I saw a video recently by Noire et Blanc vie (great synth youtuber if you haven’t heard of him) where he pulled an article from 10 years ago predicting what is now the last 10 years of music. And he looked at what they got right and wrong, then at the end asked viewers to come up with their own 10 things they think the next decade might hold for music. I did that in a word document and it was far too long to post in a youtube commend (literally, they said to cut it to like 40% of what I had). So I figured this might be a cool topic to discuss here among a bunch of forward-looking producers. Below is the paper I typed:
My predictions for the next 10 years of music technology/business are:
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Stereo synths trickle down – Right now, there isn’t much out there in the way of cheap synths that can do stereo sound – and I mean true stereo in at least the filters, if not more of the synth’s architecture. Look at the hardware that can do it today and I don’t think you see anything out there under $2,000 USD that can do stereo sounds. The list is pretty exclusive: Moog Matriarch, Waldorf Quantum/Iridium (with some limitations), Prophet X, and UDO Super 6. That list reads like a who’s who of top dollar synths in production today. Even most of my VSTs don’t have an inherently stereo signal path until you get to effects. And I didn’t think I would care about this until I got a Super 6 about a month ago. Since it came in, I’ve been doing sound design on it at least a few minutes a day. I sat down to make some samples today and I needed Harmor, a mighty softsynth in its own right that can do many, many things that a Super 6 cannot. And within half an hour I was missing the stereo signal path of the Super 6. I was able to fudge my way through my sound with a significant amount of auto-panning and automation to try and add some stereo movement before FX. But even with half a dozen automation lanes and several harmonics moving around in the sound, it just wouldn’t jump out of the speakers at me in the same way that a simple sound will on the Super 6. I imagine as this sound starts to get used in music, more people are going to want access to it and sellers of softsynths and hardsynths are going to bring stereo signal paths to the masses.
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Spacial Audio is going to be a big deal – This is my catch all for simulated surround sound and audio in VR/AR that will need to be more spacially aware than simple stereo mixes can be. What for? I already mentioned VR/AR, but this kind of tech may make its way into more common listening systems as well. If I’m not mistaken, Apple’s newest Airpods Pro/Max/Whatever has some spatial audio options, where it can simulate the mix actually being projected in front of you, and then turning your head will keep the mix in front of your body and let you balance the mix more into the left or right ear. The Playstation 5 is selling special headphones to make the most of its newfangled ray-traced audio. Maybe this will be a passing fad like 3-D was in home theater last decade, or maybe in 10 years we’ll all be worrying about surround and virtual sound compatibility of our mixes as much as we do mono compatibility.
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Live music is going to change big-time – I don’t mean that live music is going to end, or that I expect there won’t still be some musicians who make the majority of their living by gigging/touring, but I think this is going to be harder than it has been in a long time to break out of your local scene and tour widely. I don’t think the world is going to forget about COVID quickly, nor will all our governments be quick to relax social distancing rules. Will big festivals still happen? One of the more common goals in electronic music is to just get on the festival circuit, where pre-pandemic you could basically play festivals year-round and make good money if you were big enough. If the festival scene shrinks, to some people that’s like taking away Formula 1 and saying that the highest tier of show you can play now is Formula 2. How restricted are clubs going to be, and for how long? A lot of clubs were barely hanging on before, how many will survive the drought, and will they be able to turn a profit with new rules that likely limit capacity? And none of this is to mention the support industry behind tours, everything from equipment rental, catering, logistics, costumes, choreography, and all the labor that makes all that possible. How many of these people have had to leave the industry they love and might not return. Personally, I know a chef who had to quit cooking earlier this year. He sells furniture now, which sounds terrible. In fact though, he finds that even though he doesn’t love it, he makes more money and has much, much better hours. And he still cooks for himself and his family, good as ever. He says there’s a strong possibility he will never be a chef again, and he’s OK with that. If the tour support industries erode in this way, will we be able to put on anywhere near the number of shows that we did pre-COVID? Will they be able to look like what they did before? I doubt it, but only time will tell.
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On the flip-side, virtual shows/clubs may become much more common – Building off of points 2 and 3, if in person shows are too expensive and unsafe, and virtual audio is going to get better and better, then why not take the show to your home? We’ve already seen zoom/skype/twitch/youtube shows try and fill the gap that live performances have left in our nightlives. And you know what? For the early days of using technology that was never designed to send musical performances live around the world without latency, it’s going pretty well. This probably serves some genres better than others, but I’ve seen everything from Jazz to Punk to EDM (and all of these put on by local groups) trying out the live-stream show format, and all of them were a joy to be a part of (in one case as a mixer, the other two just an audience member). And for myself, I got into making music because I had a dream of playing live in a certain way that was not going to make financial sense until I had tens of thousands of people paying to see me play. And now, that might never be allowed to happen. So instead, I can take my obscenely complex stage ideas to a virtual show and have some artists make the exact environment I want in VR, while still being able to deliver the sound that I want, and not having to run miles of cable around a jostling crowd to make it happen. In a way, this could be a frontier for performance where we can synthesize a space on the fly, with a different stage for each song, or even each section (or maybe each viewer?). Perhaps fans will gather en virtual masse, or maybe they’ll go to a small stage with a group of friends, or maybe each fan will get what feels like a one-on-one intimate show, even if there’s 100,000 people watching.
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We’re going to pay even more attention to what Apple, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. are doing – Maybe I’m late to the party on this one, I just got on Spotify about a month ago to add my own music to the service as an artist. And already, I have been sucked into a rabbit hole of running ads on various services to try and point people who I genuinely think would like my music at my music. And already in that month, things have changed. Apple’s new policy that prevents cross-app tracking on IOS (or something to that effect) is going to change how the ads for my music work on Facebook on IOS. I think this is just the start of what is going to change on the internet ad giants this decade. Facebook and Google were both hit with antitrust lawsuits by the federal government last month, which will likely take years to play out. But the results could be huge. Imagine a Google that doesn’t own Adsense, or a Facebook that has to found a competitor and migrate half its user-base to them. These business decisions and lawsuits affect the way our music is advertised, where and how it can be found, and ultimately who has a chance to hear it. Oh yeah, and Spotify? They’re running their own ads on the platform now, which you can buy similar to Google’s or Facebook’s, so just add Spotify to the ad mix as well as the streaming services you need to hit.
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Digital interfaces for physical gear – Computers are an essential part of most studios today. And many artists coming up over the past few decades are learning how to make music on computers first (and staying there). And, would you believe that on many synthesizers the most expensive parts are the knobs, switches, and buttons? So what if we made a blank slab of synthesizer and controlled it from the computer? It’s been done before, but with software like Elektron’s Overbridge, we could be in for a more tightly interconnected setup like this than ever before, for a more affordable budget (both in terms of space and money). McDSP is also experimenting with this idea with their APB line, and Eventide has the H9000R in addition to their standard H9000 unit. The pieces are floating around out there, but they seem to be more fringe devices and use cases up to this point. I think a good touch screen interface and some well-coded apps would go a long way to making this more common for a lot of manufacturers. Think a more affordable version of Slate’s Raven or Acustica’s Modula, but for more than just consoles and channel strips that can record automation for all the controls to a DAW. Perhaps an industry standard will develop around a few control surfaces and all manufacturers will work to similar standards.
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Owning less of your software (and maybe your hardware) – Subscription plans and rent-to-own models are here to stay. Whether it’s the Slate everything bundle, a Roland Cloud subscription, or Pro Tools subscription plans, they can represent great value for money if you really use all those plugins. And the developers like the recurring stream of predictable revenue, which is much better at funding development than selling a bajillion copies of your software once every other year when you do a major version update. I’m personally not a fan of these systems, but they make a lot of sense in the professional space – subscriptions eat up a small part of your monthly expenses, but in exchange they are again, predictable, and you are guaranteed good support and the latest versions of all your softwares with all the bugfixes, performance optimizations, and security features. And for a more enthusiast class, they can be a great way to try before you buy, see exactly what you do and do not need for as long as you like before you commit to purchasing what you want a license for. And hardware? Access Analog is up and running now – they pipe sound you send them over a network and run it through their primo analog hardware safe at their HQ for a small fee, then send you back the processed audio. Suddenly, you don’t have to settle for the best Fairchild emulation around if a Fairchild is what you want. We’ll see how that goes, but more likely to be widespread is the use of AI tools in music, which may or may not be able to run locally on your computer. You might buy an AI mixing tool in the next few years that is actually a license to run a certain amount of data through a company’s servers with an AI on board that will process your audio in some new way currently unimaginable. Google has given us glimpses of what these tools might look like, things like resynthesizing a convincing violin from scratch with only a few tens of hours of training. You might not be able to “own” tools like this, but just having access to them is a possibility that I am excited for.
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AI in music – I don’t have much to say here. AI is kind of already in music production, whether it be in Izotope’s mix and master assistants, some of their RX modules, or Google’s free AI tools that you can mess around with. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this will become more widespread, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the first free AI plugins hit the web by the middle of the decade. I think the only surprising thing might be how fast AI becomes a standard part of the workflow. Maybe someone will do a neat-o AI-based synthesis method.
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Return of Indies? – I’d say this is more of a hope than something I’m really sure is going to happen, but between the COVID putting a damper on huge shows with superstar talent headlining just about every week of the year, and the shifting ground in the ad space that I mentioned in points 3 and 5, I think labels might lose some of their marketing power. Kind of like the 2006-2010 or so era for blogs and early social media letting some acts that might not have had a shot otherwise get onto the radars of many (there’s a genre called blog-house for pete’s sake!), I think the combination of COVID and the move to virtual shows and the antitrust suits against the de-facto online gatekeepers might be enough to let the independent artists have another day in the sun. I know, for myself, that I am and have been part of a music forum for years, and I love it, it’s my favorite online community by far. Facebook has been pushing groups as a way to keep people coming back to the platform, and even easier than making a Facebook group or your own forum (though neither is that difficult) is making a Discord server. I run around in music groups of all three types, and they cater well to my specific tastes. I don’t just listen to house, I don’t just listen to deep house, I listen to lo-fi deep house as posted by Slav on youtube. And there’s a discord for that. I wonder if other people won’t be discovering similarly niche genres and curators while working from home and going directly to them rather than to a broad genre or label. If that happens in large numbers, it would be another flourishing for indie artists of all kinds, I’m sure.
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There will still be music, and there will still be a music industry with niches waiting to be filled – I feel like after talking so much about what might change over the next decade, it’d be nice to end by saying that people will still be making new music in 10 years. Some will even be getting paid for it. There will still be people who’s passion is organized noise, who think this might just be their ticket to easy street, or who would give anything to make the sounds in their head come out the way they want so that other people can understand. And I feel pretty confident in saying you won’t believe it’s already been 10 years when we get there.
