Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. And they’ve had to surf a lot of waves. And actually the music business peaked the last time in the late ’90s or 2000 timeframe. And that really innovation, Napster, digitization of music, almost killed the industry. And Universal really led an effort to save the industry and actually made an early deal with Spotify that enabled the industry to really recover. And so by virtue of their market position and their credibility and their willingness to kind of adopt new technologies, they’ve kept their position. Now, they of course had this huge advantage because I think the Beatles are forever, I think U2 is forever, I think Rolling Stones are forever. So they had a nice base of assets that were important and I think will forever be, and forever is a long time. Again, enormous… There are all kinds of risks in every business. This is one that I think has a very high degree of persistence. And I can’t envision a world beyond streaming in a sense… Now you may have a Neuralink chip in your head instead of a phone, but the music can come in a digitized kind of format, you’re going to want to have an infinite library that you can walk around in your pocket or in your brain. It’s not going to matter that much of the form factor. The device changes. It’s not really that important whether it’s Spotify or Apple or Amazon that are the so-called DSPs or the providers. I think the value is really going to reside in the content owners. And that’s really the artists and the label. And I actually think AI is not going to be the primary creator of music. I think we’re going to actually face the reality that it’s not that music has been around for thousands of years, but musicians and music has been around. We actually care to know who’s the musician that created it, just like we want to know who’s the artist, human artist that created a piece of art. I totally agree. If you think about it, there’s lots of other technologies and computers that have been used to generate music over time but no one falls in love with a computer generated track. And Taylor Swift, incredible music, but it’s also about the artist and her story and her physical presence and the live experience. I don’t think you’re going to sit there and someone’s going to put a computer up on stage and it’s going to play and people are going to get excited around it. So I think AI is really going to be a tool to make artists better artists. A synthesizer really created the opportunity for one man to have an orchestra. Maybe a bit of a threat to a percussionist, but not maybe. Maybe it drove even more demand for the live experience.…

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