📖 The AI DJ (Idea Feature #14)

🧠 Top of Mind Technology

• So you saw the CrowdStrike outage last Friday that impacted Windows systems and thousands of companies worldwide, but what actually happened? Of course, the root cause was that the update CrowdStrike pushed did not work properly, but how did that impact Windows systems and other software products? This former Microsoft Engineer dives in depth into what happened.

• Telehealth is a 21^st century trend revolutionizing the medical care industry. There is only one problem – meeting a doctor virtually is sometimes useless without the real-time data that can be gathered from the tools and devices at a doctor’s office. Withings aims to change that with their 4-in-1 sensor that acts as a body thermometer, stethoscope, ECG, and blood oxygen level measuring device.

• BONUS: 30 ‘facts’ that you learned in school as a kid that have since been proven wrong.

🍪 Business Bites

• While banned in the US, Polymarket is changing the betting/predictions market landscape. The decentralized prediction market allows you to use cryptocurrency to buy and sell shares of various predictions. Here is a more in-depth guide into how it works.

• Summer is well under way, and maybe you feel like it is finally time to take that trip you never planned. If you do, we highly recommend you check out the Nomadic Matt blog. Travel hacking can help you save hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and this is the most solid blog we’ve seen out of the many options out there.

• You’ve probably heard that corn is the largest crop produced in the US in terms of quantity. But where does it all go? Turns out, only 1% of it is become the full-kernelled product that we eat during summer barbecues, the rest of it goes to various sources including ethanol production and form animal feed.

Idea Journal Feature: Audioshake and Potential AI Music Products

⚾The Elevator Pitch - Audioshake has built a product that allows music publishers, artists, content creators, and many others to split all parts of their audio clips for future mixing or other uses. Of course, the different parts or “stems” of the audio are split using an AI tool.

 💡The Idea

The idea behind Audioshake is not anything new. Splitting music has been part of the making of songs, movies, shows, and audio clips for years. However, leveraging AI to do so is a more novel concept. Splitting music was previously much easier if the track/firm had been recorded in different parts (meaning, for instance, the vocals were done separately from the music).

Audioshake is able to separate all parts of an audio clip even they were made all recorded together. And it wasn’t just done by luck over a short period of time. Audioshake has written many reports on their models, results, and accuracy, proving it is an industry leader.

Now we get it, this isn’t an idea but seems to be more of a business feature (and it sort of is). But, we wanted to bring up Audioshake because it led us down a path of discovery, which included the idea of AI generated music.

Essentially, AI generated music produces brand-new music that is curated for you. Over the past few years, songs written and developed using AI that imitated major artists have made head waves around the internet. This is potentially very illegal, and major record labels have already begun to sue AI music companies that have potentially infringed on their works. Some AI companies like OpenAI took things a step further and offered products that generated music based on what you requested (maybe a slow country song by Taylor Swift for instance).

This will be a highly divisive field in the years to come, one that is sure to lead of plenty of courtroom battles. Now that we’ve told you a little more about ai generated music, let’s review some potential revenue streams as well as risks and issues with this field:

💸Revenue Opportunities

• Combine Audioshake and Ai generated Music – Imagine taking a song you like, splitting it up, taking the parts/stems you like, and feeding those stems to an ai generator to remix them into new variations that you can leverage to make your own music. What if the music becomes unrecognizable? Would something like that even be detectable and thus still illegal via copyright law?

• Record Label Partnerships – Selling to businesses is always more lucrative, and if there is a way to use ai generated music and/or stems to help record labels produce songs, it could help them save a lot of costs. Perhaps one issue, however, is that these record labels will want to avoid lawsuits at all costs. Bringing in ai generated music to their label could lead to potential issues if the music is found to be too similar.

👍The Good Stuff

• Stable Industries – Music is here to stay, as is AI. Though both industries will change over time, leveraging them simultaneously is sure to lead to greater innovation.

• Fall-Back Options – Even if AI generated music is not approved by the industry, AI can still be utilized in cases like we saw with Audioshake, and perhaps for better editing and tuning of tracks.

👎The Risks

• Competition – Free tools already exist that aim to create the type of music we solve above. They are not great, but perhaps greater funding could solve the issues they face. If the music industry accepts AI more, then you could see large players such as Spotify work to develop their own models and products.

• Copyright Issues – As we discussed before, record labels are having some issues accepting AI generated music – and rightfully so. It may be a few years before the feasibility of incorporating AI into music is really seen.

🤔 Musing of the Week

A better definition for what can be considered passive income

According to Investopedia, Passive income is “money that doesn't take much time or effort to make and you don't earn it from a traditional job.” We think we can define that a bit better. Let’s break it up into two parts.

The part “money that doesn’t take much time or effort to make” should be quantified as taking less than 7 hours a week. To us, an hour a day is “not much time or effort.” Additionally, if you were to say the amount of time required per week for an income source to be considered “passive” should be even lower, then there are very few income sources that could be ruled as passive.

The second part of the phrase, “you don’t earn it (the money) from a traditional job” is something we take exception to. What if you become so good at your traditional job or running your business that you only have to work at maximum an hour a day?

Furthermore, just because an income source was not passive for some time before becoming passive, does not mean it should not be considered a passive income source. Let’s say for instance, you founded a landscaping company. You started out mowing lawns and trimming bushes yourself, before hiring others. Eventually, your day-to-day consisted of running the company from your home office, making sales and checking-in on customers, but you still worked 40 hours a week. Eventually, you hired a CEO to replace you, paying them a nice salary. You still owned the company, but your work became minimal, signing documents and making a few phone calls became your main job. Since you were the owner of the business, you still took distributions and made money, but you only worked a few hours a week. How could this not be considered passive income?

If passive income needs to be truly “passive” (i.e. requiring no initial work or continuous work beyond that), then the only income sources that could be passive would be investment vehicles such as stocks, CDs, Bonds, venture funds, etc.  

📚For the Road

• Nine most notorious copyright cases in music history

• How to Remix a Song Legally [Copyright Considerations]