Podcast Ep 342: The CTO of Massive Attack and founder of Genotone on how the music industry lost its way – and what digital watermarking could do to fix it
Andrew Melchior has spent more than 30 years at the intersection of music, technology, and digital culture.
From bringing music to Nokia mobile phones to producing the global live broadcast of David Bowie’s Reality Tour, he has had a front-row seat to every seismic shift the industry has faced.
“Music became like water. The means to make it became ubiquitous. What has to happen now is cultural curation”
Today, as CTO of Massive Attack and founder of provenance start-up Genotone, he is focused on what he sees as the defining challenge of the AI era: ensuring that the people who create music can prove they created it, and be compensated accordingly.
He spoke to The ThinkBusiness Podcast at the recent Dublin Tech Summit about the lessons of history, the threat of AI-generated deep fakes, and why the music industry needs to build its plumbing before it worries about the decor.
It’s about protecting the melody makers
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(Abridged Q&A)
The music industry has gone through enormous disruption over the past three decades. How do you sum up what changed?
David Bowie is the person I go to for this answer. He issued Bowie bonds against the future royalties of his catalogue when he realised MP3s were going to be the thing. The bonds were initially successful, but by 2001 or 2002, when Napster had come in and piracy was rampant, investors downgraded them to junk status. Bowie laughed. He said he knew it was going to happen, because music was going to become like white water – ubiquitous, everywhere.
“The chief people in record labels today are no longer A&R people. They’re data scientists”
What happened was that the internet injected itself into the distribution network. Labels like EMI had these huge warehouses in Hayes, Middlesex, pressing records, owning HMV, owning the sound stages of Hollywood movie studios. They had a whole industrial media complex. Then suddenly the distribution was eaten by new media, and they were disintermediated. The real power brokers today are the artist managers and the live booking agents, because the only way artists make real money now is from touring. That’s why gig tickets have gone from £25 to £500.
Is AI creating the same kind of moment that Napster did?
In some ways, yes – but the speed, scale, and granularity are entirely different. With sampling, you could usually tell where a chunk of music came from. There are apps that still track who sampled who. With generative AI, the audio has been atomised to such a granular level that you genuinely cannot distinguish the source. It’s super-sampling in millions of slices. That makes it very hard to know who should be paid.
And the problem is getting worse. A few weeks ago, Syd Barrett – the long-dead founder of Pink Floyd – appeared to release a new single on Spotify. Someone had used his voice and created an entirely new track. As soon as a manager discovers something like that, they have to do a copyright strike, a takedown, and start legal proceedings. That process is painful and slow, and by the time it resolves the damage is done.
You mentioned Spotify and curation. How have platforms changed the economics?
What Spotify and TikTok have done is become a kind of Now That’s What I Call Music on steroids. At EMI, I worked on that brand. My bosses Steve Pritchard and Pete Duckworth were brilliant at buying ad breaks in the middle of Coronation Street. Sales would go like a hockey stick. Now the same principle is operating, but with extreme personalisation and velocity.
“We shied away when the generative AI music machines arrived. Rob Del Naja said: ‘I’m not sure we want a machine making Massive Attack music without us being involved’”
The chief people in record labels today are no longer A&R people. They’re data scientists. And TikTok has created some interesting workarounds: kids slow down or speed up music to avoid copyright detection algorithms. That’s the arms race we’re dealing with.
You are CTO of Massive Attack – a fairly unusual role for a band. How is technology part of their creative process?
The band sprung out of the Wild Bunch in Bristol in the 1980s, and the discomfort then was sampling. The Akai sampler series allowed people who were not formally trained musicians to rack out records, chop interesting bits out of their own collections, and turn them into the basic beats. That is how Massive Attack’s writing started.
By 1998 they were the first band in the world to stream an entire album online. They were also among the first to connect live visuals to data feeds – Twitter, environmental data. Rob [Del Naja] is very focused on the idea of real-time data informing the experience. We started experimenting with game engine audio as early as 2014 and 2015, working with a game jam called Ludum Dare, giving stems to the gaming community to use under Creative Commons.
“If you rub a piece of silver down until the hallmark disappears, you can’t legally sell it. The hallmark is the proof of authenticity. Music needs the equivalent”
We also built an app called Phantom, which connected to your heart rate, the time of day, and the motion of your phone, and remixed the music as you listened to it. Teardrop would sound different at 9am when you’re late for the bus than it does sitting in the back of a taxi at 8 o’clock in the evening. And we built an interactive exhibition at the Barbican in 2017 and 2018, generating music from cameras tracking visitors’ movements within the space.
Where does Genotone come from, and what problem is it trying to solve?
The core problem is metadata. When a musician creates a track, they embed information into the file: who wrote it, who owns the rights, what album it’s on. That metadata has existed for a long time. The trouble is that the way file formats are structured, it sits in a header, and there is free software you can download that strips it out entirely. All the hard-won provenance information is gone in a blink.
“We thought: if we can embed it in John Cage’s four minutes 33 seconds of silence, it might just work”
I use a hallmark analogy. If you rub a piece of silver down until the hallmark disappears, you can’t legally sell it. The hallmark is the proof of authenticity. Music needs the equivalent. What Genotone does is embed a cryptographically secured serial number into the actual audio file itself, at the point of mastering, so it cannot be stripped out. It is bound to the identity of the creator – verified through the same kind of process you use for financial apps or government IDs. If someone tries to tamper with the file, the tampering is detectable because it damages the source.
How do you know the embedding is inaudible?
We have already done proof-of-concept tests. We embedded the identifier into Teardrop – one of Massive Attack’s most well-known tracks – and the band could not hear it. We did the same with Glue by Bicep, and again, nothing audible. And then, for the final test, we used John Cage’s four minutes 33 seconds of silence. If you can embed it in complete silence and nobody hears it, it works.
“The gauge of railway tracks is a standard. The thread of screws is a standard. If you want something to succeed, you need a unified language”
The computational intensity that made watermarking impractical in 2011 is now available to us, thanks to the same GPU infrastructure that powers AI itself.
Why set it up as a foundation rather than a company?
Because Microsoft, Adobe, Meta, Google, Universal, Sony, Warner – they are all trying to create standards, but in their own walled gardens, and those standards are not interoperable. The music industry has always been built on standards. MP3 was a standard from Fraunhofer. The gauge of railway tracks is a standard. The thread of screws is a standard. If you want something to succeed, you need a unified language.
“None of this is anti-AI. AI can be genuinely creative. You can use it to assist with composition, to handle tedious tasks, to find inspiration. The genie is out of the bottle and nobody wants to push it back in”
So we are not building a private company owned by shareholders that will extract value by renting you a solution. We are building something closer to the Linux Foundation, W3C, or Mozilla. A not-for-profit foundation with independent advisors. Your identity is yours. We do not charge you rent for it. It cannot be sold to the highest bidder.
What needs to happen between artists, technology companies, and policymakers to make AI strengthen rather than undermine the music industry?
None of this is anti-AI. AI can be genuinely creative. You can use it to assist with composition, to handle tedious tasks, to find inspiration. The genie is out of the bottle and nobody wants to push it back in. But if you are going to create a piece of work, you should be able to attach a provenance signal to it – something that travels with the work so that in 50 years someone can say, a human made this, not a machine.
The deal that has to happen between artists, tech companies, and developers is that we agree on a standard and come together around it. Because right now, without one, the system we have built is simply not able to protect the person in a bedroom in Salford or Dublin or Cork who makes the next great record.
At the moment, putting music on the internet without provenance is the equivalent of buying a car, not putting number plates on it, leaving the door unlocked, and leaving the keys in. We are trying to give every creator three locks, not one.
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Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
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