E707 | Ash Pournouri (Belong), Sundar Arvind (Mozart AI) & Daniel Waterhouse (Balderton Capital): AI Music, Control and the Next Creative Era

21:15Sundar Arvind:I was born in India, so real estate is super litigious and you know, you just see it and live with it. And yeah, it's just one of the parts of being in the industry. And, you know, I don't see it as litigious or heavily restrictive. I think the way I see it is there are some people that you have to respect, the rights holders in multiple aspects. There are artists that you have to respect for their work. And then if you build the right products, and you build it in the right way, then everyone's happy. So I think that's how we see it. And, you know, I've, when I started, like my first company, I used to complain, oh my, FinTech is so regulated, and I just don't know what to do.

21:57Sundar Arvind:And the FCA is, you know, I don't understand anything. And I was 21 back then. And yeah, now I've just realized every industry has something and it's just a part of doing the job so yeah I don't really think about it in that way.

22:11Andreas:Let me ask both of you if you could just expand to those in the audience because now we heard the technical parts of so to say in the methodical parts about how to manage a regulated industry and where there's the teaches behavior so to say I'd love to understand from you how do you understand rights in a more philosophical sense when it comes to music? Because there's, of course, if we look at the LLM world, we all know words. So for that reason, we're all assuming that it's okay to be doing stuff with words. But to me, it feels like there's a lot of people that come at music as, well, you can't train on any music and then be creating stuff that sounds a bit like it.

22:58Andreas:without, you know, then you're stealing someone else's work. But my feeling is that when you get, when you liken it to what LLMs are doing, you actually have quite a wide space to navigate in.

23:11Sundar Arvind:And the way I see it is like copyright was made, you know, hundreds of years ago to protect original work. And it served a great purpose. It kind of, it made innovation prosper. And then, you know, now you have, you know, humans already kind of listen to music and they have inspiration and then they use these reference sounds when they make music. But obviously it's a bit of, it's sensitive when a machine does the same thing, which is why I think the core belief we have is just compensate and opt in and make sure everyone feels fairly treated. and then the machine or the model is just doing exactly what the human does.

23:53Sundar Arvind:But it's just being assistive in this case. It's not actually, if you build products in a way where they're inspiring as opposed to making music on their own and feeding it to you, where you're not involved in the loop at all, then I think you're building the wrong products. If you're building more in an assistive way, then I think, yeah, I think rights can exist. I think AI music at some point will also get protection. I don't know what that protection looks like, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that evolves.

24:21Andreas:Do you think that the one-click-and-done type of production is going to be very difficult to solve without stepping on right-holders' rights?

24:33Sundar Arvind:I mean, it depends on how the model is built. So, for instance, Lemon Labs built it in a fair way, and every generation, the revenue goes back to all the rights holders. So with that model, which is commercially cleared, you know, any sound is, you can't grant those rights, regardless of how it was made, whether it was one shot or a big project. But, you know, if the models weren't built in that way, then yeah, nothing should happen. Nothing can have commercial rights. So I think it's just about how you build the model.

25:08Daniel Waterhouse:Look, I mean, it's quite a nuanced topic. I mean, the reality is, you know, the history of music is, I think we talked about this before, is inspired by what's come before it. And, you know, I just finished reading the kind of most recent Beatles biography, John and Paul, if you've read it, it's a great book. And, you know, it's talked about all their influences and how they'd be in the studio. And they'd be like, well, we're going to use the beat from this kind of Bo Diddley track because that was a great beat. And that's going to be the kind of bass for the track. and then we're going to be inspired by a bass riff from some other genre and then we're going to add our own vocal thing.

25:42And so they've kind of, you know, and the Beatles,

25:44Daniel Waterhouse:one of the most innovative, extraordinary bands of our time, they were taking bits from their historically experienced music and melding it in. And that's what, you know, music's in a band, how it evolves and builds. And so you can't say, well, there's a bit of a track that has, you know, a little bit of another track and that shouldn't be allowed because we have no music probably. Very little music does the bass. the other bit I think I kind of took away from that is when you kind of hear the conversations from the studios they were saying to the producers we need to make this sort of sound we want to loop back this sound effect and create it they were giving a text based instructions to their producer on the sounds they wanted to try and create into parts of their songs so they were kind of I'm not saying they were doing one click song production they weren't there was a kind of textual base of coming up with so many elements.

26:37Daniel Waterhouse:Personally, I think it was a music question. I don't think one click is going to produce the world's best music. That's a starting point, which a lot of bands will have used is we want to use this sort of sound, we want to start with these kind of layers, and then we're going to riff on top of that and create on top of that, and that's what produces the magic. And the challenge for the copyright industry is historically, there have obviously been cases poured against artists for plagiarizing tracks and those cases, they take months and massive forensics to try and really decide whether it's really something's been copied or inspired and stuff.

27:18Daniel Waterhouse:You can't do that with millions or billions of tracks and so I think there is still work to be done in trying to algorithmically discern if something has been infringed or not. I think that would be an evolving space. Clearly, the labels are actively getting involved in trying to help define that and work with some of the other companies to ensure the boundaries that are defined. I think that's going to be a bit of a moving feast.

27:46Andreas:I'd love to ask both of you, how do you navigate this in terms of trying to understand what will happen in the future? What I mean by this is we're all hearing news stories about you know this lawsuit here, I know the Danish music industry, CODA has filed a lawsuit on behalf of multiple Danish artists against Suno I believe it is. I'm sometimes looking at this and thinking well won't all of this be settled in the states and we will all kind of have to follow because it's the main music market globally so far at least is in the States and if they decide which the current administration seems like they they think it's a bit of a free-fall like what can you do people listen to music so can a computer and then you can also generate music on the back of having listened to anything that you have just paid for you know by acquiring that CD in the first first while does it is this the right way to think about it like observe what's going on in the States and as soon as that will trickle to europe or should we think that now this is going to probably evolve differently well if you

28:56Daniel Waterhouse:know the euro is obviously a big market as you know this is a center for a lot of the big uh industrial industry players and i'm sure a lot of those offices that's important around you know that said you know i don't think it you know probably diminishes the views all the actions of local regulators uh labels artists etc in defending their work and copyright copyrights are it can be regional it can be global and people can defend their work and the discharge of six and eight habit and have to follow guidance elsewhere i suspect that it'd be you know historically you know these various things have happened on a global scale maybe with some very small work conceptions that have happened on a global scale so probably the thinking that comes out of the US makes sense, then that will be adopted, and we'll see whether it makes sense.

29:48Andreas:Yeah, that's a big mental jump to make these days.

29:53Daniel Waterhouse:I'm not commenting on that.

29:55Andreas:I know, Daniel, and I will not force Sundar to either. Let me instead save you from this morass and get us into the tech behind this. Sundar, I'd love to just ask you really quickly if you could try and explain to everyone, why is this even possible today? Why can't we do this with music? Because it seems in a way even more magical than with words.

30:18Sundar Arvind:The cool paradigm that started all of this was diffusion models. So imagine you just feed like a song into this system that eventually just patches a bunch of noise. At each step, it just adds random noise. And by the end of it, you have something that sounds nothing like the song. It's just a bunch of white noise, probably. And it obviously goes through massive compression before it does all this. So that's where the quality problem comes from. But then now the model just figures a way out to learn how to reconstruct that song from that piece of noise. And that's where the magic happens. And then there's been a lot of evolution from here in not just using pure diffusion models and actually using more like autoregressive transformer type architectures.

31:08Sundar Arvind:and you know but this is this is the magic like anything you feed in gets broken down to something super random and then we we make we find a way to learn the path back pretty cool i think it's kind of similar to how humans know sounds you know you you have the sound and then when i hear a sound i can map it back to like i know exactly how to design that sound i can hear it and i know you know this is eq at 200 hertz i i can i can kind of tell and that's exactly what these models do so which is why i think you know they're not just spitting out copies of what they've learned but they're actually making music inspired by what they've learned so yeah i think there's a lot of

31:55Andreas:resemblance there all right so guys from the technical i now want to go into talking a bit about where are we headed what is music going to be like in the future sundar we're going to talk a bunch with Ash about this as well. So for that reason, I will just ask Daniel. And then after that, I think we should switch into our deep dive together with Ash, who is of course a very notorious producer in the world of musics. So Daniel, asking you, where are we headed with the future of music? What do you think as an investor in this space that we should expect?

32:25Daniel Waterhouse:I think we're heading into really exciting territory. I think that as more people have the ability to create music we continue to open up the kind of creative vein of the world you know we know there's a lot of music inside of people where there's probably a lot a lot that's not coming out yet and i think we i'm hoping that we also enter a world where a new form of kind of band and collaboration can exist and i know that sundar's been thinking about this and hopefully we can talk about this in the future. But, you know, the concept of the band, at least for me kind of growing up, was so important and was, you know, was kind of the kind of essential part of music and the whole kind of image and ethos and attitude and what that brought to the whole musical experience.

33:16Daniel Waterhouse:And it feels like it's gone away a little bit in more modern times to the single artist and to that world. And I'm hoping actually now we have a new form of tool that maybe enables a different type of collaboration. We'll begin to see a different type of band come together, which is, you know, for sure, more digitally centric and is producing music in a different way, which allows people to connect in a group and kind of create the magic that we've had in the past as we produce some great new music.

33:50Andreas:It's funny that you pick up on the band thinking, because what I was thinking was it's going to unleash the individual creator. But of course, Sundar, if we go to you for a second, the point for you is that you're making music multiplayer now. Talk a bit about that.

34:08Sundar Arvind:Yeah, exactly what Daniel said. You can choose to build a product in new ways. You can either hyper-personalize music and lose the social element where everyone just creates their own music, or you can, for the first time, kind of bring the studio online, have multiple people make music together in real time. That was just impossible before because you played video games with your friends because some of them were good, some of them were bad and you kind of balance out, but you couldn't make music with your friends earlier because if you are bad, you just couldn't do anything. So that bridge goes away now and we kind of already set up for that in our product and yeah, I think we'll see a future where maybe all three of us could make music together.

34:52Sundar Arvind:One of us sings real time. One of us is generating AI loops. One of us is playing the piano and yeah, that's a pretty cool world to build.

35:00Andreas:Yeah, it's incredible. Well, I for one am very excited about the future. Daniel, I want to thank you so much for taking the time for jumping on together with me and Sundar. Sundar, we'll stay on to talk a bit with Ash. Thank you so much, Daniel. My pleasure. Thanks both. Cheers. Joining us now is Ash Punori, the visionary music entrepreneur, producer and former manager of the legendary Avicii. With a career that shaped EDM and pop hits heard around the world through his label PRMD Music, Ash has also pioneered ethical AI in music via platforms like Soundverse AI, where he's developed innovative models for genres like progressive house and big room.

35:38Andreas:Today, we'll hear his insights on the evolving music landscape as a producer, artist, and manager, how he's integrating AI into his creative processes, common misconceptions about AI and music, and his vision for where the industry is headed. Ash, awesome to have you on. Did I get some of what I just said right, or was that just one big ramble?

35:54Ash Pournouri:Yeah, you got it right. I mean, you know, my world is a little bit bigger these days, not as much in music as I used to be, But, you know, wherever I can help great founders, I try to contribute.

36:08Andreas:Talk a bit about your investing and helping founders. Like, I think everyone should know.

36:13Ash Pournouri:I mean, you know, I rarely invest, you know, just as a normal investor because I just feel that there's so many other people that could do that, you know, just providing funds and sit passively. So I usually get active. And for me to do that, I need to feel like I can contribute something. Obviously, the founder, you know, or the team has to feel like I can contribute something. And I also have to believe in, you know, what they're doing to a point where I feel like they definitely need to win in one way or the other. So that's how I get involved in companies since long. And, you know, I've had a span of, you know, different undertakings since I left music about 10 years ago, coming on 10 years this year.

36:51Ash Pournouri:And, you know, since then I dove into the tech space because it's originally where I came from. People think I'm a music guy, but I'm originally a science and tech guy. and always follow that space from a distance. And then I tried to apply my skill sets from navigating the incredibly competitive music industry into the tech space. So I feel like it's given me a very unique position to help a lot of companies that way.

37:17Andreas:So Ndar, when we first talked about this episode over Christmas, I said, do you know someone who is really thoughtful about this from the industry that you think could be cool? And you said, I know just the guy. Could you talk just a bit about why you said Ash is the perfect guy?

37:33Sundar Arvind:Yeah, I mean, I met him a couple of weeks ago when I pitched to him for investment. That was my first touchpoint. And he kind of knew everything about the business. I know he worked with Arichi on one of my favorite songs of all time. He's had a label. He's kind of been all over. So it felt like he was the inside into the industry that was super complex for a 23-year-old to fully complement. So it seemed like it was the right choice of someone to work with, someone to have as a mentor, someone to guide through the crazy world of music, especially when it's so dynamic as it is today. Because you can probably pattern match and see what's happened 10 years ago, 15 years ago and extrapolate that forward.

38:18Sundar Arvind:So, yeah, that's why I think Ash is good.

38:22Andreas:When I said this to Sundar, it was because I thought we should get someone who's an expert witness to what's going on in the industry. Because now we've just had this long conversation with Daniel about all the meta stuff, which is interesting. But honestly, like the most exciting thing is hearing it from the horse's mouth I was about to say. So tell us, Ash, what is going on? How are people reacting in the industry? What are you seeing?

38:46Ash Pournouri:You know, if you look historically, the industry is generally very conservative in the lean forward aspect in general, right? Obviously, you have exceptions to that. But, you know, the industry tends to protect rather than be on board with development. You know, it's anyone who's been in the industry knows it's heavily reliant on structures, administration, rights management. and there's a bunch of, you know, protecting guardrails, so to say, to keep the status quo. And as soon as someone comes in and tries to disrupt that, then there's always pushback from the major players. And there's a reason for that.

39:23Ash Pournouri:You know, it's their livelihood and, you know, their core business. So they rarely want to be on board with disruption. And, you know, as soon as it comes to abusing or using the rights for someone else's gain, you get the most pushback. You know, that's when you get lawsuits and stuff that we've seen also in this space, you know, where there are plenty of, I guess, attacks and, you know, feelings of attacks where they feel violated. They feel the rights have been violated for training models, for using it to sell an AI service or other. and so their response has been very firm and public and it's led to them kind of using these same old tricks where they try to gain control, they're trying to restrict, they're trying to limit and then try to gain part ownership if they can.

40:16Ash Pournouri:We saw that with Spotify, we saw that with Napster, we saw that with plenty of other companies that have tried to get into the music industry space by not going about it the way that they want to see it, which would be the right way to kind of go in and say, hey, we want to pay you for the use. And then with very strict guardrails, again, then proceed to developing our service or offering. So I think this is no exception. You know, if I summarize my answer, I think there will be a lot of pushback. And if anyone is let through, it will be with control and guardrails, heavy guardrails.

40:50Andreas:What is your personal take? Like, do you think that the clear behemoth that we all know, I think, is Suno in this industry? But they're probably also the ones that have been more legally exposed in how they've chosen to go about it. Where do you think the market is?

41:10Ash Pournouri:My personal view is that you can't stop development. Like, it'll happen if the market wants it. That's the bottom line. I mean, legally, yes, you can restrict. But as we saw with all these file sharing services that kind of gave way to the ones that are legal today, like Spotify, they showed very clearly that there was a demand from the market and the audience. And eventually they just had to nurture that. Because I used to talk about this when I was in music, that I don't care personally, as an, from an artist standpoint, and from a, I was a producer and songwriter, and from a creator standpoint, I don't care to monetize every little bit from my audience.

42:00Ash Pournouri:That's not why you're in the industry. If you're in the industry to monetize, you're probably there for the wrong reason. You're not really an artist, right? You're something else. But if you're really an artist and you're really there to expose your art and get as many people as possible to enjoy it, then your first priority is to reach people. I used to say, like, you know, when people asked me, you know, aren't you worried about your songs being on the Pirate Bay or free to listen on YouTube and whatever? And I was like, well, I know the audience is there and that audience specifically, they won't just because we say, oh, you can't listen to you, you have to buy, you know, the album, the CD physically, or you have to pay for a subscription over here or whatever, that's not going to make them do it.

42:46Ash Pournouri:And I just said, if we're not on Pirate Bay, if we're not on YouTube, we don't exist to them at all. I'd rather find other ways to engage them and monetize either of them directly or indirectly by being creative or also around the business side of things. In short, I just think you can't really stop this development because there is a big demand. You can see it in the numbers. You can see it in the spread. You know, you can see it in all the different social media platforms that use those platforms to create content that then gets viral exposure, etc. So you have to take that for what it is. That's what's going to happen no matter what.

43:22Ash Pournouri:And then there's different ways to try to, you know, limit or restrict or stop it momentarily. But I don't think you can do it in the long run. And tell me, Ash, even though you've stepped out of the industry a bit, how do you see AI being adopted now in the artist process? I mean, this is also a thing. So generally, everything comes down to packaging and how you formulate things, right? So, you know, MTV, for instance, if they went out and said to the labels and artists, et cetera, said, you know, hey, can we use your IP, your music videos to monetize, you know, on our end? If that was the conversation, then they probably would have said, you know, no, or they would have said, you know, you have to pay us a lot of money, et cetera.

44:05Ash Pournouri:The business model would never have held. but instead they were packaged as a marketing opportunity. So they basically said, give us your IP and we're gonna give you reach and then you can sell a bunch of records. If they had just packaged that offer differently, I think they would have been stopped. So I think the same thing here. If you present the AI tools or AI services as a threat or as a replacement, you'll get a lot of pushback but if you instead present them as tools which they definitely are you know if you if you use them right then you get a completely different impression and and acceptance and and reception you know among the industry and i think that's what i've seen you know with people who embrace ai in their work you know obviously as anyone that uses ai in any field like engineers and co-pilot and etc like why wouldn't musicians benefit from that equally you and be able to see the greatness in being productive, getting out of a creative stuck hole, or in other ways just increase their productivity, reach, creativity, all of the above.

45:21Ash Pournouri:That's the answer I think is going to take this into being a standardized or more accepted use.

45:29Sundar Arvind:I think the fact that you couldn't make music 10 years ago if you just knew how to play the guitar, and now you can, just goes to show that the human is still very much involved in the loop. It's just so many more humans can now make music. It just wasn't possible before. Innately, it is still a tool. It's like when digital audio workstations came out 30 years ago and then EDM was a new genre that was made. People always thought the same thing. It was like recorded music is going to lose its value. No one's going to buy CDs, but you know, they just thought a computer was making the music. But I mean, we saw that that was probably the biggest error of growth in music and it was still a tool.

46:20Sundar Arvind:People mastered the DAW, like Ableton logic, and they just made so many things that weren't possible 30 years ago. So I think AI is going to do the same. There are two things, I think, that are relevant here.

46:35Ash Pournouri:One is, you know, there's constantly been a lowering of threshold of entry into the music industry. Where you used to have to be able to play an instrument or have a great voice. And then you had tools like Auto-Tune and you had different ways to play digitally and you have access and you had different ways to record digitally and you could cramp up the studios to smaller, cheaper, et cetera. Like that threshold has always been pushed down and then came the bedroom producer and now you have all these AI tools. The other part is democratization. That's also increased over time where before it was like, okay, if you went into the record store and you couldn't find an artist's record, that artist didn't exist anywhere, right?

47:14Ash Pournouri:You couldn't get hold of it. So, you know, it didn't really matter if you unless you got into the local record store of that audience, you couldn't exist to them. And then came all the democratization with more record stores first and then and then digital and then streaming and then all that stuff. So I think it's just a different, you know, level in the same progress, you know, where those two things keep evolving. You have more democratization and you have lowering of thresholds. That's exactly what's happening.

47:41Andreas:Can I ask you a crazy question here? I'm gonna maybe put something like very simplistically and create a scenario that's not true but to try and see how you react if we remember back to the biggest hits you've ever made and the biggest hits you've made in history if AI had existed at the time or in the future we're going into will these be fully produced by AI? Would they just have been made quicker? Would you have been better at creating parts of those tracks that you only realized years after that? This would have been really cool to have had in there, but we didn't realize until it had actually been played millions and millions of times.

48:27Andreas:Now you would have been able to make an even better VT track. How do you see the impact on the individual track level?

48:33Ash Pournouri:I mean, it's hard to say generally, but just to put it in perspective, I don't think anyone would consider themselves like any I don't think any creator would consider themselves creative if they cheat. Right. So if they just sit and write a random prompt passively and then put something out, it's hard to say like, oh, I did this like and feel good about it. Right. As especially as a creator, because like I said, a creator has a different drive, you know, and they want people to appreciate their creativity. They don't want to take credit for someone else normally. Right. And so I think it's the same thing here.

49:05Ash Pournouri:It's like, well, I 100 % would think that tools would be helpful, for sure, as they were. I mean, if we were born in a different decade or belong to a different generation, we probably wouldn't have the preconditions there to create these tracks in the beginning, in the first place, right? So we already used whatever was available to us with home studios, where we had access to all these VSTs and all these different instruments that wouldn't have been possible 20, 30 years earlier. But now we were. So the same way I feel like that would have influenced, to have access to AI tools would have influenced the music today, you know, but it still would be a craft.

49:42Ash Pournouri:It would still come from an idea that you have in your head that you want to get out and you just need, you know, you're just using all these tools to get that out. And I think that's the best example that I can give of why AI is a tool and not a threat. Yeah.

50:00Sundar Arvind:You know how they say it takes about 10 ,000 hours for a skill to be mastered? The top quartile of AI artists are orders of magnitude better than just the average person prompting. And that's because these people probably already know how to make music. They're throwing their unfinished projects. They're trying to re-seek inspiration that they lost somewhere in their hard drive. and the way they use these tools is just so different to just a one-shot prompt. They're almost imagining a new set of possibilities for some of their old music, giving it a bit of life now. So I think even in this era, you need to probably have those 10 ,000 hours in these tools to really be the best at it.

50:44Sundar Arvind:Because if you just write a prompt, you're going to be one of the other 200 million people that are just prompting for a jingle. So I think, yeah, art will still have a meaningful and probably a much higher amount of value than it has today, just because creativity is all that differentiates in a world where everyone can create music.

51:07Andreas:Ash, final question for you. I want to ask you, if you're looking at the artist process, the artist work, the craft of doing music today, how do you think it looks like in just five years from now? Will it be significantly different for every single one who's creating out there?

51:25Ash Pournouri:I think it's so hard to imagine. I think even like two years away is hard to imagine because if you've ever seen these development graphs where you go like, okay, you start slow and then there's a pivot and there's an exponential growth and then you're standing in like a straight up curve, right? And we've seen them in school since we were young and we've seen them applied to different things. But it's very difficult to imagine what it feels like to be in this slope. But this is where we are now. You know, this is what it feels like. Like every day you have new tools, you have new technology, you have new things happening.

52:03Ash Pournouri:You know, you have so much going on at the same time that it's impossible to really, you know, try to project the same development forward. Now we're in this, you know, straight up showing line where everything's up on its head, basically, where I'm excited, but I'm also a little bit, you know, wary of making predictions because I know whatever I think is probably going to be wrong based on history. It's like, you know, this is a completely new era with something that we've never experienced before. And we've talked about it, but we've never lived it. And now we're living it. And it's like, you know, it just feels surreal in a lot of ways.

52:38Ash Pournouri:I just think it's impossible to predict the future now because we're not talking two years in a traditional sense. It's like almost 10 years happening in one year.

52:50Andreas:There are many coders that had stepped away from coding that now with vibe coding and everything had gone back to coding. Are you feeling that itch more now than ever to go back to music and say, fuck it, I've got another?

53:06Ash Pournouri:Actually, I do because I have all these ideas that I don't have time for, but now I could, you know, I could get them out much quicker and I could actually, you know, do it in a way where I don't have to involve, you know, other people and I don't have to sit and learn, you know, too many new skills. And, you know, it just opens up a whole new world. And then back to that, to the point I was making about creativity, if you have it in you, that's what creativity is. It's not about the tools that you learned. I mean, you know, if you sit and play an instrument and I tell you what notes to play, who's the creator?

53:40Ash Pournouri:Is it you who do what I say because you know how to play the instrument? Or is it me who came up with the idea to put those notes out? So short answer, yes. I feel the itch and I understand why people want to go back because you skip a lot of the admin, which is very difficult to like. I think you're good for a lot of people, maybe not everyone. We should collab on a talk, Ash, if you do get back.

54:04Andreas:Ash, thank you so much Sundar Thank you so much as well This was incredible If AI can unleash people like you To create more music on your own And you to not transition out of the industry There are a lot of amazing people That transition out because of the admin Because of what it just takes to be in the music industry So if we can keep your creative minds pumping I think we're all the better for it Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast

54:28Sundar Arvind:Thank you Good to be here you you