Adam McHeffey, CMO of Artiphon, joins us to talk about the state of musical instrument innovation. Instruments like the Orba put music creation at the fingertips of hobbyists, allowing them to focus on enjoyment and self-expression rather than traditional album releases. We discuss the fusion of music and social media, and the new generation of creators redefining the art form. Lines between listening and playing are blurring, (see Ocean Eyes remix on Logic Pro X) pointing to a future where music engagement is akin to gaming, providing endless possibilities for interactivity and connection.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
0:00:10 - Dmitri
Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vietze. I'm also the founder and CEO of the marketing and PR company Rock Paper Scissors, where we work with a variety of music tech, musical instrument, music innovation companies, and we are a couple of weeks out from NAMM, the big musical instrument trade show in Anaheim, california. I started going back a few years ago and found out there's a whole world of cool stuff happening there in terms of the innovation and the inventions that are happening in musical instruments, as well as software. And today we're bringing back to this show Artiphon CMO, adam McHeffey, because he'll be at NAMM and he's going to help us. We had him about a year ago, basically from right before NAMM as well, and he's great at sort of painting a picture of what's going on in the musical instrument world.
As you may remember, adam spent his career at the intersection of music, art and business. He spent a decade touring as a multi-instrumentalist with several bands and as a music educator. He's great on stage. He was at the Music Tectonic Creator Fair and I felt like a student and I was learning so much. It was super fun. You got to see this guy with his instrument, the Orba, in his hands, and you can at NAMM. It's this experience that allows them to bring music-making tools to the rest of the world. At Artiphon, adams directed several record-breaking Kickstarter campaigns Very, very inspirational and he led product launches for Instrument One, orba, corda those are the names of the instruments that Artiphon has released. As a brand and marketing strategist with expertise in music tech, adam has his finger on the pulse of the emerging musical instrument market and its intersection with new creators, which is what I want to talk to him about. Welcome back to the show.
0:01:54 - Adam
Adam. Thank you, Dmitri. I am so happy to be here.
0:01:59 - Dmitri
So what is the state of the new musical instrument invention as we kick off 2025?
0:02:05 - Adam
I believe the last time we chatted I said you know, originally 10 years ago, when Artiphon first started, we were sort of the weird kids. We were doing some stuff that nobody had done before. We were creating strange multi-instruments and trying to market them as consumer electronics, and it really was strange. We always felt early and that's not necessarily a good thing. I'm not bragging here. That actually made business really difficult for a while.
I do think that the world has changed and I'm looking at several new products that have dropped just in the past 30, 60, 90 days and I'm really inspired what I see. Search for Orchid, which is a new instrument that Tame Impala helped to create. It looks gorgeous, all of the marketing materials are fantastic and they're really branding this as a song idea generator, not as an 88-key piano or synthesizer. Look at what Ableton just released with the Ableton Move. Historically, the hardware that Ableton releases is $800,000, $900,000. This is much, much less expensive, much more portable, smaller in form factor, and you can even just tell from the way that they're positioning it, the way that they're marketing it, that this is a little bit more of a play towards beginner and novice creators, and you can say the same for several instruments on the software side.
I'm always inspired by what Output does. Output just went through a major rebrand play it out, sing it out, work it out. It's a really sharp marketing campaign and you saw a lot more diversity in that commercial in terms of the age range of the players, the type of music that they were making. So I really think that this music for the masses is happening right now. I believe that music really is being democratized. There's more music being made than ever before and I think that we have this evolving technology to thank for it.
0:04:14 - Dmitri
Yeah, that's super interesting. As you talk about those form factors as well as the software and the marketing that Output's doing, it does kind of indicate a bit of a shift in a way right A sort of like your first instrument might not be what the previous generation's first instrument was. You know, you might not have to pick up a violin or a piano or a guitar or a band instrument as your first instrument, the orchid that you mentioned. It doesn't even have what does it have like one octave worth of piano keys on it.
0:04:44 - Adam
Yeah, one very small octave.
0:04:46 - Dmitri
And you don't have to know what the chords are. You play a note and it plays chords, so there's like this it's. I mean, people are talking about AI and how, the impact of AI, but these are just new form factor instruments that you're talking about and new, just ways of conceiving of what's your first note going to be, what's your first song going to be?
0:05:02 - Adam
Absolutely. I think it's all following musical listening tastes in a way, right. I mean, just when I grew up playing guitar, we were listening to Blink-182 and Green Day, so that made guitar lessons really obvious what you were going to learn. Music is wild right now, and there's just no shortage of exploration there, so I think that the instruments are following suit. It's not that crazy for a high schooler's first instrument to be some old beat up laptop with pirated software on it. That's the status quo. That's what my nephew's doing. He doesn't know how to play guitar. He knows how to draw with a pencil in Ableton, and I believe that's just as valid.
0:05:44 - Dmitri
Amazing. Wow, what a way to start this conversation off. Let's talk about how Artiphon fits into this. What's new with your company?
0:05:51 - Adam
Well, there is a new product. It's called Orba 3. And if it seems like we make a lot of Orbas, it's because we do Really. My whole job at the company is just trying to see what the customer is asking for that we're able to put back into the hardware. One of these things is instant sampling.
So we have heard from people we would love to put a few custom sounds on this thing. We would love it if I could put my own sounds on it. We actually did that with Orbit 2, but you had to use the app. It was a clunky process with cables and so we said let's just put the microphone right on the device itself. This is what people have wanted for a long time and it is so fast and so fun. You saw the demos at Music Tectonics. We'll do a lot more demoing at NAMM. Very, very happy to have this out in the world, and so far there have been rave reviews from customers. People have called it an extremely intuitive sampler, one of the faster samplers out there, and it really, really is fast, and one of the reasons for that is that we've been building on this technology stack for a few years now, so we're able to get this to market relatively quickly and have a relatively smooth experience.
0:07:02 - Dmitri
Very cool. So you've got the Orba 3 and you're starting to kind of get feedback from the market. That that's yeah, that's a new way to make music really.
0:07:13 - Adam
Yeah, absolutely, and that's just on the product side, in terms of the market, and that's most of what I think about. We're doing so much more with education and music wellness right now, and I see this as one of the biggest goals for 2025. When we survey our customers, what do you do with it? What do you use this for? Say that, but you wouldn't believe how many people come back to us and say I use this for relaxation, I use this specifically for music therapy. It's unbelievable. I couldn't make it up if I tried. So I see 2025 as a year of really following that thread and seeing where it leads, and some of that is working with different nonprofit partners. Some of it's working with actual music therapists out in the field. We're doing some work with children hospitals right now, and I think that that's really, really an exciting next step for us.
0:08:16 - Dmitri
It's like a hung drum for the Nintendo generation.
You can play in your pocket, exactly, yeah, yeah, cool, awesome. So, speaking of speaking of which, um, what are you seeing in terms of this emerging generation of new music makers? You mentioned that they're using it for, for wellness, um and uh, it just seems like the, the art of fun, and the Orba kind of represents this emergence of people. You mentioned your nephew, you know this emergence of people who, um, aren't following a traditional path, but they are making music. They may or may not be releasing music, or maybe not yet, but, and you all, you guys, also seem kind of associated with a lot that's happening in the social video world as well. Anyway, what are you seeing in terms of this emerging generation of people who are making music that may not fit the traditional demographic or?
0:09:07 - Adam
stereotype. I think the creators who are successful on social media right now are the ones who are understanding that the videos, the content that you create, really it doesn't have to be separate from the music creation. There are a lot of people and they're completely valid with this opinion. It's like spend all this time learning and creating music. Why do I also then have to make a video of it? I don't blame them for feeling that way, but I also think that they're more frustrated than their peers who are embracing that and learning how to be creative within the video music format. You have these creators who are releasing a single, making several music videos for it, different formats, different parts of the song, live version it's actually not all that different than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but the people who are nailing that and really leaning into that, I see them doing best on social media and having the most fun with it, and so when I think about if see them doing best on social media and having the most fun with it, and so when I think about if I were working with a young creator or suggesting to a young creator how to begin to leverage all these different social platforms, that probably my recommendation is to treat it like this is a holistic art form and there's absolutely a way to do that and still be true to yourself and true to your music and just have this really colorful display. And music has always had a visual component to it. It's always had a video component to it for a very long time, so I don't see that as entirely new and I'm inspired when people do it really well. Those are some of my favorite accounts to follow.
Yeah, and then to your question about you know, just emerging, emerging trends here. You said you, you know I use my nephew as an example. You're right, he's not releasing albums right now. That's not on the radar for him at all. I think this might be new. When I was growing up and playing in bands, making the record, selling the records, going on tour, like those were the goals. I think that more music is being made now just for personal fun and personal, you know, personal consumption, uh, playing it as a hobby, which is, of course, so obvious, obvious and why it's there. I see people forming bands not for the sake of trying to go viral on Spotify, but rather just to enjoy, and I certainly hope that that trend continues.
0:11:36 - Dmitri
Yeah, it's interesting. Also, back in late October at the Music Tectonics Conference, while you're over on stage, well, the day after you were on stage at the Creator Fair, we had Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano having this debate about the listen platforms versus the play platforms, and I think this is where this convergence is happening between the recording industry and the musical instrument field, where people go from listening to playing and they might be playing in a way that's you know, it's the first thing they can do the easy access, not the. Your parents got you lessons to musical instruments but you like it's more like oh, I'm video gaming one minute and then I'm literally using my same thumbs that I'm using on a video game controller on an Orba and starting to make some beats or some loops and things like that, and so it feels it's got that interactive quality. That's not. It's not for specifically because you're following your educational path that your parents put in front of you, and it's not for professional necessarily.
0:12:31 - Adam
What happens if you take that three or five steps further? What happens when the two truly converge? What if the listening experience isn't all that different than the playing experience, something that certain companies easier to do with software, I think are starting to experiment with the ever-changing song, being able to remix it, whether it's Billy Eilish releasing Ocean Eyes on Logic Pro, so people could play along with it. I think that's a starter version of it. Here's Logic Pro. This is a DAW that you're able to play with. We're giving you Billie Eilish and Phineas' session for Ocean Eyes so you can learn how they did it. You can play around with the tracks. We are giving you the pieces, have fun. That, to me, represents maybe the start of a new way of we're listening and we're interacting with the music at the same time, and that's just one of 100 examples. And we're interacting with the music at the same time, and that's just one of 100 examples.
0:13:31 - Dmitri
I'm very excited for that momentous change. Yeah, super cool. Hey, we have to take a quick break, but when we come back let's dig a little bit more into the relationship between social video creators and the musical instrument professional industry. Let's say We'll be right back. Open your calendar app, get your planner, take a note the Music Tectonics Conference will be back November 4th through 6th 2025. You saw how great it was in 2024, if not in person, then on LinkedIn and Instagram. We're doing it again in 2025. Same great venues, same great beach, interstellar programming, galaxy-wide network. You ought to be a part of it. So see you in Santa Monica on November 4th through 6th 2025. Want to get updates? Tap the musictectonicscom link in the episode show notes and get on our mailing list. See you there. Okay, we're back.
This has been super interesting already Great icebreaker conversation so far, hearing what you're up to and starting to get some big picture context here. Something that's really intriguing to me, which came out at the Music Tectonics Creator Fair, was this relationship between these social video makers and the musical instrument companies themselves and sort of like what the relationships and the dynamics are there. You know, are musical instrument companies sort of capturing the excitement of these video creators, engaging with them, etc. How do social video makers fit into the musical instrument world today? I mean you've talked about it in terms of those just organic creativity that's happening there, but what else are you seeing as it relates to the industry that we're about to meet up with at NAMM?
0:15:05 - Adam
So when we're talking so this is just marketing advice, then you can't launch a new instrument without a robust creator engagement plan. Doing my best to avoid the words influencer marketing, just because it's got a stigma these days. Call it creator engagement. Okay, change that in the documents team and that that can really. That can really span, and what we're talking about this could be your user generated content plan. We could be talking about macro or micro influencers, or we could be talking about celebrities, and even if you're just choosing to do a handful of those, even if you only have a few prototypes to send out, this is going to be an important part of any musical instrument release, hardware or software, and there are a few reasons for that. One is, despite how good you are at spending money on meta, until you have real third-party validation by real people really playing the instrument, people are going to question whether it's real or not. A lot of these newer musical instrument companies are using Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a platform that I love. Artiphon would not be where it was without it, but there are a lot of projects that don't get funded there, so people have their guard up around new musical instruments and new form factors.
It's very hard to manufacture stuff. These days, it's very hard to deliver on exactly what you set out to do, and so making sure that you're putting your product in the hands of a few artists, creators, power users, making sure that those videos make their way onto YouTube, instagram, tiktok, facebook Don't forget people. Facebook is bigger than YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. If you want to hamstring your business really fast, forget about Facebook. But that is where most of the world is 3 billion users, and if only you're doing the work to seed user-generated content and making sure that you're adding that to your website, sharing that, turning that into your advertisements, you're going to want some version of real people really playing.
But take it one step further. Let's say you do have everything you need to launch a really great campaign here. What an amazing opportunity to test different markets. There are absolutely hundreds and hundreds of creators specifically that review musical instrument products. But go beyond that. Let's say you do have a product specifically for wellness. Well, now you can tap into an influencer network that is so much more expansive, maybe. Maybe what you do is specifically musical instruments for education. Well, there's so many online music educators with great personalities who maybe could really put a different spin on this and when you use creators in your marketing, you really you win twice. You win by getting a great piece of content, something different than what your brand is able to produce, and then you win again when they share it to their own audience. So you really always just maximizing your efforts there. I've never walked away from a well thought through creator engagement campaign and said that wasn't worth it. It lives on and on for years in a way that maybe paid social advertising does not.
0:18:47 - Dmitri
You guys are masters at this too. I remember when we first met a few years ago, going to your website and it was just a bunch of videos of people using your instrument and I was like wait, am I on Pinterest? No, this is the Artiphon website and it's just like video after video. I know it's in the community highlights section of still do that?
0:19:06 - Adam
no, we still, we still do that. If you go to Artiphon, uh, you scroll to the bottom, you will see this. It actually is endless, it just keeps scrolling there. There are thousands of videos from users. It used to be that we didn't vet those at all. We would. Just if you tagged Artiphon, it just appeared there automatically and that got a little too dangerous as we grew as a company. But we, yeah, we were on the bleeding edge of that one and we we still make sure to do that. Uh, adding these videos to the checkout page and making sure you're sharing this with retail partners. It's a great way to very quickly get people to wrap their head around the instrument, whatever it is.
0:19:46 - Dmitri
I mean, you guys, you guys are a role model for how we approach it now at Rock Paper Scissors, with with clients as well, which is super cool to see, but it's yeah. I mean, if you want to see an engaged community, go to the Artiphon website or or Instagram and see what what's happening there. And you know you are a great music educator. We invited you to interview a social video influencer sides on stage at the music tectonics creator fair last October, which was great. Your talk with her was amazing.
You guys were just dropping gold after gold, after platinum. I'm curious did you learn anything new from her? What? What came out of that conversation?
0:20:20 - Adam
She had all sorts of just tidbits right. Just people were scribbling in their notebooks the entire time. What I learned from her personally? She was unapologetically cutthroat with her approach towards business and just looking out for her own well-being. At the same time, she you can tell you know she's found a way to build her business, generate revenue surprisingly good amount of it for a sole proprietorship only take on brands, clients that she wants to, and it seems that she's done this without compromising her artistic integrity at all. In fact, it seems that now she's got her business and her money figured out, she feels more creative and happy than ever.
It's been a while since I've seen somebody so blatantly say all of that very clearly and just put all of that on display and say this is how I've engineered my life. I put a lot of time into thinking about how I want it to go, and then I executed on it and it took me four years. And here I am and I'm not, hopefully not putting words in her mouth. Go look at some of her Instagram content recently. This is the sort of overarching lesson that I'm inspired by from her is it's okay to ask for what you want. It's okay to shape up your life any way that you want it, and it's okay to focus on things like revenue generation while also being a musician and making music that you love. She's found a way to do that really well.
0:22:02 - Dmitri
Yeah, no, I agree, that's what I heard from her as well when you interviewed her on stage. And, by the way, if you want to look her up on Instagram, her name is Sabrina Seidman, but her username is Seids S-E-I-D-S underscore on Instagram. She's on other platforms too, but that's the big one and she I think she started generating a following by doing Logic Pro tips quite a lot, and that's a big focus of her content. But she also demonstrates instruments and, you know, tells people about events. She's going to um and and also just makes music. And I remember she said, you know, she didn't want to be tied to kind of the A&R expectations of a record label, and so she developed these multiple revenue streams to give her that creative freedom that you were talking about, adam, and now she teaches other people how to do the same thing. So she's kind of she's the Tony Robbins of musical instrument creators in a way, minus any concerns you have with Tony Robbins, she's not gonna make you walk across coals barefooted.
0:23:02 - Adam
Not yet. I could see her doing that at the Sides Instagram TikTok boot camp in 2027.
0:23:09 - Dmitri
Maybe so, but she's very inspirational and she is very like. She feels very authentic and transparent about what she's doing, why she's doing it, how she's doing it, and inviting other people in as well, which is super cool. Who are some other interesting social video influencers we should be paying attention to?
0:23:23 - Adam
I'm not going to give you any of the obvious ones. Okay, seth davis, at I'm seth drums, asks ai to generate hit country songs and then he plays drums along to them and we hear them for the first time with him. So he's a good drummer, but he's cracking up so hard that he can barely play. I'd love it. Social repose this is a uh, an artist who dresses sort of like a witch, warlock, warrior, guarish from some other century and and plane of existence and goes in front of waterfalls which look like they are in a very, very different country than the United States maybe Iceland or something and he plays covers from the early 2000s in a very emo voice. But he's got an extremely strong voice and everybody comments on it. Am I supposed to like this? I'm not really sure, but I can't help but watch all of your videos and I feel the exact same way. I just listen to it and feel something in my soul. It's it. You think it's meant to be a joke and then you start watching it.
The thing, the thing, thing that these two accounts have in common is that they found something so particular and they ran with it. I don't think that. You know. I probably watched dozens of videos from each of those creators. I don't think that they've ever deviated from from the template that I just told you about. Everybody loves it. It's so either funny or emotional. I'm always left either cackling or just feeling a little bit more levity in my chest. Both of these accounts feel like they're always giving me something, a little respite just from a stressful day maybe, and they're both just very, very strange and different, and I like that an awful lot, and certainly you need to do something different if you want to stand out these days. I feel like both of those people didn't try too hard to find it, it just felt right to them in the moment, and then they continue to iterate on it.
0:25:48 - Dmitri
Yeah, they've got the discipline to stick with it. I mean, I remember, you know, the emergence of Vine. It's so funny Everyone talks about TikTok but literally Vine was the first TikTok and there's still some Vine videos floating around. No-transcript creativity, right, because you have to stay within these certain bounds and you get more and more creative. Within that there's like this ricochet effect of what are the few variables that you can tweak. And then it's kind of like genre in a way. I've always thought about music. To really understand a genre of music, you have to know what rules have to stay there and then you have to know what rules you break or change to become your individual voice. That makes you an icon or a beacon within your genre. And it's like they've created their own genres and they're not music specific. Sometimes they're visual genres, right, absolutely their own genres.
0:27:03 - Adam
And they're not music specific. Sometimes they're visual genres, right, absolutely. Uh, I, you should teach music or art theory or something, Dmitri, I don't know. I don't know what I can, what I can add onto that. But yeah, you, it's almost like you don't get extra points for trying to come up with new styles of video as a, as a brand or an artist, right, it's like repeating yourself is sort of the whole trick, and you know, obviously, he's not singing the same song every time. Obviously, seth Drums is finding a new AI Cowboy Country song, but we know what to expect every time we come back, and I think we like that. I mean, we're going on to Instagram, let's admit it to turn off our brain for a split second. It's nice wondering what they're going to do next. Now I really am along for the journey. Did you see the latest one? He did so funny. So I think that there's a lot of power in repetition there.
0:28:00 - Dmitri
Right, it's like the format helps communicate to you as the listener or the viewer that you're on the inside. Once you know what the format is, you know you get it. Next time you see one of their videos, you're not. What the hell are they doing? Looking like a warlock? Why are they doing country songs with AI? You know like you don't have to ask those questions. You can more be like oh, now I see you start to see those artistic variations from song to song or video to video, which is pretty cool.
I have another broad level question, adam. I want to ask you and it's something that we come back to a lot at Music Tectonics. I think it's something that you and I are both interested in personally, and I assume that our listeners, if you're out there listening, I'm assuming this is a topic that you're okay that I keep bringing our guests back to. But, adam, I want to get your perspective. What connections do you see, if any, between the musical instrument industry and the recording industry? And I think it's interesting because they are oddly separate industries, right, you don't see a lot of people jump from career to working at a musical instrument company and then going working at a record label. That's just not a that's not a common pathway.
I do think that everybody not everybody, lots of people in the record industry are working at a streaming service, are also musicians, so they know that world. They might go and buy a bunch of guitar pedals, they might buy synths, but somehow from a business perspective they have different, they have different target audiences or something which keeps them kind of in a separate world. But I think Artiphon in your work starts to make it feel like these things are converging. You know, when you partner with an artist, whether they're going to have samples on one of your instruments or because they're a creator that's out there, that, yeah, maybe they're on Instagram and TikTok and maybe they do put some songs out on Spotify as well. Anyway, what connections do you see between these formerly siloed industries?
0:29:46 - Adam
I definitely believe they're becoming less siloed. So I'm with you there. One of the Warner Music Group-led artifans Series A. So, case in point, that's a very close example to artifan and everything that we're doing. But why did Warner Music Group do that? Why did they decide to invest in a Nashville tech startup? It's because they understand that technology is going to drive innovation, not just in the instruments that we create, but also the music that's produced.
The listening and interacting conversation that we had before is very real and happening before our eyes. Bigger way, whether it's by remixing the stems or going to a concert and doing some augmented reality experience on an app. Who knows where the chips are going to land with this and who knows what fans and users are actually going to want to do? But it's getting closer and closer. Another good example of this is that Lug, the guitar company that specifically makes guitars for children fantastic company with a great brand just did a partnership with the Beatles the Beatles catalog and now you can learn Beatles songs on this three-string guitar.
How genius is that? This is typically a pretty difficult catalog to access here, but I think that the mission there is so clear and so strong let's get more kids learning these Beatles covers. What a fantastic library of music to use in educational materials. It just all makes sense. So that, to me, is an example of a really close partnership between Catalog of Music and the rights holders there and a musical instrument company. So it's happening every day, and I'm sure there are so many more examples that we can look at when we talk into AI and STEM separation, but those are just a handful that come to mind. There's no question that there's more meetings on the books between labels and instrument companies than ever before.
0:32:18 - Dmitri
Well, and I do want to talk about AI a little later in this conversation, but I am really intrigued by what you just said, because one of the problems that I've struggled to sort of solve around this connection between the musical instrument world and the recording industry is, I thought that maybe the recording industry should be paying attention to the music creation generation, because it's a top of funnel A&R pool, right Like these people that are messing with new stuff, whether it's new gear and new software, new genres, new styles, new idioms, formats they're going to be the ones that are going to be listened to in the future.
But you're also you pointed out this with the Lug guitar example there's also another level of engagement from existing fans of existing music to say, yeah, sure, you can listen to this stuff on streaming services, maybe you'll buy some vinyl. Maybe for artists not the Beatles, but for artists that are, you know, still touring you can go out and buy tickets and engage in that way and so forth. I struggle to see what is the monetization play for the recording industry with the musical instrument world, but you just pointed out a great one, which is, yeah, you might be able to license this music at a higher rate for people who are playing the songs, learning the songs rather than just listening to the songs.
0:33:30 - Adam
That's where my mind goes. I'm on the inside of it. I work for a musical instrument company, so that's the lens through which I see all of this, but there's so much more to it, right? I mean, artists will always be leading the conversation around culture. A musical instrument company that thinks they're going to lead the conversation around culture is just, they're just mistaken. I've tried it Very difficult. You attach yourself to the cultural conversation. You don't get the person to star in a commercial. You get them to use the instrument on stage or on the tour bus and you catch a candid photo of that. That's how you do it, yeah, and so I think that that's another reason for musical instrument companies to make sure that they are doing the work to find some roster of artists, whether it's through a record label or not.
0:34:20 - Dmitri
Yeah, cool, Awesome. That was a great little dive into that connection and I look forward to continuing that conversation with you and the rest of the music tectonics community. I've noticed that the musical instrument community and musical instrument or the music creation software community has adopted music tectonics from day one. They were the ones that were really interested. We're talking about streaming services and social video and so forth and they showed up saying this is our world and that's where I think you know a lot of this community comes from, as people just being interested in music and looking for what's new. So it's interesting to get a little more specific there about what those business connections could be. So I thank you for that. We do have to take one more quick break and I do have to ask you about AI. Sorry, folks, we're going to have that talk in just a second.
Are you headed to the NAMM show in Anaheim, California? Let's meet up at the biggest musical instrument convention. On Saturday, January 24th, at 1130 am to 1215 pm. We're gathering all the musical instrument software and app innovators at NAMM. Come join us at the MIDI Association Showcase in Hall A, that's booth 10302. If you're looking at the NAMM app, Everyone gets the mic in this networking session, Give your 32nd introduction, connect faces to names around the room. Then break to network one-on-one leave with connections to collaborators, customers, allies and friends. Shaylee and I will be there making sure everyone gets a chance to connect. Come say hello at NAMM. All right, we're back. I don't need every single music tectonics podcast episode to have mention of artificial intelligence.
0:35:57 - Adam
Yes, you do, but it is moving fast.
0:36:01 - Dmitri
There's a lot going on here and you know, in some ways you could say, the music industry, the recording industry, is in turmoil over the impact of AI and music creation. Do musical instrument companies care about what's going on with AI and, if so, what are the conversations you're hearing there?
0:36:16 - Adam
Every time I walk into a room and this conversation comes up with one of these companies that's doing a lot with AI, everybody seems to say the same thing, which is we want the tools to empower. We don't want to replace anything or anybody. This is meant to shorten the technology workflow. That's what I hear. So it's interesting that the world is. I think that in general, musicians are fearful of AI and they're worried that this is going to take over creativity. I haven't heard anybody like behind closed doors go like this is finally going to do it, and I don't know anybody who wants that. Is it possible, Dmitri, that on a music tectonics podcast with between me and you and me supposed to have having all the answers about music tech, is it possible that my answer is just like I don't think people care all that much, because that's sort of how it feels within the musical instrument community.
There are all sorts of core generation tools. There are all sorts of things that will just write the entire song for you. I don't see people using that. What I see people using are AI tools that provide a great deal of utility. Give you a few examples I think AudioShake has an unbelievable product and they actually won Time Best Invention of the year last year, which is huge, and the reason for that is it serves a very particular purpose that no normal intelligence could do. Our normal squishy, anxious intelligence can't do stem separation. They have a product that can take a 50-year-old Aretha Franklin recording and separate the drums from the vocal from the bass from the guitar. That is useful for dozens and dozens of applications. I like that.
I think about Lander, which is AI mastering, and there is a lot that goes into mastering and a lot of work that goes into the craft of learning how to master a song. But with so much music being made these days, basic things like normalization and equalization are things that AI can do extremely well in a more cost-effective way. If that lets more creators get their sound out there in a way that allows it to hit and feel better, that to me seems like a very powerful improvement. None of those are replacements for anything or anybody. Those are new technologies with new affordances that allow us to do interesting, novel things that have never previously been possible, or they allow us to move faster and quicker and focus on the elements of creativity that we really want to. I'm sure there are some people out there trying to completely upend everything that we're doing in terms of playing our guitars and our keyboards and all of that, but for the most part, those are the tools that I'm using in my daily workflow and that I'm seeing other people use as well.
0:39:27 - Dmitri
Interesting. Okay, well, that's super, super valuable to hear that perspective, and it'll be interesting to see whether some of the more fearful folks out there whether anything that they're thinking is going to come true as well. I saw some reference to the idea that. Actually, it was on a media research webinar back in December when I heard their predictions for 2025. And one of their commenters or analysts said that AI would inspire a lot of creativity at first, and then, in the long term, it might feel a little bit more like it's creating too much random content, maybe lower quality content too, so there could be like a cycle that's happening as well.
0:40:13 - Adam
Well, I definitely see that. Think about ChatGPT. I think that the I think if you use ChatGPT to write your Instagram comments, I think the world can smell it and your time is up. We all use it. There's no way to avoid it these days, but you have to use it sparingly, you have to use it in pieces, you have to use it when it counts and it will never be a replacement for hard work. We're talking a lot about music and tech, but I'm a marketer. I sent thousands and thousands of emails over Black Friday, cyber Monday, with multivariate testing on all of them. Every time, this is a John Henry story. Every time, I did my subject line using my regular intelligence versus an AI generated line, either generated through Klaviyo or ChatGPT, and not once did it beat me.
0:40:59 - Dmitri
There you have it. Folks, Be careful. The Adam McAfee AI test is in.
0:41:04 - Adam
AI tested every single time, every single time, and lots of different tests, making sure there's emojis in both, doing my best to control it, and so again, that's email marketing. There's so much more we can talk about on the marketing side of all of this, but in general, I think that people will wise up if suddenly all of our music sounds exactly the same. Will wise up if suddenly all of our music sounds exactly the same and we're going to have to find new ways to tweak that and rehash it and pull from it what we like and leave behind what we don't. It's going to change really quickly and violently and that in and of itself might be the next musical revolution.
0:41:49 - Dmitri
Yeah, yeah You're sort of pointing to there's still a human curation component. Even if you spit something into uh ai and spit something out of ai, there's still somebody who's selecting like does that, does that meet, master right? And then the other piece of your story about marketing emails and ab testing is not everybody has the mind of adam mckeffee, so some people ai might generate better content than they do.
0:42:16 - Adam
I mean, none of it's that good, it's just, you know, buy more stuff. I believe you have it in you listener out there to craft your own song.
0:42:27 - Dmitri
Well, I mean one thing that's for sure is that AI is always trained on something else. It's generative content. It's derivative content, right, so it's derived from something else, whereas if it comes from your mind, it is from you, so it's not derivative right? It's original. It's derivative from your experience, but there's a lot of originality inputs that are coming in every time you create something new, whether it's a song, a motif or a subject line on an email.
0:42:56 - Adam
It'll be interesting to see what happens next.
0:42:57 - Dmitri
Yeah, okay. One last question. You're heading to NAMM this month, just in a couple of weeks actually. What are your favorite things at NAMM and what should the rest of us look out for?
0:43:06 - Adam
Okay. So at NAMM there's all sorts of wonderful things. I will just quickly say that we'll be at the John Lennon bus. We're doing demos at the John Lennon bus all throughout the show. John Lennon bus is a 501c3 that goes around giving music education in a traveling studio form to cities all around the country and the world. So stop by the John Lennon bus if you're interested in partnering with some of that. There are all sorts of things I'm looking forward to.
Some of my favorite booths every year is the Casio booth. I think is always gorgeous and they always have a pretty big footprint there. Looking forward to seeing Roli back at the show floor. Rolly is one of. You might say that Artiphon and Rolly are peers, always pushing the boundaries of what a musical instrument can be. They released a bunch of new products this year and they've got a pretty large footprint, so I'm looking forward to seeing that as well. There's several others. I always check out the Donner booth, which is a fascinating company again, a lot of shared design intent with Artiphon and I like to a little bit of friendly competition there. I always like to stop by and see what those guys are up to as well.
0:44:26 - Dmitri
I'll be at the show the whole time, so don't hesitate to reach out and get in touch with me and seriously looking forward to it if you can't find Adam there, come over to the Rock Paper Scissors booth, because Adam has been a longtime client and partner on things and Artiphon been connected with us. We'll be glad to make sure you can meet with Adam and find out more about his fancy subject lines, but, more importantly, about the cool creative instruments that Artiphon putting out. Also, adam, I hope you'll join us on January 25th, on Saturday, at the MIDI Associations booth. We're going to be doing an innovators meetup at 12 noon, so we want you there and we want all our listeners. I believe you can win an Orba 3 there Is that what we're doing At our booth.
Yeah, at the Rock Paper Scissors booth we'll be doing Rock Paper Scissors booth. Yeah, well, we'll let people know at the meetup too. We've got an Orba 3 that you could win by signing up, as well as a Blip Blocks and a we Are Rewind cassette player a retro Bluetooth cassette player as well. So lots of reasons to come hang hang out with the posse at Rock Paper, scissors and Artiphon and at the MIDI Association. So should be fun. Adam, I can't wait to see in a couple of weeks. This has been great. Thanks for sharing so much great information and all your insights and really appreciate your kind of bird's eye view of what's going on.
0:45:45 - Adam
Thank you, Dmitri. Looking forward to NAMM.
0:45:48 - Dmitri
Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week. Did you know? We do free monthly online events that you, our lovely podcast listeners, can join? Find out more at musictectonics.com and, while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. Everything we Do explores the seismic shifts that shake up music and technology, the way the earth's tectonic plates cause quakes and make mountains. Connect with Music Tectonics on Twitter, instagram and LinkedIn. That's my favorite platform. Connect with me. Dmitri Vietze, if you can spell it, we'll be back again next week, if not sooner you're listening to music tectonics.
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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.
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