{"id":103736,"date":"2021-03-09T10:58:34","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T10:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?p=103736"},"modified":"2021-03-09T20:26:26","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T20:26:26","slug":"the-death-of-the-artist-why-big-hit-and-bts-just-raised-the-alarm-on-the-record-industrys-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/the-death-of-the-artist-why-big-hit-and-bts-just-raised-the-alarm-on-the-record-industrys-future\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The death of the artist’? Why Big Hit and BTS just raised the alarm on the record industry’s future."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI think we\u2019re seeing the death of the artist. Songs are fully alive [but] I think we\u2019re hitting a point in time where it\u2019s going to be more and more difficult to have follow-up hits for an artist. I see it happening.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Out<\/em> magazine ran a thought-provoking interview <\/a>with Milk & Honey CEO & founder Lucas Keller, in which he shared the above quote.<\/p>\n

Keller knows the business of hits intimately: his company represents songwriters and producers who have created \/ co-created oodles of smash records<\/a> for superstars like Demi Lovato, Cardi B, The Chainsmokers, Justin Bieber, Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa.<\/p>\n

His words arrived as news that Spotify now sees 60,000 tracks uploaded<\/a> to its service every day buzzed in the background.<\/p>\n

Keller commented: “There are so many songs… [Where] we\u2019re going with music is it\u2019s going to be increasingly difficult to be an artist, where fans are apathetic to who the artist is. They just love a song that was on a playlist.”<\/p>\n

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The timing of Keller’s observation comes at an interesting three-way junction in the history of the music business.<\/p>\n

On one road, the value of proven hit songs is rocketing to record highs, driven in part by acquisitive music companies like Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Primary Wave, plus relative newcomers like Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group.<\/p>\n

Hurtling down the other two roads are, respectively, the recorded music business and Artificial Intelligence technology.<\/p>\n

These two are potentially on a collision course that should \u2013 if you join the dots \u2013 already be ringing alarm bells in record company A&R departments.<\/p>\n

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A couple of weeks ago, MBW reported that Big Hit Entertainment, the company behind K-Pop megastars BTS, had\u00a0invested 4 billion KRW (approximately $3.6m)<\/a> into Korea-based Artificial Intelligence company Supertone<\/a> \u2013 which claims that its AI tech can create \u201ca hyper-realistic and expressive voice [not] distinguishable from real humans\u201d.<\/p>\n

Supertone additionally claims that its Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) technology can learn songs in a specific style and then mimic what it’s learned, even over new compositions.<\/p>\n

AI-performed music is nothing new: At the start of 2020, US-based digital agency Space150 modelled Travis Scott\u2018s sonic and vocal style via Artificial Intelligence, with the experiment producing in an original AI-composed track with wild results.<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cif BTS uses our technology when making games or audiobooks or dubbing an animation, for instance, they wouldn\u2019t necessarily have to record [their vocals] in person.”<\/p>\n

Choi Hee-doo, Supertone<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Supertone is set to take things one step further.\u00a0 The company recently made headlines for using its SVS technology to \u201cresurrect\u201d the singing voice of South Korean folk superstar Kim Kwang-seok, with the resultant cloned voice debuted on Korean television show Competition of the Century: AI vs Human.<\/em><\/p>\n

The company’s Chief Operating Officer, Choi Hee-doo, told\u00a0CNN<\/a> in January of another hypothetical use for SVS.<\/p>\n

\u201cBTS is really busy these days, and it\u2019d be unfortunate if they can\u2019t participate in content due to lack of time,\u201d Choi Hee-doo explained (a month prior to Big Hit’s investment), adding: \u201cSo, if BTS uses our technology when making games or audiobooks or dubbing an animation, for instance, they wouldn\u2019t necessarily have to record [their vocals] in person.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Big Hit Entertainment certainly has a lot riding on the longevity of BTS’s success.<\/p>\n

When the Korean company IPO’d last year, some pointed out that Big Hit’s reliance<\/a> on the BTS brand made it a risky bet for investors. (Indeed, we know that nearly 90% of Big Hit’s revenues<\/a> in the first half of 2020 were BTS-related.)<\/p>\n

In theory, Supertone’s SVS technology could be used to learn every song in the BTS catalog, and then replicate the vocal styling of each member of the band for future recordings.<\/p>\n

When you consider that the average age of BTS’s members is now 26 \u2013 and that each of the them will likely enter government-mandated military service when they turn 30<\/a> \u2013 it’s only sensible that Big Hit would now buy into tools that can help maintain BTS’s popularity… even when the band themselves are unavailable.<\/p>\n

Big Hit already has a business line \u2013 dubbed \u201cArtist Indirect-Involvement\u201d<\/a> \u2013 that sees it use the name and likeness of BTS for advertising and branding exercises without requiring the band’s active participation.<\/p>\n

Could this ever extend to their speaking \u2013 and singing \u2013 voices?<\/p>\n

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Virtual pop act K\/DA have hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Yet even if such an experiment blew up in the face of Big Hit, it wouldn’t mean the end of the rise of virtual artists.<\/p>\n

League of Legends\u2019 fictional K-pop band K\/DA<\/a>, currently has over 440,000 followers on Twitter, over 500,000 on Instagram, and their tracks have been streamed hundreds of millions of times on Spotify alone.<\/p>\n

The band’s video for POP\/STARS<\/em> (ft. Madison Beer, (G)I-DLE, Jaira Burns) has been viewed over 420m times on YouTube.<\/p>\n

If Lucas Keller is right, and the avalanche of new music hitting Spotify \u2013 combined with ‘playlist culture’ \u2013 is making young people care increasingly more about the song than the performer, examples like K\/DA raise difficult questions over the need of real-life artists to record hit music.<\/p>\n

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