 Welcome all. Personally, it's great that art and culture are more part of the technology community. And this panel is a great example. And we'll jump right in. The last decade in terms of music has seen great influence of technology in how music is enjoyed and distributed as well as influence of platforms on discovering music. How do you see what are the skills, and particularly soft skills that we need to empower creators with at this point? And if you could talk a little bit about what you see as the biggest changes that have happened. When I look at you, I see myself because I'm on this screen behind you. But how's everybody doing? Everybody's feeling good? It's been a long two days. I had a roundtable. This young lady was in the roundtable with me earlier today, and we were talking about soft skills. And what I was saying is that one of the things that we all have in common in this room is that we are enthusiastic about being here. We're excited about being here. And it is important for us as leaders in the culture industry to communicate that to other culture workers, to young people who might want to enter into contemporary art, dance, filmmaking, music, performance art, whatever it is. The ability and the reality of being excited about what it is you're doing and being inspired by what it is around you. Because we talk a lot about technology and artificial intelligence and blockchain and all of these tools. But at the end of the day, these technologies are just that, they're tools. They are going to allow us to make better business decisions as business people. They're going to allow us to make better personal and creative decisions as creatives. And they're going to help to minimize repetitive tasks in our process. But at the end of the day, they're just tools. And what is going to be most important for us is to continue to be excited about what we do regardless of the medium, regardless of the tools we use, regardless of the equipment we use, whether it is that you're using a piano or image and is using her gloves or whatever it is. It's important that we can communicate that human emotion through whatever tools it is that we use. Yeah, I echo that. It's a painful year when you spend so much of your time, as we all do, with admin. We've just chasing numbers, chasing acknowledgments, making sure that everything is the way it should be so that the song or the product or whatever it is can have a life of its own. And what I'm really interested is, how do we empower the song to do a lot of that work by itself, empower it with data about who's written that, what are the monetary splits about that, what is the inspiration about that, what is the emotional tagging around that song, where was it written, what gear was used, all these other ways that people could build services to find songs that could essentially find the artists, so that they don't have to worry when they finish a song and they're happy with the song, they can just put it somewhere, in a place, and they can walk away knowing that it's going to be doing its best for you, that you don't have to become like an amazing entrepreneur or some hilarious video blogger to be able to have a career in music that the song should speak for themselves. And we need to encourage development in that space so that AI, curation, discovery can help connect the people that would like to hear the music, would like to discover the music in whatever ways, through a health app or a jogging or a sex app or however they're going to hear your music to empower all these different uses for music, because it's very hard for innovation to happen in the current music space. And so you've not only spoken about but worked towards a world where this kind of missing layer would exist of an open song database and easier tagged. That data, two years ago you were at Slush and how has the world developed? So we have streaming services for delivery, but you argue very strongly that there should be another independent layer and possibilities for smaller services, can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, so ultimately every individual in this room has multiple skills, passions, ideals, collaborations that they've done, projects that they've worked with, and all of these things help empower you to get better jobs, to go and work towards more things that you're interested in. But how do people find you? They might find you on LinkedIn or they might find you through friends or... But if you're a musician, there isn't really that community, there isn't really that space to be visible. We are, you know, our songs are over here and we're over here with our website collection society number over there and a Spotify identity over here. But we're very fragmented, we don't have a place where people can find us through a trail or a breadcrumve trail of our works. So what we're proposing that we do over the next year, we've been talking about it for four years and now we're gonna do it, is we're going to build, we're gonna bring to life a music maker data layer so that individuals can own their data and in time kind of turn the music industry onto its feet so that we can be that base layer and we can generate, help author to come to life, a truly comprehensive open songs data layer as well. So you've got your data of your songs over here and your music makers. And from that base layer, there's all of these commercial opportunities for services to innovate on that space. And that's what we hope to, we'll materialize over the next year. So the reason why we're in Finland is we're doing a week here, we've just done 15 weeks in 15 countries connecting with 15 conferences and doing shows and whatever we can to reach music makers and to invite them into this imagination of the future by putting their foot forward and essentially just putting their name on the map and saying we believe in this future and that as we have a thousand or 10,000 over time, we can start to show how many we are, how organized we are becoming and how we want this future to create a flow of innovation in the music industry and beyond because our songs need to, they deserve a better home at the end of the day like music deserves a better home. I think a related theme, both of you have mixed many different influences also sort of geographically. How do you see the opportunities in new technologies to serve underserved musical communities or markets that haven't really had access before? Well, I think one of the biggest advantages of the technological evolution in the creative space is the tools that have allowed us to communicate and collaborate. So we live in a whole new world of communication and collaboration now where you can work on music with someone across the world who you've never met before. You know, just using email and Dropbox and WeTransfer and all of these tools that we have available to us. You even have tools now where you can share a session so we can work on the same session even if we're in different countries. So those tools have really allowed people to collaborate in ways that they were not able to collaborate before. It's no longer a case of, you know, well, we have to schedule a time so that we can be in the same country so that we can be in the same studio so that we can share the same ideas. We can now share our ideas regardless of where we are in the world or what time it is or what we're doing. So that's one part of it. And then the second most important thing is the democratization in technology in that the same technology that I use or you use or you use is now available to somebody who is in the Africa's or in South America or in Asia or in North America or wherever it is. So we all have access to the same tools. We all have access to the same garage band on your Mac or the same Ableton or the same fruity loops or whatever it is. So people have new opportunities now to create in ways that they never really had before. It's no longer a case of, well, I can't afford a piano. I can't afford a drum set. You know, the tools are available and the tools are there and it's just up to the creators to, again, take advantage of those tools and use that to inform their work. And the third thing is that it's important for people like us who are in this position to also inspire the younger ones, inspire the newer ones to be able to shine a light on what people are doing where they may not necessarily have had that opportunity before. So this is no longer a case of saying, well, I'm going to go to South Africa and discover some kind of music and then come back to America and use it in my own way and not have to give credit to the person who created that music. The whole thing has kind of been tuned on its head now and now it's more about celebrating here. Here's this very interesting artist that I met when I was in the Caribbean or when I was in South America or wherever it was and we did some work together and you shouldn't check out what they're doing and that's kind of the ethos that we've taken in a lot of the music that we've done over the years whether it is collaborating with artists from the Caribbean or from South America or mostly recently from across Africa and not just incorporating their production aesthetic or their music or their lyrics or their musicians or whatever it is, but also being able to shine a light on what they're doing and saying, hey, you know what? You might like what I'm doing and I work with them so now you should go check out what they're doing. So it's important for us to be able to kind of open that gate and show people something that they may have been missing previously. I mean, it is incredible. Globally, what we can do, how we can co-create across different platforms, different cultures. That bit of it is really amazing what we can do now. The difficulty is there isn't the industry to support what next. We output tons of music, amazing stuff but in order to sustain us to do that we often have to do other jobs in order to create the music which maybe other people enjoy and pay for in some way but it doesn't come back to sustain the livelihoods of those music makers and in many parts of the world there literally isn't any music industry. There's no, to speak of, royalty situation where musicians in Sudan get paid on the radio don't get any money. It's, there's just so much room there for music makers to be invited into the actual industry side where they currently can't. So whereby you might go and do a collaboration and that might invite them into our commercial music industry but otherwise how would they get their foot in the door? You have to have worked with somebody who knows how to get you into the system, da-da-da. And so what we really need is, you know, a true global music maker community handshaking across the world, verifying each other to bring us the same opportunities to every music service out there who's not just able to focus on the people who already have records signed by record labels to, you know, independent or whatever. There's so many other parts of the world that don't have any way to make, to play in that game, to get music on Spotify or to... You both touched on it a little bit. Do you see the world today, given dominance of streaming and other social platforms for new musicians? You're both established musicians. How is it, how are the new platforms for starting artists? Are they in their favor? I think independent artists still face a big challenge when it comes to these larger streaming platforms because I think the biggest challenge that the independent artists face is that they don't necessarily have access to the same metrics that Spotify does or Apple Music does or Warner Music or Universal Music Group or any one of the majors, you know. So you're starting off and you're putting music out there but you don't have access to any of the metrics associated with your music because you don't have any ownership of the platform. You don't have any stake in the platform. So I appreciate what Imogen is talking about in terms of being able to add an additional layer so then maybe that will allow the artists to now have some access to their own data, to their own information so that they can make better decisions as opposed to targeting marketing, as opposed to going to perform in Finland because you might be able to look at the metrics and see, oh, yeah, people like my music in Finland or targeting super fans, you know. And the two big players, Spotify and Apple Music, they have backends that are tailored towards artists. They have Apple Music Connect and Spotify for artists but at the same time, those are still very rudimentary tools and they don't really offer the type of engagement data that Spotify uses to build their playlisting engines which playlisting engines aren't necessarily built right now to benefit the listener or to expose new music. They build so that people can keep hearing songs that they like so that they can keep paying $5 a month for Spotify. So it's more about customer retention as opposed to creating tools that can empower, not just the listener but empower the creator and from that standpoint, it can be a bit challenging for new people that are coming into the market. Yeah, I mean, ultimately I would love to see a feature where the song interfaces with all of the services and the song kind of has a history of events and partners and people who've collaborated with it and that is kind of wrapped around itself and are able to move further. So if people discover that via Spotify or via some health app or whatever it might be that this particular piece of work is actually really good for running, then that data can go feedback into the song that it's been discovered that it's really good for running so then other running apps might start to use that music. It's, at the moment, these kind of, the services are, it's a good step like into helping people, you know, having an option of a library of music to play but it's by no means comprehensive and the data is all fragmented and sitting in their own silos and really we would love the songs and the kind of postcards from the songs to come back to the artist or anyone involved in that song and so that even maybe a fan, you know, it must be, well it is really annoying that we have like Apple Music accounts, Spotify account, YouTube account, wouldn't it be nice just to have one identity that kind of floats through these different accounts and that me as a creative could have somebody that wants to follow maybe what I'm doing but they want to know when I'm doing a Q&A on Twitter or Reddit or I might be doing a Facebooker thing over there, I might be doing some other thing over there and they get notified of that by way of a kind of image and heap bot letting them, letting their kind of fan passport know that so that individually, it's called a fan passport or whatever but individually people having a digital version of themselves or a digital representative of themselves that shares what they do, what they love, who they're interested in, you could want to sell that or not to people who are interested in that because other people are buying it off services anyway, you should be able to, so this is kind of the creative passport which is for the music makers it's like a step towards that ultimate goal that as humans we can just interface with multiple services and our skill sets can reach out to find better future of work and collaborations on a much bigger level because many artists are not just music makers, we also, I don't know about you, but I'm interested in developing technology or you might be interested in certain subjects or might be interested in photography or filmmaking or you know and so yes we make music but we're also just generally humanly creative like we all are so it seems like we have an opportunity in the music industry to kind of pilot that identity space into how we navigate around the various different services and help to create more of a flow in our business and creative life and that we hope, I hope services will come as the music makers come to start thinking in terms of if we had that layer what could we change? Yeah, I don't know where I was going with that. No, I think what I would ask is you've both spoken about that such a layer would be good for artists and creators. What's holding it back? Well, what do you think? So what is holding back that there isn't an independent layer? The way it looks for me, I was struck when you talked about the tools, I took a 15 year break from making music, you come back to it and you said, now this is all possible, everything here and you kind of see the delta in a very big way. From a distribution point of view, we can each put a song, get it on Spotify and through a distributor and it'll be there in a week. Whether any people will find it is another thing like you were talking about the algorithms. But, and you're specifically I think proposing that this new layer and songs having more information about them feeding back into it would be a way for songs to travel, be discovered more beyond the algorithms only of Apple and Spotify music. For me, it's just a matter of time. Blockchain has inspired a lot of people into the ideals of what could happen in terms of structure and business and sharing and open data and authoring into that space. For me, it changed my life four years ago when I was like, so wait a minute, there could be a song database where all of the collection societies and all the radio station, all the labels would feed into and respond back from one point of a song like an identity of a song and that I as a musician, instead of waiting two years for a payment from a radio station or from a live performance or something even though I played it, I have to wait two years for that. And so even though you might get a penny in your pocket if some Finnish radio station played your music, it would take probably two years for me to receive that as the composer back in England and it would have cost the system at least a hundred times that to make that payment into my pocket. So there's not just up to 50% of royalties every year that doesn't reach the right people, that's a major issue, but it's also the time that it takes to get there, costs a hundred times as much so we could be getting a hundred times as much back. It's crazy. So I think that's the exciting point in time now is that lots of people are thinking about these issues across all different industries and for the first time ever in my life, I think first time ever, people are interested in the musicians' woes because there's innovation possibilities, there's commercial potential for people outside the music industry to innovate in this space because there's such a market for it, which is why things are starting to shift. The music industry itself is slow because they're quite happy in some respects, but I think that the time has come where musicians are just fed up and they're just fed up with being fed up and now it's time to just get on with it and you know... What are you, from a technology point of view, what are you most excited about in terms of opportunity for creators at the moment and new technology? Well, I think that, you know, the whole idea of big data in the creative space, in the music space is brand new and to your last question, one of the biggest challenges we face is there's a lot of fragmentation. So there are a lot of players, you know, they're the labels and then they stream in media services and then they distribute us and then they publish us and then they radio stations and then there's online and then there's their content management tools. So you have all of these fragmented players that are kind of operating in isolation and the only communication they have is really kind of like what information they choose to exchange with each other and then on the other side of it you have this whole idea of big data and how do we manage it and that's so brand new to us, you know? So I think that probably one of the most exciting things is us being able to kind of scale down enterprise solutions that have been in existence for the last 10, 15 years and actually be able to apply those same enterprise level tools to the creative industry in terms of like song management, rights management, payment processing and all of these things. So that's definitely a big change that I think we're going to start seeing over the next three to five years. It's going to take some time again because you have so many players in the field, you know? And a lot of it will need to be structured and regulated, but I think that that's going to make a significant difference to how people put their music out there and how it's consumed. I'm excited about so many things. I just don't know where to start. I'm excited about the idea that big data and the curation of that data could emerge into something like a data sets for artists where scientists do kind of, you know, work and analysis and research and that they curate that into a place where musicians can interface with that data and create music out of, you know, fact kind of, you know, analysis and research that then could then potentially pay the scientist for their research as part of the song and that could all be distributed via smart contract. Or I'm also very excited about how the social aspect of VR could impact the music touring space or the music performance space, how our own identities are going to be visible in the VR space, how we can co-create in the VR space. I'm also excited about the idea that in the future there's been just no need for advertising ever again, that especially in terms of music, that the idea of the song by kind of going through some kind of filtration analysis sponge goes onto this kind of song database thing or network of and that it gives the same opportunity for some 15-year-old kid in outer Mongolia who's creating some music in his bedroom, reaching some CEO executive at the head of IBM who maybe is having a bad day and by way of their personal assistant computer metrics knowing that you're feeling particularly down in that day, the system might actually connect these two people together from outer Mongolia and the head of IBM. So I just, yeah, I think there's so much potential with AI and blockchain. This may have answered one of the questions that came from the room. The artist Laurie Anderson once popped the big one. She said, are things getting better or are they getting worse? That was her question. The question reached from the audience. In your experience, is technology making the music business better or worse for the artists, especially in terms of distributing the content? Both of you are optimistic. Yeah, totally. I mean, again, the tools are there. It's really up to the artists themselves to choose how they use to manipulate them. I think we're in a curve. It's not, it kind of is okay for a few artists in the past did very well and it kind of worked out physical sales touring that kind of made sense. And then the digital area came and then it went, doesn't make any sense at all. There's no connection between anything anymore. Who is everyone anyway? And now we have this potential with, you know, thinking is around identity and privacy and data sharing and all these things, which are going to lead us into an age of abundance for creativity in terms of flow of creativity, in terms of tools, but also in terms of discovery and support and partnerships and collaborations. So I feel like now, if you're like now in the music industry, it's not good. It's really hard. And it's not hard to be creative. That's easy. It's like easier than it's ever been. But in order to actually do something with that and go to the next stage, it's so, so hard. You just can't shout above the noise loud enough. So, but I'm excited about, you know, with the support of developments in AI, and curation discovery and, you know, a shared systems of protocols that we will reach and an incredible, you know, future in five, ten years from now where you can say that my daughter, if she ever decides to go into the arts, I have confidence that it's going to be an incredibly abundant space as it should be. Very good. One last question from the audience is, tech has democratized access to music making and publishing and soon Western music in quotes or Western music makers will be a minority. What will mainstream sound like in 2030? Ooh. I don't think we have any idea what it's going to sound like. I think it's just important for us to keep persevering, keep innovating and keep shining a light on people who are doing fun and exciting things, you know. We share, we like something because the reason that we got into creating any first places because we were passionate about it, we were passionate about what others were doing. So we continue to share that passion, we continue to highlight what other people are doing and we just try to leave our mark. But I don't know that I can really say what music is going to sound like, you know, because it's continually evolving. So it's just for us to kind of leave our mark on it. Yeah, I don't know, but I would love to see, I would love to experiment with kind of an AI version of myself, like my creative self, so that if there was specifically an Imogenheak fan out there and they were having a bad day or they needed a bit of extra courage to go into school that day or whatever it might be, that I might have developed an AI kind of generative reactive version of myself to be able to do what I would do if I was there in person, but I'm not. So I would like to see, like, yeah, how we can extend ourselves. Extended creativity. Yes, and kind of situational, spontaneous response, kind of, yeah, connecting in real time to the fan, a piece of us, a very personal piece of us. Yeah. With those words, it is great to have art and culture in the middle of technology. We hope that there'll be more of that together with Slush and Helsinki Festival in the future. And for all of those of you that may be back last two weeks of August in 2019, welcome to the festival and YouTube. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.