Decentralizing music distribution was the PNW March 2023 topic, with Steve Turnidge (top), Dianne Krouse (left) and Bob Moses (right) discussing.
The PNW Section's March 2023 meeting was held via Zoom, and discussed how technology is evolving to allow legitimate personal music streaming, with proper credit, and not be in the control of a few major companies. About 26 AES members attended and 11 non-members. Leading the discussion were PNW mastering engineer Steve Turnidge as our host, Jam Galaxy founder Dianne Krouse, and former AES Executive Director Bob Moses.
Roon is a music playback program that aggregates and presents metadata from multiple sources and presents your music in a magazine-like format. A recent release from Roon (Roon ARC) provides new functionality allowing personal and private streaming services. This meeting demonstrated one example of this process, and was an introduction to a possible future using AI and Blockchain to bring personal agency back to the musician, producer and engineer. This is currently the vision of Jam Galaxy, represented here by Dianne Krouse, their CEO.
The meeting began with self-introductions of attendees, replicating our physical meetings and letting people know who is in the virtual room.
Steve Turnidge started the discussion with a short description of Weedshare, a music superdistribution model active from 2003-2007, which was a model that paid you and the artist for sharing their files. Then Bob Moses discussed and described the research he and Steve worked together to design in Plus Z, a vision of a possible blockchain music system based on decentralized processes rather than systems only controlled by single companies or entities. This was expressed by the "Plus Z Ladder," describing the rungs of acquisition, validation, coding, storage, access and a presentation application. The idea of a "Transaction Patch" was introduced, which is a user interface to music tracks (or other media) that combines musician and engineer credits with the systems that brought the track to you.
Next, Steve gave a short discussion on the concept of decentralization and how it is a different mindset from what we've been used to. This led into a discussion of Jam Galaxy and SingularityNET from Dianne Krouse, CEO of Jam Galaxy and a member of the Jam Galaxy band, which has an AI Robot as its lead singer. She told of the mission of Jam Galaxy to use the new technologies of AI and Blockchain for the benefit of musicians and their community.
Steve then described Roon and its history, and Roon's audiophile customer base that wanted external access to their music libraries. Roon met this request with the ARC offering, providing Android and iPhone mobile interfaces to their music collections. This capability unintentionally provided a platform that could be used as a personal and private streaming service. Steve then displayed his version of this on his phone, using music from The Player's Lounge - a music collective he is a member of. Later in the meeting he showed a Matterport capture of The Player's Lounge, which is a VR representation of where they have played for over a decade.
Then Bob Moses wrapped up the presentation from the perspective of an audio hardware engineer, with the understanding that these days hardware is trivial, so he is interested in seeing how these new technologies play out.
The rest of the meeting was an interesting conversation among the speakers and attendees regarding this future, which lasted for around 45 minutes.
After the group discussion, the meeting was called to a close by Section Chair Dan Mortensen.
