Hello, Audio!

Recently, there has been an immense boom around startups working in the field of music and artificial intelligence. We see companies and individuals embracing the new technology in various fields of music production, composing, performing to music recognition. But how new is this technology really? In this episode Helen Meyer talks with Dr Leigh Smith, Senior Research Engineer at Landr, who has been working in the field of music and AI for more than 20 years now. He gives us a wrap up about how it all started, what the state of the art is and what he thinks the future may bring. Want to dive deeper? Here are some useful links: ISMIR - International Society for Music Information Retrieval https://www.ismir.net ISMIR 2019 - International Symposium for Music Information Retrieval 2019 https://ismir2019.ismir.net GANs - ISMIR tutorial on Generating Music with Generative Adversarial Networks https://salu133445.github.io/ismir2019tutorial WiMIR - Women in Music Information Retrieval website https://wimir.wordpress.com/ Portrait XO - artist using neural networks for generating an album of vocal processing https://www.reeperbahnfestival.com/en/speaker/portrait-xo-portrait-xo Aaron Burnett & The Big Machine "The Prototype” https://open.spotify.com/track/12zlZ8URX0gm8rxniduLUi?si=egX_cDCpRKGQvcN_LHODJg from the album “Anomaly" https://www.discogs.com/Aaron-Burnett-The-Big-Machine-Anomaly/release/13032173

Although having your own podcast is very time consuming, podcasts are currently flooding the German market but hardly anyone can even compensate the costs for the production. The American podcasting scene is a few years ahead of us, having big production companies and an advertisement revenue that is expected to hit 1 billion USD by 2021. Meanwhile in Germany, the podcasting industry does not seem to be on the radar of big companies’ digital marketing mix yet. What possibilities do German podcasters have to monetize their podcasts and how do they become relevant for the advertising market? Christoph Falke, Head of Audio at Axel Springer SE, Vincent Kittmann, Head of Podstars by OMR, a podcast marketing and production company and James Harper, owner of podcast “Filter Stories”, a documentary podcast that sheds a light on the stories of people hidden in the shadows of the coffee industry, talk about their experience with podcast monetization and how to improve it.

Do you want to found a business but are unsure about the first steps? This special podcast series of “Hello, Audio!” recaps the event called “Found Your Future” which was launched by The Venue Berlin in cooperation with students from Popakademie: Beere, Fabian and Lukas. In this podcast we will focus on some of the main points when it comes to founding. Founders and experts from the creative industry are sharing their knowledge in different keynotes. In this episode, Tilmann Kemper and Anastasia Troyanov from APX are sharing their knowledge about finance investment readiness and sources of funding.

Do you want to found a business but are unsure about the first steps? This special podcast series of “Hello, Audio!” recaps the event called “Found Your Future” which was launched by The Venue Berlin in cooperation with students from Popakademie: Beere, Fabian and Lukas. In this podcast we will focus on some of the main points when it comes to founding. Founders and experts from the creative industry are sharing their knowledge in different keynotes. The first part of this series is an interview with Simon de Koning from ELEVEN who is getting interviewed by Helen Meyer from The Venue Berlin about how to stay motivated and believe in your idea while founding a business.

Music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have changed the way we discover new music. These services use algorithms to provide music recommendation. They suggests songs to listeners corrisponding to their taste. But who determines what kind of music these algorithms suggest? How will music streaming services improve in the future? What about protection of data privacy? In this episode of “Hello, Audio!“, Helen was on tour at Future Music Camp in Mannheim and met up with Prof. Peter Knees from the Technical University of Vienna who is researching on music recommendation systems.

On March 26th, the European parliament has backed the new and much discussed EU copyright law. One main change is that internet platforms that offer users to upload their own content are now responsible of the right copyright permission for this material. While the law’s aim is to protect creators' rights to get paid fairly for their work, one major implication is that anything posted on the internet will be subject to censorship, so opponents of the bill say this will stifle freedom and creativity on online mediums. This might especially affect unsigned artists and parodies. But what does Article 13 actually mean? When will it be implemented and would it need to be changed so that artists get their share, but the freedom of internet is not affected? Find out in this episode of “Hello, Audio!” where Helen discusses this with Felix Stang, associate partner at the law firm Raue in Berlin in the area of copyright and media law; Micki Meuser, composer and music producer from Berlin; and Steffen Holly (Sholly), leader of the business unit Media Management and Delivery of the Fraunhofer Institute.