Who Owns What in Music Tech with Cherie Hu
- Eric Doades
- May 1
- 24 min read
Updated: May 12
Today Dmitri talks with Cherie Hu, music industry analyst and founder of Water and Music. We start by discussing the Ouroboros project which maps the complicated and intertwined stakes in the music industry held by various entities, including private equity firms, media conglomerates, and tech companies like Tencent. We also talk about shifting power dynamics between the majors and the independents, the impact of AI – particularly generative AI, and trends in rights management and live music.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
Dmitri: Cherie, Hu has over a decade of experience as a music industry analyst with a focus on the cutting edge of music and tech. She runs her own research and consulting firm, water and Music, which serves thousands of industry leaders on music tech market research and strategy, especially in areas like generative ai.
Web3 gaming and direct to platforms. Previously, she served as a columnist for publications, including Billboard, Forbes, and music business worldwide. I've been a fan from the beginning. Welcome back to the podcast, Cherie.
Cherie: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It feels like a long time coming.
Dmitri: It's been a while. It's
Cherie: Yeah.
Dmitri: we're focused on some of the research and work you've been doing over several years around investment in music tech. Why don't we kick off, what is the music tech ownership Ouroboros project, and why did water and music start it?
Cherie: Yes. The music tech ownership, Ouroboros is a sprawling ever-growing map of. Ownership and [00:01:00] investment stakes in music tech and music rights companies, especially, the growing stakes that are being eaten up by private equity firms, institutional investors and banks, media conglomerates and tech conglomerates like Tencent, globally, even, government funds like coming out of Saudi Arabia.
SoI guess there were a few points I wanted to make. With the Ouroboros, which for those listening who don't know what that is, it is a mythical serpent eating its own tail. So I think that's what's happening with, the music tech landscape, is that there are so many intertwined business interests, especially among different groups of, buyers and sellers who wouldn't previously have associated government funds or big tech conglomerates with even independent labels or independent artist services.
so one, those relationships are becoming, even more intertwined. two specifically there are, some very specific major players that come out of this. So the way that I designed [00:02:00] the Ouroboros, which is just using a fig jam board for those who, know fig jam, enjoy brainstorming, at the center of the Aura, Boris is.
I believe Tencent Holdings and Universal, I think to an extent, so many different, distributors, streaming services, even earlier stage startups can be traced back to Tencent or Universal or to one of their competitors in big tech or in the major label world in terms of these companies increasingly trying to, own stakes in the next generation of music tech.
And I guess the third point, more speaking from an independent music perspective, I think so this topic got on a lot of people's radars When Universal announced that they, were in talks or were planning to acquire downtown, one of the largest, independent music services companies in the world.
They have,a lot of. Distribution business, but also publishing admin, accounting. They have access to a [00:03:00] lot of indie labels, financial data as well. but that really is just, that's actually the rule and not the exception, I think is also a point I wanted to make with, this Ouroboros, that's, there's so many independent music services that you might not know because it's not super public, but they are actually majority owned by private equity or received an investment from a similar firm.
I. In recent years. So that raises a question for the independent music community on kind of the health of this ecosystem from a power and ownership perspective. What happens when more and more of these tools do become more consolidated under just a handful of people? What does the market look like for, tools and services that can actually.
Stay independent in serving the independent music sector. So yeah, that's, those are just three of the top things that come to mind. But, as the last thing, the way that I design the Ouroboros is meant for self-exploration. So my intention is for people to get their own takeaways from digging more into the data.
[00:04:00] Those are just some suggested themes to, look into as a starting point.
Dmitri: Yeah, it's,the thing that I don't think you mentioned, which I noticed is the, yes, there's a graphic, an infographic that shows the relationships with all these lines that point to everything. And it is big. Like you can't really look at the whole thing on a regular computer screen.
You need to like a projector or you need to be like hand scrolling left and right to, or up and down. You're constantly looking. It's almost like a maze. And the other piece is. It really is the dragon eating its own tail because you'll see this company has invested in this company, which then has bought this company, which has invested in the original company.
And it really is, there's multiple circles, overlapping circles of what? And you're like, wait a second. It's not just that there's a handful of big companies, several of these big companies are invested in each other mutually. which is crazy to see.
Cherie: Yep. The origin of the Ouroboros was, I think this was definitely pre covid, I wanna [00:05:00] say around 2017 when Spotify and Tencent announced, what was called an equity swap. So exactly what you just described, I think they both purchased around seven to 9% of, a stake in the other company. and I knew that Tencent.
had stakes in the major labels and I knew that the major labels had stakes in Spotify. So immediately I was like, what? What is going on? is there a way that I can map this out just to understand? So I made the Ouroboros, definitely, I. First and foremost from my own curiosity and just my need to understand what was going on.
So it's been really great and reassuring to see that other people have been wondering similar things or that just like my own mapping for my own use has been helpful for other people as well.
Dmitri: And to me, that's such a Cherie who water and music thing, to map something out to, to say, I'm not just gonna talk about this stuff, but I wanna back out and see the full pattern. and then that becomes a helpful tool for the rest of us. So it's a suit. the graphical [00:06:00] element. This is one of those situations where it's like you couldn't even understand it.
In narrative form, you have to see it as a picture, so that's super cool. And you updated the infographic and the analysis on music tech ownership earlier this year. you've done it, I don't know if it's every year, every couple years, where you look back and see who's invested and who's bought whom and so forth.
What were your top three or four insights from the latest review you did this year?
Cherie: yes, Few immediate answers. So in terms of how frequently I update it, it used to be once a year, but investment activity has increased or I'm like, as more people become aware of it, I hear about more and more deals to the point where I try to update it once a month and they're always at least four or five new deals to put on the map.
So it's definitely going quite quickly. In terms of highlights from last year, I would say. I was intrigued by how many of the largest acquisitions or investments, let's actually start with investments. A lot of the largest investments in [00:07:00] newer music companies involved merging rights and tech in some way.
I'll call out a specific example of an investor who's become really active in this space called Flex Point Forward. They're, Private also growth equity firm, based primarily in Chicago I think. And they last year announced two investments in two music rights tech vehicles. One is Create Music Group, which has been around for a very long time.
they have built really good software for more like YouTube and UGC royalty, revenue management. But now they are increasingly buying out their own rights. So acquiring labels and publishers and then using the tech that they have to, a flywheel effect, to increase the value and optimize the catalogs that they own.
So they, for all intents and purposes, for water music, was like a music tech company, but they are increasingly like. a tech enabled rights company. So that's where the [00:08:00] categorization starts to blur a little bit. flex 0.4 also invested in a company called dotti, which is, using a lot of sophisticated analysis to identify targets.
In terms of indie artists for buying out their back catalog, and then actively marketing those catalogs trying to increase their value. similar to a hypnosis, but not like a publicly traded, fund, and definitely more independent artist focused. I. They are definitely tech enabled rights because none of their tech is really available publicly.
like they don't really offer tools for other artists to value their own catalogs. it's all for internal use for the purpose of optimizing the value of their catalog investments. yeah, I guess in the span of like music tech, that's been one of the most interesting trends for me.
Dmitri: I wanna hear about the other trends, but I have a follow up 'cause I was gonna ask you this anyway. So in the, in this analysis infographic, in the research and report. It sounds like the line between rights acquisition [00:09:00] and ownership is blurring with music and music tech specifically. so when I'm looking at this, does it include the hypnosis in the primary waves of the world, or it only includes those if they have a tech element?
Cherie: Yes. the Ouroboros scope is broader, so I believe hypnosis is on there through, their acquisition by Blackstone. there are some other catalogs like Flex Point invested in Network Music Group, which is I think primarily a label and music rights company. When it comes to valuing like the music tech market, which I guess is a separate question and not like beyond the Ouroboros, I prefer to keep as much as possible on software or if the majority of the company's business is coming from primarily software or selling tech in some way.
It is blurring though, in, in certain areas, especially when you look at, at rights management or people working in like the artist marketing sphere. it can blur a little bit.
Dmitri: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. that's a great [00:10:00] insight that you're just seeing a lot of that blurring happening.it's, it's interesting 'cause when you see these rollups like downtown and other companies that have,bought up. They may start with IP ownership, of the actual rights of the songs or the recordings.
And then they'll add a tech component and then they might get out of the, the rights component completely and say, we're only a services company as well. So that I'd, I'll take that as one of your insights of sort of, that is definitely shifting more in that direction.
Cherie: Yeah, that's interesting. 'cause yeah, downtown separated the two. Cobalt definitely separated the two with AWOL spinning off. and then getting bought out by Sony. there always is this question or this appetite for seeing what like the next iteration of a record label would look like.
whether you're in the mindset of Totally disrupting the industry and, saying we're not gonna own any rights, down with the majors. Let's like build our own tech thing from the ground up. Or what I think create is doing, which is like really taking a [00:11:00] lot from a traditional label playbook in a lot of ways, but just applying a lot more sophisticated tech and just being, having a lot more intelligence on where people are actually discovering and consuming music today.
so yeah, I guess it's a pendulum. It might be swinging a little bit back, in the original direction.
Dmitri: Gotcha. All right. You were going through other insights from the latest review. What other insights did you draw from this last year of investments in acquisitions?
Cherie: Yeah. so rights, was a big trend and I guess to zoom out, at water music every year we do look at. high level investment and acquisition trends at every stage. So the Ouroboros is definitely more focused on later stage growth stage companies, but we also look at, like seed stage, early stage, and then all the way to exit.
And we mapped out across all those stages. What were the top trends? or what were the top verticals? Rights management was one of the top. and a general takeaway for us, looking at that whole cycle is a phrase that, I've coined boring is [00:12:00] back. we're not in early covid anymore. When, I feel like, cash was really cheap and.
Investors, people in general were throwing a lot of money at, very shiny objects or just very early stage experiments, just 'cause that was really the industry mindset at the time. obviously the macroeconomic conditions right now are super different investors in any industry, they want actual revenue.
Like they want to see that you actually have traction in real business. They're not as, Gungho and getting behind like these super moonshot ideas. So how that's reflected in music is that, traditional core revenue streams that are nothing new are coming back to the forefront and breaking at the top.
So that's rights management, that's live. so a lot of the startups that we saw get a lot of funding, work in the ticketing, festival, merch business. I think one of the biggest investments. Of last year was in a company called At Venue, which just does like [00:13:00] on-premise e-commerce, food and beverage sales management for, a lot of big venues.
And they, as a result of that, they have a lot of data on what is a live music fan consumer actually spending on, how does that differ across genre, across markets? It's super valuable. data, especially in the current kind of fandom hype era. yeah, so live in general also really big topic.
And then in terms of any interest in emerging tech, it is completely all on AI right now. There, there isn't as much interest from the investor standpoint in Metaverse or Web3 or gaming. I think there are still so many smart people working all those spaces, but it's very much in build mode and let's see what we can actually ship to market versus, let's wait for all this flush of capital to come in so we can throw anything at the wall.
so yeah. boring is back. a lot of the sp splashiest deals were. not like inno innovative in the sense of like genuinely bringing something new, but rather [00:14:00] bringing more sophisticated analytics to, revenue streams that have been around in the industry for decades and just haven't gotten, perhaps the right tech treatment that we would expect in other, in, in other
Dmitri: So innovation in the back office is what you're saying.
Cherie: Yeah. Yes, exactly. even the. The downtown acquisition, a lot of, I would say most of their tech is distributed back office tech, whether it's like for accounting or publishing admin, helping to collect royalties from DSPs. It's all like very critical back office work.
Dmitri: Well, I wanna ask you a little bit about the, I don't know, the pulse slash size of the music tech startup investment space, but were there any. Any other insights you wanted to pull out from the last year I, I know you hit on two, two pretty big ones there around rights management
Cherie: Uh, yeah, yeah. Other takeaways from the last year of investment? I'll share a bit more on the Gen AI side just because A tech story and debate and kind of a litmus [00:15:00] test for where people think the industry is going. That's been like by far the top trend. that said, so okay, we're taping this in April, 2025.
To my understanding, the last time that a big music AI generator announced funding was 11 months ago. So that was when Suno announced their $125 million round. I think just a month after that is when all the lawsuits came out. from the major labels against Suno and uio. Since then, there has been on the music AI generation side.
So the model of write a prompt out pops a song that is Gone more quiet on the investment side. again, like not to say there's no activity at all. There are so many different tools out there. but just in terms of where investors are putting their checks, a lot of it is still going into AI for music, but in, not in a full generation sense.
Instead, there's a lot of investor focus on specific [00:16:00] use cases like, audio shake for stem separation. there's a lot of momentum around AI and rights management. startups like musical AI that are trying to, apply attribution to AI models. So being able to attribute outputs to specific pieces of training input and then pay out royalties accordingly, which I think rights holders would love.
So there's a lot more momentum. There's still a lot of momentum in music ai, but investor interest is increasingly coalescing around, more B2B. Specialized use cases as opposed to the Suno model, which I think that they're making a super ambitious, consumer bet on, like this change in behavior where pe where people will not only want to make their own songs, but also listen to other songs that are AI generated.
It's a very different thesis. So yeah, I guess that to wrap up my high level thoughts on ai, it's definitely not a monolith. I think that's a very important point to keep in mind that there are so many different segments, so many different [00:17:00] target users, and then corresponding differences in investor interest.
Dmitri: has investment across the music tech startup world been lower in 2024? in 2025 than previous? I don't know if you have the actual quantitative it fe, like when we're talking to startups, it feels like more of them are struggling to get investment at the moment. and that looks like. Other than ai, and I don't necessarily mean music ai, but across the entire tech space, AI has really taken up a lot of the oxygen around investment
Do you also either have the feeling or the data that Music Tech startup investment has been lower in 2024 and into 2025?
Cherie: yes. comparing the data that we have with data from another great music tech org called Music Ally based in the uk and they have been tracking. investments dating all the way back to 20 14, 20 15. So I was curious, looking back at the data that they have. so comparing music allies data in 2015 versus water, music's data [00:18:00] 2024.
the deal flow in terms of the number of deals, at least being publicly announced has almost quadrupled. So there's, and I think that kind of corresponds to people's awareness of music tech as a category worth taking seriously. Especially now that, like so many major streaming services are publicly traded.
Same with like label side, there's a lot of investor awareness of the possibilities here. from a tech standpoint. So deal flow has almost. Quadrupled, but the total amount of capital in this space has almost stayed the same. So I think for 2015 and 2024, the total was around $1 billion. I think slightly more back then.
also keeping in mind that is the floor. 'cause I think both of us as organizations are looking at just publicly announced data. There's probably a lot that like hasn't been announced, but. I think that's a good [00:19:00] reference. there's a lot more activity and a lot more interest in building solutions for music.
the amount of cap and the number of investors I think has also grown. They're just writing smaller checks and I think especially as you have the Spotifys of the world, going public or getting acquired, a lot of the like more mature, perhaps more attractive. Later stage music tech investments are like off the market or they've gone off the market in over the last few years.
And so energy is going all the way back, more towards like pre-launch, very early stage that, that, that's reflected in our data from last year. I think almost half of our list of investments that we tracked are earlier seed stage. And that kind of tracks also with. VC at large, like VCs, there aren't that many startups raising series B, series CD rounds.
I think, this year.
Dmitri: Super helpful. All right, we have to take a quick break, but I wanna dig into a couple topics. I do want to talk about AI more, not just on the investment landscape, [00:20:00] but the Cherie Hu perspective on it, and where it's going, especially with gen. AI and licensing and all that. And I also wanna talk a little bit about what you started off with around the shift in power between majors and indies.
We'll be right back.
Okay, we're back. And before the break we were talking a bit about, AI and music. And up until the last quarter I had thought that the gen AI companies that train on unlicensed data would get sued out of existence. That's what I heard when I was in the, in the hallways at conferences last year.
but the change in power of maybe the court system in America and just the role of technology leaders now has me thinking. That some of these larger tech companies and well-funded, as you described, some of the gen AI stuff are gonna succeed the way that maybe YouTube had succeeded by growing faster than regulation could stop them and that labels and publishers' best hope might be to monetize music created using unlicensed training [00:21:00] data.
I'm curious, I know it's a little provocative, but I'm curious, do you agree and does this increase the investability of gen AI companies in music?
Cherie: okay. There, there are a few layers here. I do think Suno and UIO have strong enough legal teams and actually have, submitted strong enough counter arguments about training data being. Fair use versus not that I really am not married at this point to any specific outcome. I'm, I definitely am pro like the music industry still continuing to exist and rights holders, like still getting, still getting their fair share.
But, like a lot of people. Are comparing this to Napster, which totally makes sense in terms of the litigation that happened when, at their peak. but based on my understanding of how, like AI models work, most of how they're learning [00:22:00] from training data is it's not like sampling.
It's not like directly taking training data and. Spitting it out. It's a lot more complicated. Even the most seasoned, AI researchers still call it a black box, and there's so much research funding going into trying to explain what happens inside these models. and I know outside of music, it's still so messy, I'm like really not sure how these cases will play out.
SUNO and Udo's attorney have indeed,I guess defended Google and YouTube and all these big tech companies in the past too. So definitely that's like important history to keep in mind. that said, I've, I think out of the investor conversations that I've had so far. the default stance is skepticism towards full stack generative ai. So like the suno model of, yeah, again, just like writing a prompt and then producing a full song. I think because the outcome of the current cases is so up in the air, like I think it's [00:23:00] actually very hard to predict which way it'll go.
It seems like even the Anthropic case, which has been going on for over a year now is like still ongoing, like the two parties haven't reached a settlement. So it makes me think that they actually do still wanna go to court, and have the case resolved that way. So yeah, I think that the timeline will really be a few years to have this all shake out, which like seems like a really long time.
but in the meantime, investors are. I think default skeptical about full stack generative ai, more interested in more specialized use cases, or, AI that like really understands a specific customer segment. I guess to, to give an example, outside of music, there's a company called 11 Labs. That does, voice generation primarily and sound effects a little bit as well.
They just raise their series CI think, and their valuation is at a few billion dollars. and so much of their business comes from servicing [00:24:00] Fortune 500 clients. So they like, I think most of their business is B2B and, helping them make. Voice, AI agents or tools for like customer support or, they were also worked with a ton of YouTubers to translate all their videos into like dozen plus different languages.
so there it's like full generative ai, but I think what makes 11 Labs stand out is that they like actually really understand their customer and what they need and building everything around that versus, Let's just put this tool out there and hope that people use it. it's very customer centric.
So in some ways, going back to like fundamentals of business, as an AI company, do you actually understand what your customer wants? And are you building relentlessly around that?
Dmitri: Yeah. And is it based on novelty? if you look, if you say, the investors and the companies that you're describing clearly have confidence that there's a business model here because it's billions and billions and billions of dollars that are going into something that doesn't have a business model, right?
So is this [00:25:00] a clubhouse moment where it's shiny and glossy and for a minute there's Hey, check this thing out. But then. Like you said, who's the customer for it? Is anybody gonna pay to generate a song that may or may not sound like the music we're used to listening to, even though it's based on that music?
or are there specific use cases where it actually makes sense? And if there's specific use cases, they may be so specific that the actual total addressable market is not the same as I social media company. It is not, it's not 500 million people might not actually. Even care to make a song we don't know,
so I appreciate your perspective on that. and the, the, my thinking was it feels a lot like, to me it feels less like a Napster moment and more like a YouTube moment where content is getting repurposed. It is derivative content. whereas Napster was literally just posting stuff, like it wasn't derivative, it was just,underground,Illegal posting of content. it made me wonder,if there was a market for it. Someone could create what content ideas for YouTube. What is the way to monetize? And then everybody's incentivized. It's [00:26:00] a win-win, but only if somebody actually wants to make songs this way. Right?
So, okay. So the other big issue that you brought up early in the conversation that I just wanna dig in a little more, you talked about. the kind of, the shifting of power as you look at those investments from majors and indies and even DIY. You talked a little bit about this when you were talking about create music, but also around, Tencent and Spotify and and the majors investing all these different ways.
I'm curious, how do you think this balance of power between majors and indies will play out in the next five and 10 years and, is this a thing that people should be fighting about or is this just the natural progression of the markets? how is it gonna change how music works?
Cherie: Yeah. so I think a lot of what's happening in live music is a harger maybe of things to come. If we look at. That's how the current administration, is even actually to my surprise, even the current administration is investigating, like live music industry. I think they [00:27:00] just released an executive report or statement on ticket scalping.
which is so interesting, especially as like StubHub is planning to go public. And then the previous administration kicked off the investigation into, into Live Nation and their monopoly status. I think we see, We definitely see the impact of consolidation in live music, where arguably, because there are only a select few players that control so much of the infrastructure, it leads to potential concerns about diversity or like opportunity for certain kinds of artists or scenes to really come up, have an opportunity to perform.
Especially when we think about live Nation owning so much of the,not just venues, but so much of. The other parts of the business workflow behind the scenes of promoting and booking as well. so if we translate that to, the music side, I think that's an interesting debate around like whether this consolidation will [00:28:00] lead to even more shrinking of like diversity of voices that are heard will lead to more homogenization of culture.
What we hear on the radio, which is already so homogenized already. I think that's, I guess to start off, like one reason to be concerned, like even just culturally, philosophically about consolidation, not to mention the, like the business opportunity and the impact of potentially shutting off competition, once you get to a monopoly level.
I think the downtown acquisition is still pending, at least as of this conversation. I, this is also a situation where I actually am not sure what the outcome is going to be. I can see, the, I can see the acquisition going through and then maybe that kicking off, further potential investigation for maybe other jurisdictions because there also is, There was a whole new law introduced over the last few years, around like streaming and fair conversation for artists around streaming in the us. [00:29:00] So all the pieces are there for there to be more, for there to be more regulatory scrutiny of,major consolidation of indie companies.
I'm actually, I wouldn't say I'm the expert in terms of understanding why that hasn't happened already, but maybe there's a perception that, Anyone can still upload to Spotify or SoundCloud or wherever and start earning a cent, start earning some money from music. it's perceived to be a very open marketplace.
I think obviously if you look at the numbers, very much still stacked towards the head in terms of like bigger stars capturing the majority of the share.
Dmitri: and the, uh, power of negotiation as you get more and more market share being something there in terms of royalty rates and, and other, compensation, I guess. But, okay. Yeah, nobody knows the future and it was super helpful to hear you just reflect and talk through some of that. So thank you for that.
We gotta take one more quick break and I have just a couple more questions after that. I wanna ask you a little bit about your career and about the transformation of water and music. We'll be right back. [00:30:00] Cherie, you did something amazing with your career. You invented your role of being an independent music tech journalist and analyst.
Super cool, role model for all of us. You turned it into a subscription based newsletter, and then during the height of decentralized, autonomous organizations, you transformed water and music again. What has this all been like for you?
Cherie: yeah, it's been. Definitely a whirlwind. a philosophy that, a philosophy that I've always tried to embrace, whether through modern music or through earlier in my career, is that if I'm writing about innovation, I should practice what I preach at least to some level. if I am, especially if I'm getting to the point of.
Recommending, what are some path that people could take? given how tech is changing, I should have my own point of view on that based on my experience with technology. I know this is like a contrast to how some other people think about tech, but I also very strongly believe that the best way to [00:31:00] build a critical view of what's happening with tech is to engage with it.
I don't think, only observing from afar and Speculating or, complaining without actually engaging with it and understanding what a given technology really can or cannot do,will only really get you so far. whereas yeah, just having that holistic understanding so important.
so I've applied that like a newsletter is not, innovative tech, but I had my own newsletter. Pre Substack. So it was so fascinating to start the water music newsletter. See companies like Substack really take off in the kind of following three, four years. And then, me really being able to have like almost a front row view and experience on how that was evolving and then being able to apply that even if indirectly to my understanding of topics like, fan communities or how do you.
Like nurture community online. That was super helpful. and then you mentioned the Dao era of water music. So this [00:32:00] was, over covid when there was just so much interest from the music industry in alternative, models for monetizing music and monetizing fans. I also realized on my side at water music that certain trends like Web3, Because it was so early and there was not that much like press coverage about what was really happening on the ground. I had to involve the community in doing the research in some way, whether in letting us know about projects, like submitting to our database or doing interviews with their peers who were releasing projects and compiling all this into these very large scale crowdsource reports that we put together.
and through that like I shamelessly say that NFTs actually. Helped bootstrap like a lot of our research for a few years, which is crazy. that's not something I would've foreseen, in,in like 2015. But like through Direct Web3 native support, we're able to compensate all these contributors and,put out these amazing reports.
yeah, obviously the market is different, and so we've [00:33:00] not been as involved on the Web3 side accordingly, but. Still follow it very closely and whatever we are focusing on, embracing with and experimenting with the tech as we are researching it. AI is a great example. I mentioned 11 Labs.
We were one of the first,I think we were one of the earliest people to apply 11 labs, AI narration to our own newsletters. So I used to have a free newsletter series and just for a few issues. Like three or so. our developer, Alex, made an AI model of my voice and had to narrate the article and just put it on SoundCloud, because it was my article.
I wrote everything. I was totally comfortable with having that experiment out. it's still on SoundCloud, I think on the Water Music channel if people wanna look that up. but just that experiment and also. In that case, realizing how cumbersome it was, like there actually was a lot of editing involved in that process of getting it to be a good reading experience.
I was like, oh, this really is not just like a [00:34:00] one click fantasy that a lot of people are fearful about. There's actually still a lot of creativity and discernment involved. So yeah, just, throughout, building a critique and opinion on tech by engaging with it has been our philosophy.
Dmitri: Yeah, no, that's great. the experimentation and try the samples, is a great. It's a great way to, to approach it and has definitely seen in the output of what you guys have done, both in terms of rallying a community to help with research, but also just your knowledge base and being able to talk about things because you've actually played with them and so forth.
Well, Cherie, this has been an amazing conversation. I'm super grateful that you took the time to dive in on the Ouroboros project. If people want to get involved, you still have membership water and music.com. Is there anything else you wanna say? Say about how people can get the full reports and be engaged with water and music.
Cherie: Yeah. to, if you're not familiar already with water music, the best way I would say is to. Sign up for our free newsletter. There's a link at the top of our homepage, as you mentioned, [00:35:00] water music.com. We're also very active on LinkedIn. If you want to follow me, and or the water music page there, that's the best way to keep up to date, especially on our webinars as well as our longer reports.
we're also on X and Instagram. Our handle is water underscore and underscore music on those platforms.
Dmitri: Cherie, this has been a blast. Thanks so much for sharing with us.
Cherie: Thank you.
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.
