Artificial Intelligence (AI) is threatening to upend the jobs of workers around the world. However, I believe these outcomes are not inevitable. Technology is developed and deployed based on a set of choices by people in power. In order to better understand today’s AI transition, and the impacts of today’s choices on all of us, I believe we can learn from recent history—specifically, the digital music transformation.
The potential bait and switch of the tech world today is worryingly reminiscent of the early 2000s. While new technology always promises a flashy quantum leap into utopia, it instead regularly delivers opaque systems that streamline mistakes from the past. Throughout 2023’s frenzied AI debates, my feelings of déjà vu have become undeniable.
Today, at the Ford Foundation I work to ensure technology uproots instead of inflames inequality. But back at the turn of the century I made my modest living as a punk rock musician and record label owner. We quickly learned the so-called tech revolution in music was never designed to deliver for us. Instead of enabling artists to live off their work, most musicians’ income from physical media like CDs and records tanked, and digital royalties paid fractions of pennies on the dollar. Today, I can see this history repeating itself across every sector.
The way I see it, in 2000, Napster was the equivalent of ChatGPT. Napster’s CEO Shawn Fanning was on the cover of Time and Newsweek and, depending on your perspective, digital file sharing was the end of the world or a pathway to limitless freedom and opportunity. The promises from tech CEOs of that time—including Fanning, MP3.com’s Michael Robertson, and Rhapsody’s Rob Reid—were likewise utopic and mission-driven, in much the same way that CEOs exalt the possibilities of AI today.
These leaders described an extraordinary future of diverse and competing platforms where musicians could control their destiny and access new tools to promote and steward their work.
I was pragmatically optimistic about the digital music revolution. As an independent record label owner, I was hungry to bypass gatekeepers like major labels, record store chains, and corporate radio. It made sense; if the crushing expense of making and shipping physical media was transformed into cheap “ones and zeros” rocketing around cyberspace, independent record labels could surely compete with the deep-pocketed majors. And if indie labels and musicians retained more profit, more of us could make a living in our vibrant musical groups instead of wasting money competing for a spot in a narrow set of increasingly concentrated winner-take-all markets. So, with the help of other pragmatic music lovers I produced studies, hosted conferences, and cofounded a think tank—all to try to make sure we all didn’t end up on the wrong side of the digital revolution.
What happened next helped concretize a Darwinian myth of tech disruption: The bubble burst, the market concentrated, and iTunes (and later Amazon and Spotify ) wiped the floor with the less technically adept major labels until they had to come back begging for license deals. Unfortunately, the oft-repeated and misguided argument that resistance to technological disruption is backward, luddite, doomer, and futile, gets both the facts and the key takeaway of this moment dangerously wrong.
Many musicians did embrace the tech revolution. The problem was the tech revolution didn’t benefit musicians as much as they were promised. Most musicians’ income from physical media tanked, and new paltry digital royalties dwindled.
While meaningful comparisons in compensation between the pre-digital music era and today’s economy are difficult, here’s a common practice for labels like mine: a band that sold 10,000 copies of an album in the ’90s could expect to earn around $50,000 in revenue. Today, that band’s entire album would have to be streamed a million times for the same financial return.
Instead of getting rid of the pesky gatekeepers, the old guard (major labels) worked with the new guard (tech companies) to create fancier gates and new unhealthy economic dependencies. Spotify is now the first place many listeners go to find music, meaning that—despite widespread frustration over low (or no) royalties—many musicians need the platform to stay relevant.
I would argue that the streaming model didn’t level the playing field as advertised. For instance, in November 2023, Spotify announced it will pay nothing to artists for tracks that receive under 1,000 streams in a 12-month period and instead will use these funds “to increase the payments to all eligible tracks, rather than spreading it out into $0.03 payments.”
(Fast Company reached out to Spotify for comment but did not receive a response on the record.)
Many of the same musicians who expressed cautious enthusiasm about the digital revolution in the 1990s and 2000s, have been vocal about the downsides of today’s changed industry. Why haven’t their tales of unrealized promises and lower royalties in this radically changed environment set off alarm bells among the wider public or their fans? I believe it’s because we as a society devalue most artists’ labor. I wonder, will the alarm bells sound when lawyers, accountants, and coders begin to lose their jobs (or see their incomes dwindle and their agency diminished) as part of the AI disruption?
If so, remembering the digital music transformation back in the aughts could offer useful context to the hot takes of AI’s impending jubilant metamorphosis or catastrophic disruption of the economy.
Musicians like myself witnessed the extreme contrast between the digital music industry’s rosy promises and disappointing reality. Now two decades later, we cannot forget what we learned and what to expect.
For instance, when Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen claims that generative AI will allow smaller businesses to develop their ideas, I expect that those companies will be compelled to pay expensive licenses. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks about how “AI will remove the drudgery of work and unleash creativity,” I expect that we’ll be charged to use AI tools that were trained using our own unreimbursed creative labor. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posts that, while AI will take away some jobs, he is “confident we will find new and much better jobs when that happens,” I expect that only a lucky few will get these jobs.
Indeed in October, while talking about the massive job losses expected as a result of AI, Altman said “I’m not afraid of that, at all. In fact, I think that’s good.” On November 18, the day after he was briefly fired from his CEO role, his perspective on getting laid off shifted.“I’m hurt and angry, and I think this sucks,” he said.
If we are to all share in the improved future we’re being promised, we’ll need to first step outside the “resistance is futile” mindset and flex our imaginations. We need to ask ourselves, how exactly will these new, powerful technologies serve the many and not the few? This is not a trivial or rhetorical question.
Since 2015, I’ve been working with coalitions of philanthropies, academics, private sector technologists, and civil and human right leaders to build the field of Public Interest Technology. I believe regulation and oversight will eventually create more equitable and responsive technology. However, I also believe regulation is not happening nearly fast enough. To keep pace with rapid innovations in AI and other tech, we’ll need thousands of public minded and multidisciplinary technologists to help build guardrails across all these new systems as they are developed.
If musicians had such champions and more leverage in the 2000s, I believe the current digital music space could look very different. Technology companies in partnership with artists could have created markets where everyone could benefit. A minimum royalty owed and paid to artists would compel streamers to compete for artists—instead of simply pushing down the cost of content. Direct micro-payments that went into an artists’ account every time a fan accessed their music online could eliminate distributor fees and share royalties more equitably. At the very least, if the data and algorithms that track and distribute money to artists were required to be transparent, we would know how our creative work is monetized and we could demand our cut. By understanding the failed reality of the digital music revolution experienced by the majority of musicians, we could break out of an idealized playback loop and imagine, design, and create tech systems that benefit all of human society, not just a handful of vertically integrated dominant companies that see music as a loss leader.
Today, many believe AI will play an important role in building the economy of tomorrow and that it justifies disrupting millions of stable blue and white-collar jobs, making those once resilient professions as precarious as a musician’s career. But I experienced the consequences of similar failed promises and idealized assumptions. It’s what made me want to fight for a world where tech is accountable and no one—be they a punk rocker, journalist, coder, factory worker—is expendable. It may sound naive and out of step with the times to imagine a better world is possible where humans are valued. But I would argue that it’s only naive if you believe the overly optimistic promises of Silicon Valley executives.
Paradoxically, many AI-enthusiasts dismiss those who investigate their promises and demand they protect workers as “Doomers.” I find this ironic—I thought it was those that failed to learn from history that were doomed to repeat it.