The Future of Music is Visual: With Ty Roberts

In today’s episode we welcome pioneering innovator Ty Roberts, founder of Gracenote, and former CTO of Universal Music Group. We talk about some of the pivotal moments in his career including Gracenote's role in the development of iTunes, and working with David Bowie on generative music. We discuss the future of visual music experiences, the rise of AI in music creation, and the possibilities for personalized live events using advanced technologies. 

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Episode Transcript

Machine transcribed

Dmitri: Ty Roberts is a leading innovator in music and immersive entertainment. He was the founder of Gracenote, the pioneering recognition company that powered services like iTunes and Connected millions of listeners with rich metadata and discovery tools. Gracenote was sold to Sony for $260 million and later to Nielsen for nearly 800 million.

After the acquisition, Roberts became the CTO of Universal Music Group, where he championed high resolution audio and led groundbreaking projects. Over the past four years, he's focused on producing large scale immersive concert films, including Chicago and Friends, which ran in over 550 theaters on TV and streaming platforms.

Ty is always on the cutting edge. I always like talking to him because I Find out what's coming next. Welcome back to Music Tectonics, Ty Roberts.

Ty: So great to be here. Thanks for, thanks for inviting me.

Dmitri: Awesome. So I wanna dive in 'cause there's tons I think we can talk about. I guess reflecting on your trajectory in music innovation, what have been the top three pivotal [00:01:00] moments in music tech, business model listening experiences?

Ty: Well, we can go back to ancient history. for me anyways, it was the first I. Musicians that got interested in digital technology and I got to be lucky to work with David Bowie. So I was in the studio with David Bowie and Brian Eno working on, if you can imagine this generative music CD ROM projects in the mid nineties.

I.

Dmitri: what, how was it generative? What were you guys

Ty: So we were recording all kinds of alternate tracks for his album outside. And these were gonna be combined by the computer, when you played the product. And basically you get a different album every time. And he was really into, him and Brian were really into generative technology at that time.

Brian's continues to be in this area. and so this was the first product to do that, unfortunately. The record label didn't really understand neither the medium nor the idea of generative, so they ended up just putting it out as a linear album. But somewhere in the archives is all the information to do a generative album.[00:02:00]

Dmitri: Whoa. That's, what year was that? Ish.

Ty: outside.

Dmitri: Wow. That's wild. Okay. There's one pivotal

Ty: Okay, that's one. I think the other pivotal moment is,being called down to Apple and, being told by, uh, some of the executives there that there was this new product they were gonna come out with that was so secret that they couldn't tell us about it. That we needed to buy a bunch of servers

for our CD database.

And we were like, what could this be? they were like, well, it's a hardware product, but we can't tell you. that turned out to be the i, the iPod. And so our, grace note was called CDDB at that time. And um, we had the database that let you rip CDs into your computer, but then also transfer 'em to your iPod.

So technically speaking, our database made. basically those early iPods work, because we had, they had to get music in there from your CD collection. There was no digital store. There was no way to buy them online. So ripping CDs was the legitimate way for how to do [00:03:00] it.

Dmitri: this is super fun, Ty, like, you're an og and these pivotal moments have been awesome because they simultaneously tell a story about the industry, but also about your career, which is cool. I asked for three, I'm gonna ask for one more. What's another

Ty: Okay. The next one was, Again, a good Apple story getting called. We'd have to go down there for these meetings with the Apple guys who were very nice. Steve would blow in there and ask some questions of some kind, and so he comes in and says, look, I need you to get me the album covers. And I'm like, you have a black and white iPod.

Why would you want album covers? It's not gonna be a black and white forever. I said, okay. How many album covers do you need? we have to go to the record companies. We have to figure it all out. He's like, I need all of them. We were like, all of them's a lot, actually. We don't even know if there is all of them.

He's like, get me what you can get me and get it for me in two months. And, that became cover flow. So that was basically the first time the album covers were part of digital music products. Again, this was still on the era where you were ripping your CD and then you were seeing the album [00:04:00] cover coming from our database.

not from, it wasn't inside the cd. later when the digital music store. It became popular and the iPhone came out. Then the album covers were inside the music. But at that time they weren't.

Dmitri: So adding a visual element to, to

Ty: Yes. The only problem was I tried to convince him. I and my coworkers tried to convince him that the back of the album cover was important because that's where all the credits were and all the information about who did the things were. And he said, nobody cares about that. Nobody wants to look at that.

And so hence, we do not have the backs of album covers. I tried.

Dmitri: I who actually loved

Ty: We tried to explain that in many recordings that this was important. And also there was like the message from the artist and you know, many, many of these were very lateral. Like long, I wrote the album for this reason. So there was a lot of thought put into those album covers in those days, and you can find 'em online now, but a lot of that, was not part of the experience.

And it's, even today, if you watch music on the Apple TV or whatever, it shows you the album [00:05:00] cover on the screen and then it flips over, like it's gonna show you the back. But it just shows you the front. Again, there was, it was designed to do that, but it didn't really ever

Dmitri: feel like this is the Back to the Future episode of.

Ty: yes. Really actually for me, what happened is the internet came along this thing called the internet and when we had CD ROMs, which is where I was in the mid nineties with Bowie, the CD ROM disc delivered data that's about broadband data rates off of the disc. So we were getting like 150 kilobytes a second on a double-sided, CD rom get like 300 kilobytes a second right off the disc.

So you could do real time video mixing, all the stuff, the genre music stuff I was talking about. What happens is the internet comes and destroys the whole idea of the CD ROM and replaces it with a three kilobyte, a second, 2.8 kilobyte, a second modem. And the only thing you could send across that was text. And so you have this guy who's in the studio [00:06:00] making multimedia with David Bowie, that then has to change his life to text until broadband can come. So I had to do text from 1998. I guess we got those album covers around 2004, maybe. Got the iPhone 2008. Broadband didn't really show up, maybe more than to 2010, so that's kinda when Netflix and these things got going.

So reality is, it was a long time in the text world and luckily with the things I've been doing today, I'm back in full motion, full screen, 4K immersive video. but boy, it took a long time to get back to that.

Dmitri: when I asked you the question about Pivotal moments, I was picturing you were gonna tell us about downloads and tell us about streaming and so forth, but I really like. Hearing more about the actual stories of these interactions or these deals and things that actually changed the course of the music industry history.

But I do know that you're totally up to speed with everything going on now. If you had to name the current phase of the music industry now, what would you call it and why?

Ty: I think [00:07:00] streaming music is in, in my opinion, of streaming music platforms is very mature. Okay. Because there really hasn't been any new features added to streaming music platforms at all in about a decade. what I would say is that we're. We're in the audio realm. We've got high quality audio now, we've got, really good user interface for music.

So the music playing applications are pretty easy to use and people who wanna subscribe or are willing to tolerate ads pretty much get what they want, but I. The audio visual side of music has really been undeveloped completely because it wasn't really part of the concept for those original streaming platforms.

All of the audio visual developments happened in YouTube and in TikTok and on Instagram, so completely outside of what I would consider the core product of music. And so now all the innovation's happening over there, and that to me seems like a mistake. It seems like the music industry could have figured out how to have an audio visual product [00:08:00] in a decade ago and figured out how to integrate that into something that was actually directly benefiting the artists rather than through these other services, which I think do benefit the artists, but in a much smaller way than they could have if it was part of the product.

Dmitri: Interesting. So you're saying in a way, because the music streaming services were so focused on the, simply only on the music, the opportunity for this visual experience in a digital realm got, I don't wanna say hijacked, but

Ty: What lost.

Dmitri: lost or served by other platforms. Platforms where music wasn't really the priority.

Music was an afterthought.

Ty: yes and there's many reasons for that, one of those reasons is rights. Obviously for audio visual, there's synchronization rights and other rights required. So in the good old days of music to have a video or a film or anything you wanna do, you had to go to each publisher that was on the song and get permission on almost a publisher or publisher basis to get the audio visual synchronized to release the film.

And so it was a lot of work to do that. And,there was no such thing as compulsory sync. Okay. Where like the just make it put [00:09:00] it up and it goes up. That was until YouTube was invented. YouTube has compulsory syn and so does TikTok, and so these other doesn't mean that they don't give control of copyright owners, but copyright the first default is the thing goes up in like one second.

You don't have to call anybody, it's up. Then later people can claim the ownership of the money and the things for it, or they can block it if they choose, but it goes up. That's not how it works in the audio visual world. For the companies that are not those companies, so Spotify doesn't have a, music ID sync, auto sync thing, so they would've to get permission or have to license all these things in advance, and so that left user-generated content.

A huge door opener to bring the content of the world is audio visual, just straight onto those platforms. Frankly, without any permission of the content owners. For the most part,

Dmitri: So if you say that the current phase has to do with switching from audio only streaming to this audio visual component with a music mindset, what is it, what does that mean for music right [00:10:00] now? Where, what are the innovations that are

Ty: it's everything.

Dmitri: what, what's gonna be coming down the pike in that space?

Why is that the phase?

Ty: So first of all, this is how young people are getting their music, news, information, culture, everything through these platforms that are YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and a few others. And the reality is that by time they get over to Spotify, they already know what they wanna listen to. And maybe Spotify has playlists and they have popular playlists that people go to discover things as well.

But by and large, it's a listening platform, not a discovery platform. Now, when you talk about these TikTok, being a TikTok is an amazing discovery platform because it's audio visual, because the. Often the musicians, especially the emerging musicians post themselves. So they themselves post, they don't have their team post.

They post and it's a direct communication from the fan to the artist with little or no filter. And they make lots of mistakes and they say crazy stuff they shouldn't say, but it's. [00:11:00] Generally pretty authentic. And so that direct voice audio, visual voice, their face, literally them talking about whatever they're doing, them playing a clip of their song they're developing is extremely captivating.

And so even though it's only 15 seconds long, they can also put out little bits of their songs just as they're developing 'em. Hey, this is the new bridge that I did. Hey, this is this thing. And,artists that are very popular today have become very good at this. and the numbers on those platforms are what drive a lot of the a and r decisions at the labels.

In other words, they look at your TikTok numbers and your Instagram numbers and your Spotify numbers, but I. They'll look at those other ones and say, Hey, this person's already got 7 million followers and 200,000 people a day are tuning in that they should be an artist that's assigned versus the old school way, which is to go to a club and see them perform and go, this is really great music, and there's 150 people there.

And so they don't need to do that now. Now they can just wait and see if the numbers develop.

Dmitri: And are you thinking that, we'll see a shift in how the, the now called traditional music [00:12:00] streaming services,will serve up content? Are they gonna get more visual?

Ty: They're gonna, they're gonna try something slightly different, which I think they should do, which is they're gonna try to develop an artist tier that's kinda like an artist level subscription. So the super fan tier is what it's called. And so you'll get in that they have something that you can't really do on TikTok too easily.

They could give you early access to work and progress. They could give you early access to tracks. They could give you access to tickets and. Photographs and other things that the artist could provide directly through their own channel and some of those artists might move off of those social media platforms we discussed and into this kind of a tier inside the music products.

But it's very tricky to develop such a thing because. there would need to be standards for how one would deploy this information. Those standards would need to work across multiple music services. in the old days when we had vinyl, which we have vinyl today, there's like one format for LP or 40 fives, and they played on all the record players.

Regardless if you bought one from [00:13:00] Sears Row Roebuck, or from, radio Shack. And so the reality is. Unfortunately with digital music, these are all data feeds and the digital music services assembled the product differently in the way that they want. So when you talk about a complicated product, like I just mentioned, a super fan product, how are the industry going to communicate?

this data and the experience and the two-way communication is probably part of it and get that implemented. So that's a big project. I know they're working on it, but it's uh, just how things have evolved. we're kind of in a one-way world on the music platforms. Music goes in there from the labels and comes out the fans.

And this, social media world is two way.

Dmitri: So are you imagining that there might be this premium content that somehow labels or artists or managers could deploy across multiple streaming services at once? Like they

Ty: they're gonna have to because

Dmitri: and iTunes, Apple and YouTube and Amazon.

Ty: Yes, and I think that's what, that's the challenge. they're already doing this in social media. 'cause the, there [00:14:00] are tools that allow cross posting of content. So you can post once with this tool and then the tool will get the content out on Instagram, out on Facebook. in other words, there's already tools that let.

Artists not have to log into every app and post, but we're talking about something much more complicated in the video clip. And so it's gonna be interesting to see. It's really necessary because,one of the challenges we also have is that, music right now is. really hasn't it?

It went up a dollar, a year ago or whatever, but it's, like net Netflix goes up about a dollar an hour. I have no idea what Netflix is now. so the reality is that we are not very good. I. It, monetizing, I think what we have and the super fan could give back a little bit of the, 'cause there will be more, it might be $20 a month to be a super fan for an artist or something.

So the reality is it could give back some revenue directly to the artist. It would help the smaller artists because even the smaller artists have 2000 crazy vans who could pay them [00:15:00] $20 a month. That's a lot of money. right now there's just no way for the super fans to really contribute more except for buying tickets or merchandise.

And there's no way to,take care of the whales, or in the old days, or they used to call those guys the whales, which I was one of these guys that would come into the CD store. And I would leave with like $500 or a thousand dollars in CDs and I would come home and my wife would kick me outta the house.

And that was like every couple weeks, and I'd apologize for buying those things. So there was a guy, I'm a guy spending 500 bucks to a thousand dollars a month. I can't spend that right now. I can, I have just have to buy one Taylor Swift ticket, but I can't spend it on our products.

Dmitri: Yeah. Yeah. So it's how do you get back to helping fans who wanna not only support an artist, but have that kind of

Ty: these people were consuming massive amounts of stuff and they were collecting it and they are doing it today, by the way. Vinyl, as you know, is back, and people are collecting it like crazy.

Dmitri: I don't know if they play it. I, but they sure look at it.

yeah. Exactly. Alright, we've gotta take [00:16:00] a quick break and when we come back we have to talk about another pivotal moment we haven't talked about. Really ai. We'll be right back. Okay, we're back. Ty. I did not expect any of your answers. This is great. It's exactly what we need on,on these kinds of conversations.

AI is transforming music creation and raising questions about IP licensing and monetization. Are you pro ai? Are you anti ai? Where do you see the intersection of music and AI in the next five years?

Ty: I have to say I'm pro AI because I don't think there's any way to avoid it. It would be like saying I'm against the internet. by the way, new things like the internet cause mass disruptions Oh, of it good. Some of it bad. I AI will be the same. And, the trick is to try to figure out a society, how to minimize the bad stuff and maximize the good stuff.

And, the bad stuff is exactly how you opened with, which is, creators need to be respected and need to be remunerated in some way. And the industry's gonna work its way through that somehow. I [00:17:00] don't know how it will ultimately work out, but, uh, I feel it. Well. Um, and the side that I think is very positive is, That it will lower the costs of being able to create things and gave much more power to the creators that are just starting out. So, you know, it's already doing this for films. I've been looking at some really amazing student films that students are doing now where they can like literally take their script and.

Visualize it, but with space aliens or whatever, they would never be able to afford to hire, industrial light magic to do that for them. They had, they could do it themselves. And these are short form today. They're not, these are not, we're not competing with Hollywood movies yet, but it's allowing them to get their ideas out there and, I imagine that.

Pretty soon, a lot of people pitching new audio visual programs will actually send like a AI generated version of it with AI voices playing the actors with AI scenes in there. And they'll be able to do that for like a thousand bucks [00:18:00] and or less, and that will really help a lot of filmmakers visualize their ideas, not just be lucky to be the ones that can find the funding from their friends or family.

And so I'm happy about that. And in music, I think it will allow people to, experiment with new ideas and experiment in genres of music that they themselves don't know how to play. I haven't really thought about, what, some of the new music's gonna be, but, when I hear these things today, I think AI's got a long way to go to reach the point where it's, directly competitive with the pop hits of today.

and even if it was, are the pop hits of today really about the music? I would claim that they are only 25% about the music and 70% about the personality of the people, who they are, what they're doing, what they're saying, where they're going. The music is like the soundtrack to these guys, audio visual lives.

So it's gonna be hard for it to make up, you know, Sabrina Carpenter to [00:19:00] pick an artist who I really like and who's just like doing all this amazing stuff and could do her music. Probably it could do something like her music. Is it really gonna figure out how to be her? No way. And so the reality is their personality of the person in the realm where the person is not visible in the realm of, music for films or for, industrials or soundtracks for other things, it probably will be able to compete there more effectively because you don't need.

The cult of the personality. You don't need to know there's a person behind it. You don't need to know what it is. You certainly could benefit from it. obviously I'd like to see films where Trent Resner does the soundtrack. 'cause I'd like Trent Resner. But you know, if it was, Trent tour and I don't even know who that is, I may not care that much about it, but if the music was great, I'd still enjoy the film.

So I think it's a complex subject and we can talk about any part of it that you want.

Dmitri: I, I do wanna talk a little bit about it. The,the big question right now is where are the courts and where is the law going to land with, Unlicensed training data for generative AI companies. [00:20:00] And I don't necessarily know whether you should try to predict what that outcome's gonna be.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on tv. right, right now, whatever lawyers think seems to be, the rules seem to be changing beneath our feet about everything in

Ty: Yeah, the challenge really is that the systems that currently exist could be changed so that the attribution or the training data is something that they could keep track of. It doesn't seem like that's impossible. The current ones have not been built that way to keep track of how every inference is created.

And something like that would be necessary so that when you generate a track and you say, dude, make this thing, it can say, well this is 4% Taylor Swift's, blah blah song, and 2% this, and 3% that. coming up with that recipe would be important to figuring out how to compensate somebody. and right now that's not really how these things think.

They more. Unfortunately think a little bit more like they don't think like the human mind, but they work like the human mind a little bit. and so you think [00:21:00] about it, if I'm a musician and I've spent my whole life. Listening to music, watching people perform, listening to records. I've internalized all this information and when I make a song and it comes out and it sounds like LCD sound system or it sounds like the Rolling Stones, even though it's not really there, I certainly learned from some of the stuff that they did maybe.

And so the problem is that's where it gets tricky and in the. Normal world when this happens, if it's too close and there's money involved in the actual success of the track, they often go to court and say, I wrote Stairway to Heaven, or You wrote this, and these are very big cases that have come and gone before us.

They're fairly rare, quite frankly, and it's really hard to prove. So I think. A better tactic of not trying to prove it that way with AI is to get these systems to create the attribution data as part of the platform and it seems like it should be technically possible. I'm not an expert in how to make a scalable system like that, but it would be something that I think would help society if we could really do it.

Dmitri: it could be done on the backend too, in terms of if you search [00:22:00] for a Trent Resner track or a nine inch Nails track, if you've used the search to create the song, then clearly, that's maybe who should be, paid for using the

Ty: Yes. But if you go to the sync platforms, and you're doing film soundtracks and I have a really good friend who's in that business, they use, they want a Trent Rener song. So they'll say, I want a Trent Rener song and I wanna find something that has edgy in this. And then they'll find, the.

Small, independent guy with Studio who's getting something that sounds like that. Because ultimately in a film, I think you probably know this, but like a scene with a song in it, it like, if it's 15 seconds, it's a huge long time in the film. There's no, nobody's playing Stairway to Heaven for six and a half minutes in a film, except if it's Led Zeppelin film.

so they just want the feeling of it. And so the question is, is that something that AI is gonna be able to do and how are we gonna compensate people for it? It's really tricky,

Dmitri: if you were the decision maker at a major record label, would you be working towards [00:23:00] monetizing, the monetizing generative AI out outputs, or would you be working towards trying to stop them from

Ty: I think trying to stop it is like I said, would you rather try to stop Google or make Google? So the answer is.

Dmitri: In the past.

Ty: Right, right. So the, so really I would be doing the following. First of all, I would be trying to understand the people who are the talented artists, which are kind of like the producers of the past, who really understand how to make things with this technology and make things that other people want.

And I would be, I. Finding those people as rapidly as possible. I'd be learning as much about this. I'd be trying to figure out what my unique angle and secret sauce to this is. I, of course, would be working on the side, trying to get attribution and payment working properly so that I can get out there.

But like I would be the master of ai,

Dmitri: You'd build your own generative AI on the content you.

Ty: I'd have the best generative AI the world's ever seen.

Dmitri: I love it. That's great, Ty, [00:24:00] you keep twisting me upside down. I love it. This is awesome. I wanna change gears. You have, a lot of background also in high tech live events. I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit about what's the status of mixed reality, high tech, live events, domes, avatars, all that.

Where is it heading?

Ty: let's break it down, Tiffany. at the time we're recording this, Coachella was just last weekend, and so anybody who watched the Coachella Couch cast, which essentially is YouTube broadcasting Coachella both weekends this week, this year, which was truly fantastic. certainly much easier on my feet and my lungs.

I hate to say it older person than the many times that I went there, but. What I saw and what I was watching was a very interesting thing. First of all, all of the script stages now are massive. LED powered audio visual displays. Okay? It was very rare to see an artist, first of all, very rare to see a band.

there weren't very many bands. There was a lot of artists,and a lot of people with backing tracks with a giant visual show, which [00:25:00] was truly fantastic. and what's changed about that is, is that. The artists of today, these pop artists of today, have to be the masters of their visual show.

And on an epic scale, like, on the screen that's for. 200,000 people, that's 60 foot tall, all wraparound. and there's the people who understand how to do that. And then there's the people who are on the stage with the generic backing loops that the AV crew can throw up for you 'cause they've come prepared with media and just a world difference.

I was amazed at Charlie XCX. This is like one woman with a vocoder on the main stage with a massive audio visual display and lights insane beats, essentially. Singing her heart out and dancing and doing whatever she's doing. It's one person. One person on that stage with the amplification of that system, held the audience.

They loved it. So the reality is, yes, there were Lady Gaga with, I don't know what, 30 dancers and a massive super well choreographed display. Again, all [00:26:00] audio visual and the biggest change that I see in this is that because of YouTube and the other broadcast networks, Hulu, I think does Lollapalooza and others.

They're producing two shows now. It used to be the video at the live performance was only for what's called imag for blowing up the artists. So people way in the back could see Lady Gaga's face. They are doing that, but they're producing for the at home audience. Now a, I'll call it Grammy Awards Level tv, special for Lady Gaga and it's multi-camera.

It's got people on stage. It's all a hundred percent shot blocked. In other words. They had to work with her in a warehouse before she ever even got there to figure out all the camera moves. So when they dropped that thing at LAPOs, the at home audience is seeing everything exactly as she imagined it, and they know exactly where she's gonna be at every shot.

They can't have a guy with a steady cam with 30 dancers just wandering around, he'd be run over. So all of that was thought of advance. And so I would just say is in the live entertainment realm. It's all about AV baby and certainly festivals. which is, hard if you're just a band with some great [00:27:00] songs, and you don't really run around and look great on video,MTVs just move to the live stage.

So that's that, in the realm of, avatars, we can talk about that. I think we're aware of the ABA Voyage Show in London's Done incredibly well. It's sold out like 98% of the time, for years now with basically Abba, the Avatars, which is what they're called, the Avatars, singing and Dance, along with a live band.

And it's absolutely a fantastic show and it's extremely cleverly thought out. The entire experience is designed to make the video screen imperceivable, and that's done through lighting and special effects and smoke, and just thought about how it's organized. So when you're there, you suspend disbelief just like you do in a movie.

I'm really not. On the train dangling off the cliff with Tom Cruise. Okay. But I'm in a movie theater and I'm watching that and it's so well done. I'm on the train dangling with Tom Cruise, so this is the equivalent of [00:28:00] that. it's a little like a magic trick. Basically, you're getting people to believe they're there and they absolutely believe they're there and have a blast every single night, twice a night sometimes.

And so that show is now morphing into the next production by that company, which is called Pop House, and they're gonna do KISS in Las Vegas. Okay. Only kiss will be different. It won't be so much dancing. It'll probably be a lot more explosions and, uh, who knows what else. but the reality is these are also single purpose venues.

In other words, the whole venue, the whole design of it is like a ride that you would get at Universal Studios. So it's Harry Potter ride, except it's more like the Gene Simmons kiss ride. And you're gonna go on it from the second you enter the door to the second you leave. And these are. $500 million musical products.

so it's just a completely different scale, and I feel like this will extend over the next decade to many of the artists, especially as they either pass away, hate [00:29:00] to say it, or they just decide to stop touring. They will come back in, Avatar form and I'm waiting for, of course, my favorite artist, David Bowie to do that.

he's not quite doing it yet, but I'm sure quite a few others are in discussions about thinking about it and how they might do it. The business model is really interesting because it's not just about the live show. These companies are acquiring the rights to the music. They acquire the artist share of the rights.

So the whole idea is you put the band back on tour kiss back on tour, and you own them recording rights and the recording rights that you paid for At the level they're at today, the amount of interest goes up five times and now you're recording rights are worth. Five times. So it's a combination of rights and shows never been done.

it's really not the business of record companies to put on live shows, and build venues. And this is a world where you're merging those together. So it's kind of like a new kind of record company buddy.

Dmitri: that is wild. I love the way you put it in context. You know, we started off, I asked you [00:30:00] about these pivotal moments. We talked about, the now of the AV world and you've brought it back. Again, when we started talking about live events and high tech live events. Let's do one more question for you, Ty.

what's emerging in the future that the music industry isn't discussing yet, but should be talking about? What, let's go into the future even further now.

Ty: Okay. Even further in the future. Well, I think what's gonna have actually happened is, first of all, I do believe that the immersive experience technology, both in the augmented reality and the virtual reality, will eventually arrive. It might take another 10 years. I don't know when it's gonna be like eyeglasses that I put on, and they had a really lightweight, and they're super awesome, but I feel like it'll eventually get there.

And so what that means is that you're not. 'cause we're still quite far away from that. You're not likely to get immersive at home. So that means immersive means you need to go out to the KISS thing and see it. And so what's gonna happen, it's gonna be different is these things. Today are films.

So in other words, the ABBA Show and the KISS Show are [00:31:00] largely, I don't know what all the features the Kiss will be, but they're basically preconceived shows. So if you go back the next night or even the show later in the day, it's exactly the same. For the most part. and in the future, this will be game engine driven so that the avatar show will be, generated in part just before you go through the

Door. Probably be generated earlier in the day. And what this will allow is during the show, let's say it's for Elvis and the people note that Bob is there with his wife and they're celebrating their, I don't know, 30th wedding anniversary or it's your birthday and. Elvis will know that information in advance.

The AI will generate a segment, and Elvis during the show will know that you are sitting in seat six A and he will turn to seat six A and he will look down and say, happy Birthday, and he will wish you Happy Birthday in Elvis', voice to you. And so the shows will become personalized first in that. In between part where the thing interacts with the audience or in other places, maybe you're gonna go up to the suite and meet Elvis upstairs in his suite at the hotel [00:32:00] and he's gonna talk to you.

And so that would be the first part. And then later beyond that is fully generative live performance. So what happens then is we start now we're bringing back the Rolling Stones only. We've got Brian Jones back, he's back, and we're getting to experience them. And you're gonna see some stuff that you just never thought was possible.

It would be very unlikely that Brian Jones in 1969 is gonna cover, the latest chapel Rone Pink Pony Club. But we're gonna see it. That's what's gonna happen. And people will go, yeah, of course. I don't know what the Stone's version of that's gonna be like, but you know, who knows? So I would just say those combinations which have been done in physical space.

there was a band, I think it still exists, called Dred Zeppelin, mixed reggae and Led Zeppelin. That's coming and I think it's, you know, all these kind of mind-bending ideas are must see moments if they're done well. And I think the key is they've gotta be done well, schlock sets people back.

genius pushes people forward.

Dmitri: We have gone [00:33:00] back to the future with Ty Roberts. This has been a blast. Ty, thanks so much for coming on the Music Tectonics podcast and sharing your past, and your present, and your future. This has been a blast.

Ty: Dmitri, you're a genius yourself. Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.

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.