fine-tuned with our Modern Musician artists in mind, so it's basically designed to help them, specifically with all things related to growing a successful music career.
But it's essentially a Chat GPT, but fine-tuned for artists. And yeah, there's not an integration yet. I think that Open AI's working on something with the music generation stuff, but it's definitely been some... I've been dipping my toes into the water, and I feel like the water's sucking my whole leg, body down into it. And I'm not usually the kind of person, I don't know. When NFTs were blowing up... I still think there's a big opportunity for the music industry, we just haven't quite figured it out. But I think there was a big bubble around NFTs, like why GIFs of hamsters shouldn't sell for millions of dollars.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
So I'm usually a bit skeptical of stuff like this, but man, I haven't been as excited about something as I have been about AI, probably my whole life, as it relates to technology.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah, and if you don't start using it, you will be left behind, unfortunately. Even in your daily working, just writing emails out and whatnot, Chat GPT could do that for you, creating legal documents, it could do that for you. It might be pretty cool for the usage of AI in the future that's fine-tuned for publishers to create publisher contracts with the writers, being able to do that on the site using AI and actually getting a real lawyer to revise it at the end, obviously, so it's applicable in whatever country law you write it in.
These kinds of things can be solutions even for the independent artists who does not have access to a legal team. Things like that on the legal end, I think AI can definitely help. It's ironic, right? It's like, an AI written song is being represented by an AI lawyer. It's sung by an AI artist, with an AI virtual thing. It's like, where doe humans come in now? It's like humans are just here, basically the owner of that song, the owner of that virtual artist. The humans will be making money, and essentially you're having AI make money for you, which is the trend in a lot of different sectors right now. It's, pretty soon, I wish AI would make me breakfast right now, I'm about ready for breakfast.

Michael Walker:
What they got, the Tesla bots that they're building right now, the humanoid robotics? Yeah, it's crazy. Lot to unpack, a lot of stuff that I think it's going to be a big disruption to a lot of existing systems, but also huge opportunities for abundance, also huge risks that we have to navigate and be aware of, so I think conversations like this are really important. Man, Kenneth, Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on here today.

Ken Kobori:
Likewise.

Michael Walker:
Hey, system is awesome, and awesome-

Ken Kobori:
It's been a pleasure

Michael Walker:
And I love what you've built with Surf, and just the overall mission and core values around it, like transparency, bringing people together, the community aspect of it. It's so important, especially in an era that we're in right now when it comes to AI technology evolving. So thank you for building Surf, and for anyone who's listening to this right now-

Ken Kobori:
Thank you.

Michael Walker:
... and is interested in diving deeper, whether they're part of a major record label or they're part of a publishing company or they're an independent artist, what do you recommend for them to go to learn more or dive deeper?

Ken Kobori:
Yeah, just if you go to www.discover.surf, you could click whether you're a buyer or creator, and it'll give you more information, and it'll give you the option to sign up. And obviously we have an FAQ section with a lot of the frequently asked questions that, you just type in your question and you can get an answer. If not, you could contact us, and as I said before, someone in the world on the Surf team is going to be awake 24/7, and we'll try to get back to you as soon as we can.

Michael Walker:
Beautiful, awesome. And like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access.

Ken Kobori:
Yep.

Michael Walker:
And yeah man, thanks again. It's been a lot of fun.

Ken Kobori:
Thank you. Thank you. Oh yeah, DJ Dean just woke up. Say "Hi."

Michael Walker:
Hey, DJ Dean.

Ken Kobori:
Yeah. DJ Dean.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at its episode. Make sure that you check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today, and if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow.
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