#218 - A Musical History of Innovation.
Or is it an innovation history of music? Either way, the history of music innovation is rich with lessons for any innovator today. Here are some stories.
This week I had the pleasure of delving into innovation in the music industry, and I have to say it was was a lot of fun!
The first thing I noted was that the earliest musical instruments - made of bone or ivory - were 40,000 years ago. This is before pottery and woven fabrics, or any kind of healthcare, long before any human settlement, and synchronous with the disappearance of neanderthals and the earliest forms of cave art. A reminder that music has been around for far longer than what we call civilisation. Actually I think that the earliest record is just that - the first record, rather than the earliest music. I suspect music is almost as hold as homo sapiens.
In the past millennium and a half, innovation in music has spread through every aspect - the evolution of musical instruments, composition, and recording & distribution, and offers a number of insights into how innovation works. Let’s have a look:
Marginal Improvements: The Invention of the Piano
The Piano was ‘invented’ around 1800 by Bartolomeo Cristofori. He didn’t start from scratch though. He simply added a hammer mechanism to replace the previous plucking mechanism used in the harpsichord, to enable musicians to control the loudness of the music. Hence the term pianoforte, or to give it its original name, the “clavicembalo col piano e forte” from which the word piano derives. But the harpsichord itself came from the clavichord, which first introduced the string mechanism. And the clavichord drew upon the harp and xylophone like predecessors - the monochord, the polychord and the dulcimer. Although this process took hundreds of years, you can see the gradual progression up to Cristofori’s instrument and beyond. Almost all innovation works this way though we often credit a breakthrough moment or an inventor. We forget that behind ChatGPT is a piece of research credited to Google scientists.
Adoptive Patterns: The Saxophone
Much like Cristofori, Adolph Sax was also trying to solve a problem in the middle of the 19th century. He wanted to create an instrument that had both the range as well as the amplitude to work on a battlefield. Through a series of experiments, he created the earliest versions of the Saxophone combining the control elements of woodwind with the body of a brass instrument. What he would never know is how the saxophone was adopted a hundred years later by jazz musicians. Through the first half of the 20th century, as Jazz evolved out of blues music, the saxophone became one it its most favoured instruments. It was not invented for this purpose, but Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, John Coltrane and others didn’t really care. Text messaging on mobile phones was not invented for consumers either, and GPUs weren’t created for AI.
Mastery: From Beethoven to the Beatles
I’ve written about Beethoven recently, but it’s worth calling him out in this context because the one aspect of his life that stands out for me is the fact that he did most of his composing after he had turned deaf, and that he was such a virtuoso piano player that he could still create incredible sonatas and symphonies without actually being able to hear them. It speaks to the mastery over music that Beethoven could practically think in music, like a language. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule, and how it might have applied to the Beatles during their early years playing night after night at the Hamburg club. Bill Gates was a brilliant software engineer before he was the CEO of a successful software business. Picasso turned to cubism around the age of 35 but he had been drawing and painting from the age of 7.
Social Change
The song ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billy Holliday is often considered the first protest song. It’s a disturbing song about the lynching of black people in the southern United States in the 1930s. Although some might argue that the French National Anthem Le Marseillaise significantly pre-dates this and is also a kind of a protest song. Today we recognise music as a legitimate form of a social movement. Bob Geldof organised Live Aid in 1985. Brands such as Patagonia use the axis of social change to define themselves. Michael Hayman recently mentioned in a conversation that every brand is an activist - you need to know what you want to stand up for.
Self Belief
When Bob Dylan took to the stage for his set in the Newport Festival in 1965 he sang some songs with an electric band and sang a few songs which had very mixed reviews. Some people clapped, others booed. The critics said he “electrified half the audience and electrocuted the other half”. Today those same songs are often recognised as great songs. But not at the time. Bob Dylan didn’t really care so he sang them the way he wanted to, anyway. Sometimes innovation can be hard and the results aren’t often great of well received. But that’s not the point - great innovators find their path. Katalin Kariko set her sights on mRNA research over two decades ago, and even lost her job because of it. It turned out her research saved the world from Coronavirus in due course.
Technology and The Internet
When a 12 year old boy from Stratford, Ontario uploaded his first video onto a new platform called YouTube, he was just trying to share his songs with with his friends and family. An agent called Scooter Braun found him, nurtured his talent and got him signed up with Usher a couple of years later. Justin Bieber was the first artist to be discovered via YouTube. Before that, Music Television (MTV) revolutionised music in the 1980s. Music has been completely reconstructed through information technology. The way it’s recorded, stored, replayed and distributed, all the way from Edison’s phonograph through to the Internet, Napster, Spotify, and Youtube to the way it’s played on ipods and smartphones, and on connected speakers.
AI Changes Everything
As you look back at across the timeline of music above, you can see changes in instruments, production, creation, and distribution. AI is the big wave because it does all of those things. AI can create music, change the way it’s produced and played, and also how it’s distributed, sold, and packaged. Open AI’s Jukebox project allows you to create new music in any style - such as Ella Fitzgerald. The clip below is in fact of the Ella Fitzgerald ‘impression’. The voice sounds like her, and the song sounds like it could be hers. Listen closely though and you’ll see that the words aren’t really words. It’s a generative AI tool, so it ‘approximates’ sounds, rather well.
There are plenty of other tools in the AI generated music space. Aiva is one of them, as is ‘Beatoven’. The MIT Media lab created a tool called Hyperscore which allows you to draw lines which can be converted to music. AI has long been in the guts of the algorithms at Spotify and YouTube in the way it assesses the songs to suggest to you. And of course AI can change the sound of a piece of music too. John Lennon wrote and recorded ‘Now and Then’ on a cassette and for the longest time, it was not of a quality that could be produced into a song. Thanks to AI, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were able to release the song in 2023!
We believe that AI is a real game changer and will have similar and drastic impact on many businesses, especially where information, knowledge, patterns, prediction, and complex optimisation play a key role. Think of Deep Mind’s Alpha Fold predicting protein folding.
Opportunity Everywhere
In 2023, Taylor Swift received an award for innovation at the iHeartRadio awards. In the very long list of her achievements, this will probably be a footnote, but I do think it’s worth noting that Swift has been an incredible innovator, knowing how to challenge and break orthodoxy, and carving her own path. I feel like I should dedicate an entire edition to Taylor Swift at least for my daughter’s sake! But also because she has been a remarkable innovator in the contemporary music industry. At a time when all you hear is doom and gloom about piracy, streaming revenues, the impact of AI on musicians, and the decline of creativity, Swift’s current Eras tour is earning over a billion dollars and impacting national economics in the countries she plays in. It’s a reminder that there is always opportunity around us and adversity is not an excuse. The story of Hamdi Ulukaya who went from sheep farming in Turkey, to creating a business empire out of yoghurt in America is probably a sound reminder of this.
Music as a Metaphor
As you can see, Music is a rich metaphor for understanding innovation. This is a very small list and excludes many great innovators - you could argue that every musician who has tried something new - from Mozart to Miles Davis, and from Elvis to Eminem has been an innovator, and studying their lives and work would give us great insights into how we could improve our own innovation capability. We’ve barely scratched the surface!
AI Reading
Guide to the best AI for business (WSJ)
Open AI’s Sora has faced some racial bias problems with images, the company is working to fix them.
On Human like intelligence:
Goldman sachs on AI: the time has come to move from excitement to deployment (GS)
How AI is impacting the ancient craft of carpet weaving (BBC)
Can the high environmental cost of AI be offset by the potential benefits it delivers? Maybe, but it needs more transparency and focus on impact. (FT)
Other Reading
Apparently recorded music will never feel as good as a live gig. Although I feel this is a matter of opinion and introverts and audiophiles may disagree. (The Economist)
According to Taylor Swift, Jetlag is a choice. And apparently some neuroscientists agree. (Inc)
If like me you keep wanting to construct the ultimate timeline of human development - the University of Southampton have already built it.
Who are the bitcoin whales? MicroStrategy, Grayscale, BlackRock, Fidelity… and who else? (BBC)
thanks for reading and see you soon.