Should Music Publishers Be Worried about AI?
- Evan Nickels
- Oct 8
- 25 min read
This week we dive deep into all things music publishing with Monica Corton of Go to Eleven Entertainment. With over 30 years of experience in music publishing, Monica lays a great foundation of how exactly music publishing works, and then we talk about what it looks like today with AI, streaming, legislation, and in some cases, suing major platforms. Whether you’re in music publishing or know nothing about music publishing, we cover a lot of great stuff.
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Episode Transcript
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[00:00:00] Dmitri: Today's guest is Monica Corton, the CEO of Go to Eleven Entertainment where she helps songwriters, artists, and producers with publishing, licensing, branding, and artist development. Before starting her own company, she spent 27 years at. Next decade Entertainment. Working with music from Boston, Harry Belafonte, Vic Mizzi, who wrote The Adams Family Theme and Green Acres theme and More.
She's also supervised music for films like Grumpier Old Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Three, as well as Broadway Productions. Alongside her work with songwriters and artists at Go to Eleven, Monica has also been a strong voice in music rights and policy conversations, which is why I have her here today.
Welcome to the podcast, Monica.
[00:00:39] Monica: Thank you. Nice to see you, Dimitri.
[00:00:41] Dmitri: Nice to be with you too. We're gonna get into some interesting areas today about evolutions in the music business and things like whether publishers are protecting against AI or leaning into it. But first I wanna bring our audience into the conversation with some industry background.
I'll be honest, understanding what publishers do was one of the last things I grasped as a music publicist 20 years ago. Even though I tell people I was a publicist and they say, oh, you're a publisher. No, I'm a publicist. And record labels, they get all the glory. So to level set for our widely varied audience.
How do you like to explain the role of a publisher for those who are still getting up to speed?
[00:01:16] Monica: Okay, so there's two copyrights. when you're listening to a song, the first copyright that people don't usually think of is the copyright in the song. The song is written by the song writer. That's what's administered by the publisher, or owned by the publisher.
The other copyright is the recording of the song, which is the master and master recordings are generally owned by record labels and, record labels. Pay the artist for making the recording. So. Really the whole start of the process is from the songwriter side. 'cause without a great song, you're never gonna have a great recording.
And it's really the hub of the business. And people used to always sort of call it the annuity for creators because the term of copyright is like two or three times as long as the term for a master. And, now. That term is, the life of the composer plus 70 years. So your royalties could ostensibly be going to your grandchildren and you know, if you have a valuable catalog, that means a lot to your children and grandchildren.
[00:02:25] Dmitri: Oh, that's so interesting to just think about sort of how long the value lasts there as being a contributor to what the value is of a composed written song as opposed to a recorded master.
[00:02:37] Monica: Right. A master only has a copyright term of 70 years, so it's a very big difference.
[00:02:42] Dmitri: Wow.
[00:02:43] Monica: And, and also the beautiful thing about publishing is if you have a great song.
You get lots of people to record it. you get the income streams from all of those recordings. And it also can change the tenure of a song. So if you have a rock musician that records your song and then you have a hip hop version of the song, you're bringing in totally different audiences for your same song.
[00:03:07] Dmitri: Hmm.
[00:03:07] Monica: And, and in licensing. like a film or television, they always have to license the publishing the song, but they don't necessarily have to license the master. They could make their own master, they could find a different master than the one that's most popular because they have a limited budget.
You know, we're always looking for all the recordings of our songs, so we have lots of things to pitch because if somebody's really married. To a big song that we have, but they don't have a huge budget. They're gonna want a less expensive master. That also captures the essence of the song, and we know all those.
So it's also important for a publisher to try and get as new masters all the time so that your song is current and being used in lots of different ways
[00:03:52] Dmitri: is the biggest, revenue for publishers around sync.
[00:03:56] Monica: No, the biggest revenue is performance income. when the song is played on, radio or television or the internet and in, countries outside the United States, they have performing rights in movie theaters as well, which is huge if you have a huge movie and your music is used in it.
Performing rights for theatrical youth are huge. We just don't have that right here in the United States.
[00:04:20] Dmitri: Gotcha. Are there other categories that are pretty big? I'm picturing like, what is Monica doing? Is she like, where is she going to look for the money? I'm, I'm sure you're also looking like what catalogs to buy, but then the catalogs you represent or that you administer also, you're looking like, where do I go and find that money?
[00:04:35] Monica: Yeah, well, I mean, it's important to have, good relationships with all the performing rights, societies, which also collect mechanical rights most of the time in, in the United States, we have that separated. but in most countries they have one organization that collects both, or, people are signing what's called these pan-European deals for digital.
So there's sort of two groups that do that to have better market share and collection. because digital is sort of one type of collection. And then you have, physical product that's So mechanical is audio only. So, a cd, back in the day, a cassette, you know, any kind of audio only configuration.
And so there's physical audio configurations, and then there's digital. They, function on in different royalty, rates. you know, so everybody talks now about vinyl being the rage. It's not like there's so much vinyl necessarily being sold, but the royalty for vinyl is 12 cents now. So you could sell a lot less vinyl and make a lot more money than, a stream is like 0.001.
You need millions of streams to make even anything that's remotely decent. And that's really what has changed the business so much with digital, because we used to get. Tons of money from the sales of records in mechanical royalties, and now we don't. So that's why there's been this huge pull to do sync to make up that difference.
[00:06:02] Dmitri: Hmm.
[00:06:03] Monica: And so artists who would never license for sync before, because there was this feeling that, using your music for advertising was selling out. Now they all want those syncs because the money isn't the same from mechanical royalties.
[00:06:17] Dmitri: Got it. Well, why is it that when new technology emerges and new formats and new revenue streams emerge, the trade press talks so much about record labels and a bit less about publishers.
Does that have to do with the different rights and royalties or just less understanding of publishers or is it something else?
[00:06:33] Monica: it's because the rates for mechanical royalties are controlled by the government. There's a panel of judges that sets them, after much. haggling between the publishers and literally everybody else because labels want lower rates.
digital, services want lower mechanical rates. telephone carriers want lower rates, like it's literally a David and Goliath story. So there's us and everybody else, and it used to just be between the record labels and the publishers. But now that we have all these other diff media that are distributing music,
It's a big carnival of opponents, for these rates. And we're not in a free market. Whereas record labels are in a free market to sell records and they make a lot more from that. They would argue that they don't make money from performances 'cause there is no performing right for masters in the United States.
There is that right. in other places now we have sound exchange, but sound exchange only collects performing rights and masters on the internet. It doesn't collect them on television and radio. And those performing rights in Europe are huge, but we just don't have that. Right. We've been trying to pass that legislation for years now it's in the hopper with this Congress.
I was at a meeting yesterday, with Jerry, representative ler. chief of staff and he claims he thinks that they can pass that finally this year. and I've been told there's no way in hell that it's gonna get passed, because every city has a radio station and those radio stations don't wanna pay additional royalties to artists.
[00:08:10] Dmitri: Yeah, that's a, complex aspect of it, the difference between the US and the rest of the world and all the stakeholders involved with trying to, lobby for, save their business, improve their business, et cetera. and it is kind of crazy that it's all based on this idea that radio can advertise against music without paying any licenses.
[00:08:31] Monica: Well, they do. See, that's the thing. They pay licenses to the publishers. But they don't pay licenses to the master owners.
[00:08:37] Dmitri: Got it. Got it. And
[00:08:38] Monica: that's why they don't want this. They think we're double dipping by adding a performing right for masters, which we aren't. they're using both rights. They're just not paying for both rights.
[00:08:51] Dmitri: That's easy for you to say as a publisher.
[00:08:54] Monica: It's true.
[00:08:54] Dmitri: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. so we talked about different revenue streams. How does it break down? Like what are the biggest revenue streams for publishers? Like, what are the top several? And, then I'm curious how that might be changing. But let's just start with that.
Like you mentioned some of them, but what are the biggest ones? what drives revenue?
[00:09:09] Monica: Performing rights is usually the biggest one for everybody. So that's when your songs played on. The radio, television or the internet. And those are controlled in the United States by basically four entities, although there's a few new ones.
So ascap, BMI, SESAC and Global Music Rights, GMR, all collect performing rights in the United States. And then there's a new one called Alltrack that's sort of focusing on DIY creators. and there's another one that I had never heard of, but This is currently being challenged by, basically, restaurants and,
Venues who are now being solicited by these new pros, including, global music rights is sort of new, but they happen to have very big repertoire. Like there's no way a restaurant could have the proper performance license without a license from global music rights because their focus is all big Start.
And so that music's being played everywhere. But,
[00:10:06] Dmitri: so performing rights is the biggest category. It's
[00:10:08] Monica: the biggest one. The next one is mechanical rights. So those are audio only and those are, there's two ways they're collected. The physical product is licensed by the Harry Fox Agency and Music reports and the digital,
Mechanicals are by the MLC, which is a new organization that was formed under the Music Modernization Act, which started in 2018. Then there's synchronization rights. Those are audio visuals that we film, television, video games, commercials, anything, audio, visual. and then there's print. So that's the visual only.
So when you see lyrics in a book or sheet music, or lyrics on a. Like a plate or a t-shirt, that's all print. And then there's some sort of outside the box ones like merchandise, which is of in the sync category, but not, and that's in a free market, so everything's on the sync side. And the print side is in a free market, but on the performance side and the mechanical side, those rates are set by the government or controlled by the government.
Under in, in the case of performing rights, it's controlled by consent Decrees that have been in place with ASCAP since 1945 we're one of the most overly, watched, industries by the government. and that was started by the radio stations, I think, because they felt like ASCAP at the time had a monopoly and they could hold them ransom.
So the government said once there's a first use. Then anybody can record, your song. And also, they have a court that people can go to, if there's a dispute over their performing rights.
[00:11:42] Dmitri: Hmm. Wow. Man, this is complicated. Now I know why people don't talk about publishers as much.
[00:11:48] Monica: There's a lot to learn.
I mean,
it is complicated, you know, and one of the challenges. I've had in raising money for our new company was teaching Music investors who are interested in learning about music rights, how this works.
[00:12:01] Dmitri: Hmm.
[00:12:02] Monica: And basically they only, they don't have a lot of. Attention span for the most part. And you cannot explain all of this in two minutes.
It's really complicated.
[00:12:11] Dmitri: Yeah. You know, you talked about the diff, I mean, we didn't talk exact ratios or percentages, but you know, these big categories as drivers of revenue for publishers. I'm curious how much that's changed over the last five or 10 years, and what about technology has influenced the change if there has been one?
[00:12:28] Monica: Oh, the transition to digital made a huge change.
[00:12:30] Dmitri: Oh yeah.
[00:12:31] Monica: Yeah. Because you know, we used to get. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for mechanicals, and they were a huge mainstay. And also, people would have to buy an entire album. So if you had like a B cut or a cut that really never made it to the radio, you were still making money because Your song was being sold in an album in a whole compilation, whereas in digital, people cherry pick what they wanna hear. So usually only like the top singles are the things that sell for any new band. And for older bands, you know, they have, what people used to refer to as album cuts. So those songs that weren't quite, you know, the thing that everybody knew, but like if you were a fan, you knew the album cuts.
[00:13:14] Dmitri: Yeah, so this is great. You've kind of set, the framework, at least. We've got a little bit of vocabulary, a little bit of understanding about how you work as a publisher and what the revenue streams are and how that plays out in the market or in the government. and it seems like AI is a big threat to songwriters, composers, publishers, because just with a few keystrokes, a user might be able to craft a song that's based on someone else's copyrighted.
Creation, their intellectual property. let's talk about the threat first. In what ways should publishers be concerned?
[00:13:46] Monica: well, they're stealing our songs and they're not compensating us and, they're making a lot of money from doing that. and we're, we have, they're over 50 something different lawsuits.
With different gen AI companies, not just in music, but everything, books, journalism, art, photography. but of course, you know, music's probably one of the biggest categories as far as, that's sort of the thing people gravitate to as far as being creative or thinking that they're creative. and so it's, it's flooding the market.
With a whole bunch of songs that aren't written by humans, or sometimes there is a human writer and they're using the AI to enhance whatever they're doing. But there's problems now with, whether it's protected by law because the copyright office has basically said that the AI part of any song is not protected because it's not written by a human.
there's, New problems now. Like I was just reading today that Spotify is letting people just load anything. So there, you know, you can make, I think on Suno and udio you can make 2000 songs a month and because it takes like two seconds to, you know, you put your prompt in and they, it literally spits out a song in a minute.
And so, somebody that's just having fun could literally create 2000 songs on their subscription. Load those all into Spotify. And now those songs are taking up space from the songs that are written by human creators. It gets harder for people to discover the songs by the human creators unless they find a way to stand out or have really good social media, or they're being promoted by their publisher or label.
and we have these companies now. Labels and the publishers are so consolidated, they control millions of songs with stabs that couldn't possibly really manage millions of songs. So usually only the upper repertoire is what gets focused on, and then there's everybody else.
[00:15:43] Dmitri: have you seen evidence that publishers are already starting to see a decline in revenue as a result of those threats?
Or is it more
[00:15:49] Monica: a threat? Yes, but it's a combination of things because. We've sort of been in constant battle with Spotify over all kinds of issues. And now they've, bundled book subscriptions with music, which has reduced the music subscription value significantly. And they originally, when they were telling us how much, they said it would reduce it by $150 million.
So, that's a huge gut punch for music creators.
[00:16:19] Dmitri: Hmm.
[00:16:19] Monica: And if you, so you take that, the bundling problem and then you add a whole bunch of AI music which is flooding the system, that reduces it because the more songs that are in the income pool, the less each stream is worth. Because the, the way they account to us is in an income pool.
So say they have a hundred dollars in the income pool, if there's 2000 songs. Those 2000 songs, the per stream rate is a certain amount. But if there's 500,000 songs, that rate is gonna be significantly less.
[00:16:49] Dmitri: But they have to be played, right? You can't just have 'em there.
[00:16:52] Monica: They have to be played. And now there's also, you know, Spotify started a thing where if you don't have a thousand streams in a month, you don't get paid at all.
and I mean, there's all kinds of problems and I'm, pointing out Spotify simply 'cause they're the biggest and, they've sort of been the most difficult because. At every juncture since the beginning of us finally getting a license with Spotify, they have pulled all these kind of tricks to find ways to not pay us or pay us less.
[00:17:19] Dmitri: Hmm. So, I've heard you talk about AI and maybe a spoiler alert, I was surprised with your views given all the threats. Now we have to take a quick break on the podcast, but when we come back I wanna ask you about the opportunities you see. We'll be right back.
Okay, Monica, we're back and, and as I was mentioning, I heard you talk about AI and I was kind of surprised with your views given some of the threats you were talking about before our break.
As a publisher representing songs, how do you view the threat and the opportunity of generative AI for music?
[00:17:50] Monica: I think it's an opportunity, I mean. We've had to sue every platform. We had to sue YouTube to get a license. We had to sue Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And now we're actually, we've been in a lawsuit with X, Twitch.
We had to sue. Like there's almost no, I don't think there is any major platform that has gone gracefully and done the licensing before they launched. So. I don't see AI any different. You know, they're claiming that it's fair use. I don't see how it could possibly be fair use because they're building their LLMs on our songs.
They scraped the internet for all our songs, took them, didn't get permission, haven't compensated us, and now they're dragging it out in these lawsuits 'cause it's gonna go all the way up the food chain. I'm guessing, until there's a final decision that it is copyright infringement. Although some labels, have been talking with, AI companies we're told.
And you know, as an independent, we're always worried when that happens because the majors get their own deal and then we're sometimes left with the scraps.
[00:18:56] Dmitri: Hmm.
[00:18:57] Monica: and so, you know, we're all watching that sort of with bated breath. In the end, I think it's a huge opportunity. 'cause I do think the courts are gonna say it's copyright infringement and you know, I think what's happening is it's creating derivative works.
So the right to make derivative works for your song is the sole right of the publisher and the songwriter. And they like to call it transformative because it's this newer. Idea about, that judges have been passing that says like, if it's so different, then it's not a derivative work. And I would argue, how, how could it be so different if everything that's in there is our songs and the LLMs or the companies that have tried to do it without the good songs, their gen AI systems aren't as interesting.
So. It has to be because there's are really good songs in those systems. But I, I believe it'll get resolved because all of these things have been resolved. some have had better starting points than others. You know, when we, our first license with YouTube was terrible, but now YouTube is the best as far as income remuneration for songwriters and, labels.
It's the best one of all of them. So they develop over time as we learn more about what they're doing and they learn more about what we're doing and always they wanna expand the rights, they wanna create different things to get more people to use their system. And when they add more rights, they have to pay more money because they have, they've only paid for a certain.
Group of rights in the initial contract. And so that's kind of what's been happening with the labels that have been making these direct deals with the streaming services, because the streaming services now wanna put videos on their sites and the video is a synchronization, right? It's not a statutory, right?
So they have to negotiate with everybody if they wanna add that to their system.
[00:20:56] Dmitri: So what I'm hearing you say is that this has happened before. There's some new technology that gets emerged, like user generated video to take the YouTube example, or even just streaming and every step along the way.
Labels and publishers have had to sue to get their, remuneration more in line with the value that they're offering in that licensing of that music.
[00:21:16] Monica: Well, to get any remuneration, like literally they're not licensing.
[00:21:20] Dmitri: Yeah.
[00:21:20] Monica: And I, I've been in your lunch thing where, a tech lawyer said, oh, you know, launch.
And then you can make it up and figure it out. Like I was. Kind of appalled like he knew I had been speaking, so he knew there was somebody in the music industry there and he still was giving that advice.
[00:21:36] Dmitri: Yeah No, I think there are two different approaches. It depends who they're representing in some, in some cases too, and some of them represent both sides at times too.
but I think what I'm trying to get to is, your hunch is that it will get resolved that, rights holders will get paid for music, that's being used for training and also possibly paid
[00:21:56] Monica: the output.
[00:21:57] Dmitri: On the outputs as well.
[00:21:59] Monica: Yeah.
[00:21:59] Dmitri: Um, and, speaking of hearing people say things, I've heard you say that you think AI might actually turn into one of the biggest drivers of revenue for publishers in the future.
[00:22:09] Monica: Yeah, because people do wanna be creative and they don't know how to write music or do, and so they're gonna use these gen AI things and some of them will get good at it, you know, the prompting and. Then there'll be some excellent copyrights, but they're all containing our copyrights.
[00:22:25] Dmitri: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:25] Monica: So, you know, how are we gonna figure out the attribution?
Who wrote the output? And so there's two companies now that have systems that claim they can do that. Musical AI and surreal ai. I don't think you're gonna be able to pay every single song that might come up in their survey, but the way they survey will tell what's the top. Songs, it has a hierarchy.
So say we pay on like three to five of the output songs that are in there, and we have to come up with some kind of a royalty, you know, based on what the market is like. We, you know, it's not. Sometimes the labels will be really unreasonable. I've had many tech people tell me their horror stories of trying to launch their systems and, taking a year or two years to negotiate with the labels.
and I've been trying to pitch that they should really start with the independence. You know, you don't need to license every single song in the book. You need to license a thousand songs that really work in your system. I would say do it with independence because we're more nimble and we we're more aggressive about licensing because we have smaller repertoire and we, we actually have relationships with all our writers.
They're not just social security numbers. And, it might be a faster, better way and a more innovative way to start your system, you know, to get it going. 'cause what happens when it drags out like that is investors are like, uh, I am not waiting another two years. You gotta do something or I'm done. You know, and they, and that's legitimate.
If I was investing in a system and I put my money in there and it took two years to launch before I made a penny, I wouldn't be very happy as an investor. So it's all I, you know, it's complicated and, I think that, you know, the other thing that I keep pitching is that tech companies should be using music supervisors, real music supervisors, like the ones that work on film and television because they have all the relationships with all the publishers and labels and can facilitate the licensing better.
They can understand, like you tell them what you wanna do, they could break down the rights and the potential value of the rights, come up with a deal that they. That should be closer to what would make sense with the music industry and they could facilitate the licensing, but nobody's sort of caught on to that.
They were, Julie Suss Sussing Services was doing some tech stuff for a while, but I don't think they're doing that much anymore. because the tech lawyers don't know the music business and they don't have those relationships, so it takes them a long time to figure out where to go and what to do. And.
If you are the tech company, you're just basically paying for your tech lawyer to learn music licensing. Wouldn't it be better if you actually hired somebody that knew music licensing from the beginning and could just get the job done?
[00:25:11] Dmitri: This is why I wanted to have you on Monica, because I think as a publisher you're being certainly critical of what's emerging because you've seen what's happened with other tech trends and platforms, but you're, you seem pretty open-minded in spite of that.
Like you're not just ready to fight against, you know, what's coming next. More just. Looking at what is a pathway for a win-win and doing what publishers should do best, which is looking how to quote, exploit their works and help help their songwriters or their songs, their composers, et cetera. figure out new revenue streams, which is super interesting.
[00:25:49] Monica: You know, the reason is because I was, I went through the whole Napster period and I aggressively tried to get people to like, let's bring Napster in and work with them, because people were going, they liked it, I liked it, you know, it was great. So why didn't we just go in and take that and make a business with them that, I mean, we would've had so much more control.
We wouldn't have lost as much money. could have been really good. And the labels were not willing to do that. They thought they could be gatekeepers as long as you know, forever, and that was not what was happening. So I don't want AI to become the same situation. I think we have to embrace it, and we have to find a way to make the business work for everybody.
[00:26:33] Dmitri: Well, let's crystallize that a little bit. What's your ideal scenario on how generative AI music will play out in the music marketplace?
[00:26:39] Monica: I think, you know, we have to a license for the inputs, and that would be based on how their revenue model works. and then we need a license for the outputs and we're gonna need the technology, whether it's musical, AI real, or another company that's still, you know, I don't know about yet.
whatever those systems are, we need to figure out the attribution to make it fair. Like what I was told initially was that the. Majors and the larger publishers were trying to convince us that it's impossible to figure out the attribution, so we would have to do it on a market share and. I said over my dead body and I started searching for who could do that because, when I worked at next decade, we had a lot of prominent songs.
You know, the Boston catalog, say what you will about the Adams family theme. It is one of the top five television themes in the history of music, and I know that from just all the licensing that I've done for it. So we had great songs that were played a lot, but we didn't have market share because we were a small boutique company and we got hurt badly by all these market share decisions.
So I don't want that to happen again. And I knew that tech was out there because tech people love a problem. That's what they thrive on. and you know, it's not like this is some mystery. Everybody knows we were gonna have this attribution issue.
[00:27:57] Dmitri: Yeah. Okay. Well this has been so helpful to hear through kind of all your thinking on this as well as the background, the foundations, and now getting us to this point.
my last couple of questions are really about expanding the network for us to see who else is out there. What recommendations do you have to other publishers to record labels to? You mentioned some music tech companies. Maybe there's others that are operating in this space that you think people should know about.
[00:28:19] Monica: You know, part of the problem is I do a lot. I spend a lot of time. I really enjoy all the music tectonic stuff because I meet a ton of tech people that way, but. Last year I did a panel at Mondo about the positive uses of AI for publishers. So, you know, being able to make a master recording of a new song that we could pitch to a film company is a huge thing because before AI, we would have to hire people and musicians.
It would cost money and it would take time. Whereas with ai, we could literally produce that in an hour or less and then we could pitch it. So if it got the spot in the film. Then we could have a human group record the song. So we had a better master. But to facilitate pitching is great. So for example, a lot of times they'll want a master by a woman, and all the masters that exist are by men.
Well, we could put a female voice in ai. Like there are a lot of positive things, that are happening that could be tools to make our businesses run better and be, More collaborative, more interesting. when we did this panel, I don't know, there was like a hundred people in the room and I asked, who here is talking about these things in their company?
Have any of you heard about any of the things they're talking about? Nobody raised their hand. Are you talking about anything that has to do with AI in your company? Nobody raised their hand. And this was last year. It's pretty scary, and even when I have the conversations with other publishers, I know.
We're not tech forward. That's part of the problem. And so the education piece kind of has to come on both sides and that's why music tectonics has been so good because I think you do bring in both sides. There's not a lot of other organizations that do that, and with us constantly being at each other's throats on opposite sides, it's not facilitating business for either side.
So I think just in general, we need to be more open about learning about each other's businesses and that collaboration's really important for tech people too because they, a lot of the time they build stuff that we don't need 'cause they don't talk to us about what we need, or what would really work or, you know, they might have a kernel of idea, but like we could tell 'em how it would really be adaptable.
And those conversations aren't happening very much. You know, or if they are, they're only happening with majors. They're not happening with independents.
[00:30:43] Dmitri: Well, I appreciate you saying all that. We do try to bring together the ecosystem so that music innovation is the focus, not stakeholder this or stakeholder that.
It is complex. Sometimes it's hard to get people to, to speak in public forums or even to arrive, to be part of those conversations. I think people have felt threatened by different things, but we certainly try to create a, a warm and welcoming environment where people feel comfortable to make those connections.
So I appreciate that. Um, I'm curious to expand our network a little bit more. Are there any other thought leaders or business executives that the music tectonics audience should follow, maybe from your world to continue pushing their thinking around everything we've been talking about today? It could be AI monetization, attribution, licensing, or publishing.
[00:31:24] Monica: I really like Michael Pesky, who's, working with Voice Swap, which is an amazing technology. they were able to. Make a vocal, file for Pitbull. And, there was a request for a Hindi version of one of his songs. They had a local, Indian songwriter translate into Hindi and also sing it with the correct pronunciation and inflection.
Then they put the voice swap. Master a pit bull on top of it. And now Pitbull has this huge hit in India. We could do that for languages all over the world in all emerging markets. I think that's amazing thing. But Michael's, I've been, I was on a panel with Michael at, music Biz, um, and we have come friends before and he, he always knows all the interesting people.
Like he consults for surreal and he has a very good. Sort of mix of understanding 'cause he worked in the music business, but he has a really good mind for tech and has done a lot with tech. I kind of look to him.
[00:32:21] Dmitri: Yeah, Mike's been on the podcast a couple years ago. We did one on fan powered royalties and Mike Polsky's.
Awesome.
[00:32:26] Monica: Yeah. If I digital companies as far as an attorney, I, often go to John Delaney, who's at Perkins ey, and, but he's been in digital since he was at MOFO and he was a youngin with me in the Copyright Society. the Copyright Society is an interesting place to learn about, this intersection of copyright and technology.
They have an annual conference that just happened in September. Copyright and tech. And it really is both sides. It's not just people like me who are protecting creators, it's other people who think we should just be giving our music away too. So it provides an interesting forum. And of course, like everything this year was all about ai.
cause we're all grappling with, you know. What should we do? How are we gonna do it? The protection issues. You know, there are creators that are legitimate creators using AI to facilitate art. And right now, if you submit, that you know, a majority of what you're doing is just prompts that is not protectable because you can't register it.
So. You can't, if you had to sue somebody that copied it, you couldn't do that because you don't have a copyright registration. All these things are gonna need to be worked out, and I think ultimately they will be. You know, it's just what they told us originally is it has to be substantive if you have a substantive musical contribution.
The ai that's okay. Well what is substantive, like, substantive to me isn't necessarily the same thing. Substantive to a copyright, to a person looking at that certificate. So, you know, we have to, it's a. Lot of different issues that have to be worked out, but the more we're openly talking about it now is, you know, we need to be working on the business solutions now.
Like the court cases are gonna drag out for at least another year, year and a half, maybe longer. But if we're ready when they resolve, then we can start the business that we need to start and adapt. And I, I'm, I wish there was more of that, like I've been pushing for that.
[00:34:26] Dmitri: Perfect. Well, Monica, this has been great.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights and directions where things might go and, great questions to ask and a bit of a position of where we should go. Monica Corton, it's been great talking to you from Go to Eleven Entertainment.
[00:34:41] Monica: Thank you so much, Dimitri.
Let us know what you think! Tweet @MusicTectonics, find us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
