Tech Focus: Production Music, Part 1 - Technology, Business Upheavals Create Challenges and Opportunities AI and the RSN bubble are among current disruptions in the sector By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Wednesday, June 7, 2023 - 7:00 am
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Production music has been one of the stabler sectors of the sports-media business. Football always seems to want its triumphal horns and crunchy guitars while golf relies on its pastoral themes, and so on. That's even as sports clients ask for more of the same but different, or modern takes on classic themes, as the head of one music house phrases it. It's a typical pattern for sports-production music: the classic themes endure, but elements of the current culture find their way in.
But, as in other media sectors, a combination of technology and business disruptions has been churning the waters around production music. Players in that market are aware of it but say it's too soon to tell how it all will play out.
AI Is on the Horizon As is likely to happen with everything AI touches, artificial intelligence will probably affect production music, eventually.
Sound Ideas Sales Manager Peter Alexander believes that no algorithm could effectively imitate the emotional qualities that music for sports applications requires. You need to be able to get crowds up on their feet and cheering predictably, he says. It's hard to imagine a machine able to compose at the same level as a human, at least not without human supervision. But it's still early days, so it's hard to predict how AI will shake out for production libraries.
AI has drawn wary looks from the music industry in general: composers see it as potentially replacing them; publishers view it as the next iteration of sampling, which uses data from existing IP - a sound or a song - as the basis for a new work, a path some expect AI to follow in music creation.
However, production-music companies may take a more nuanced view of AI: as both a source of potential infringement but also as a way to lower the costs involved in music creation and production.
The AI is definitely a topic of consideration in the production-music sector. According to Morgan McKnight, executive director, Production Music Association, a non-profit that works with production-music libraries, composers, performing-rights organizations, and technology solutions to promote the sector, AI is viewed by many as potentially one more tool to help foster the use of production music, particularly from established providers at a time when almost anyone can make credible music on an iPhone and an app.
It's too early to tell what the impact of AI will be, she explains, but it's seen already as potentially a tool that could make life easier, such as metadata for creating remixes.
She adds that new avenues, such as social media, create more demand for production music and stimulate the need for variations, such as alternate mixes. Hopefully, it becomes another way to create stories for sports and contribute to the authenticity of those stories.
AI-based music-creation platforms are proliferating. Bandlab's Songstarter will generate three unique musical ideas for composers. Splice offers a similar CoSo tool, and TikTok owner ByteDance is reportedly readying its own app for its 1 billion users.
RSN Disruption = Opportunity Recent disruption in the RSN sector, which has seen streaming and cord-cutting push regional networks like Diamond/Bally Sports to the financial edge, has the potential to create opportunity for production-music providers, says Whitney Arnold, president, Stephen Arnold Music.
Stephen Arnold Music's Whitney Arnold: A lot of teams need to create their own brand identities through music.
We're seeing a lot of teams taking back their broadcast rights and, with them, the need to create their own brand identities through music, he says. When they were part of a larger network brand, there was often a one-size-fits-all approach to music and graphics for all the teams and leagues broadcast by a network. Now we can help them choose and create custom music branding.
Stephen Arnold Music Director, Brand Strategy, Russell Boiarsky points out that, even as sports moves into new distribution paradigms, such as Apple's acquisition of MLS streaming rights, a team's desire to hold on to its own identity branding will survive, creating a need for vendors like production-music houses to take on creative duties.
[This shift] is going to create a ton of new opportunities, he says. But it's going to be the Wild West out there for a while.
Matthew Gutknecht, director, sports entertainment, APM Music, believes that the classic broadcast-sports model remains strong for many leagues and teams though not for every market.
APM Music's Matthew Gutknecht: When technology outpaces legalities, you have to wait to see a legal precedent set [for AI]. It'll all get figured out.
The Diamond situation has touched so many of our clients in basketball, baseball, hockey, and other sports locally, he notes, but the full impact won't be felt immediately but rather as each sport's next season comes around. He adds that litigation and other disruptions, such as the legal kerfuffle between the Phoenix Suns and Mercury teams and Bally Sports, will increase that uncertainty.
Yes, he continues, there will be opportunities [for production music], but the larger picture is that the whole local and regional and OTT broadcast ecosystem has changed drastically. We're monitoring all of that.
Gutknecht takes a similar view with AI, waiting for its inevitable legal concerns to show some resolution: When technology outpaces legalities, you have to wait to see a legal precedent set. This is like sampling was years ago
