The year is 2025 and the award for the best music director goes to Spotify!

It might sound absurd and outlandish, but can one really rule out the possibility? The possibility of a creative pursuit, erstwhile only within the realms of blessed homo sapiens, accomplished by a non-human entity. Let’s lay the cards on the table, shall we?

Spotify (case in point) — music streaming app, launched in India in February of 2019. In the period between Mar 2020 — Feb 2021 the app had recorded approximately 56M downloads with roughly 3M daily active users (DAU) — mainly millennials (25–34 yrs.) who are wired into the app, listening to their favorite soundtracks.

Now, for a moment, let’s take the creative aspect out of the equation and look at what does Spotify (or any other similar music app) knows about their DAU’s. They know the age-wise split of the daily 3M odd user-base. Safe to assume the app can trace back the song preferences of the consumer cohort’s basis age, gender, and location. Further, over a fairly longish period of time, the app should be able to draw a pattern of “liking” for each of the cohorts — as in probably a 120 BPM soundtrack works for an 18–24 yr. old OR a 25–34 yr. old typically choose B Major songs… if not for this ability, the app wouldn’t be so popular for its serendipitously accurate playlist suggestions! With the depth of consumer data on soundtrack preferences and twelve notes to play around with, how difficult would be for these apps to churn out a bucketful of permutations of soundtracks customized to the audience cohorts! Isn’t this music to the industry’s ears…

The purists might disagree on the possibility of machines and artificial intelligence doing an extremely skilled job of music direction OR composition but think of it — with 1,500 to 2,000 movies releasing in a year and an average of 3 songs per movie album we’re talking about 4,500 to 6,000 songs in a year! Creativity at that scale is impractical and inhuman. And since the industrial age, homo sapiens have been leaning onto machines to do inhuman tasks — so why not now? Coming back to purists, one can understand that the genius of a human mind is to churn up a melody for generations to enjoy. But that’s one in a million… For that one track to be significant and pathbreaking, apps (and artificial intelligence) will have to be churning out the rest 999,999!

Now that we’ve addressed (or so we think) the remote possibility of artificial intelligence in the music industry, let’s talk about its business viability. The current business model accounts for music apps like Spotify, Resso, Gaana, and Apple Music to pay a certain fee to record labels and music companies for the audio rights. In a utopian world wherein the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, and Gaana replace the mediocre rung of music directors/composers in the Indian film industry the relevance of record labels and music companies would be significantly jeopardized. Should the premonitions come true, the music industry could be staring towards a future wherein these music apps (and their parent companies) become the one-stop-shop that direct, compose, release and distribute soundtracks by the dozen for the industry at large! Basically, a D2C model in music wherein the apps are making and distributing their own songs!

Now one might argue that a key element of the song — a hit one especially — has been missed out completely i.e., lyrics. The old mantra for hit songs was the hum-ability of that song — the ability of a tom-dick-harry walking down the road to hum the song absentmindedly. That’s what made the song popular and people like Gulzar-saheb, legendary. However, over the last couple of years, the “hum-ability” of a song has been dumbed down so much that lyrics have become practically irrelevant. How else would you characterize recent social media rage around “rasode mein kaun tha” and “biggini shoot”! One might retort that “these aren’t songs” but Bollywood isn’t far behind, is it? And the dumbness of recent lyrics again goes back to the sheer scale at which songs have to be churned out day-in-day-out throwing “artistry” — in its truest sense, out of the window.

So now that we’ve figured out the mechanics of how a music app can create, release and distribute original soundtracks, the most important question remains — will the music lover like it? Well, to start off, the ingredients of the song are correct and statistically tested for the consumer cohorts. So that should surpass the first barrier. Now for building familiarity…

Taking a cue from a similar industry — off late there’s a special breed of writers who “optimize” articles penned down by the best of the authors/journalists to suit a special reader — Google. Now Google reads an article very differently as compared to how a human does, but Google has become the unanimous discovery tool for the globe wherein the entire internet population bestows their trust in what a Google says. Thus, the likelihood of a Google-optimized piece becoming the Bestseller is pretty high as against a Pulitzer-worthy literary work around the same time! The same analogy works for the music industry too… wherein an artificial intelligence optimized soundtrack shows up on the YouTube feed of a certain consumer cohort so many times that within 24 hrs. of its release, the song gets a million+ views, which in turn makes it trend and voila you have got a hit number up your sleeve! Practically no musical creative genius needed, all one needed was coding ingenuity!

In closing, I lean onto what the co-writer of 2001: A Space Odyssey once said;

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Sir Arthur C. Clarke

and should the “absurdly, outlandish” thought see the light at the end of the tunnel, who knows by the year 2025, the music awards section might be a “clean sweep” by one of the popular and (then) technologically ahead music streaming apps!