Tag: chatbots
Posted inNews

How will AI and chatbots have an impact on the music industry?

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AI and bots are two of the technological buzzwords currently at large in the music industry, but what impact will they really make on the way we discover, listen to and share music – as well as connecting with the artists that make it?

This morning, Music Ally hosted a conference panel at the by:Larm festival in Oslo to kick those topics around.

The panel included Ieva Martinkenaite, VP of Telenor Research, heading up its AI lab; Syd Lawrence, founder of The Bot Platform, which is powering Facebook Messenger bots for a growing number of musicians; Lucy Blair, head of international marketing at The Orchard; and Gregor Pryor, partner at law firm ReedSmith.

Posted inNews

Music’s future in a world of bots, smart assistants and invisible interfaces

Avatar photo by Stuart Dredge

The ‘future of technology’ session at last week’s FastForward conference in Amsterdam, moderated by Music Ally, started off with a discussion about virtual reality. You can read our writeup of that here.

The conversation moved on to chatbots and voice-controlled devices with smart assistants – think Amazon’s Echo and Alexa – and what they’re going to mean for musicians and the music industry.
We Make Awesome Sh’s creative director and head of design Rob Hampson talked about the company’s spin-off The Bot Platform, which has run chatbots for artists including Hardwell, Axwell Ingrosso and Olly Murs. We recently profiled the company.

Posted inNews, Startups

The Bot Platform opens up Facebook Messenger bots to more artists

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After creating Facebook Messenger bots for musicians including Hardwell, Olly Murs and Zara Larsson, agency We Make Awesome Sh is spinning the technology off as a standalone startup called The Bot Platform.

The system has already processed more than 10m conversations for clients, who also include Axwell /\ Ingrosso and Bastille. The Bot Platform is keen to sign up other artists as clients, as well as brands, sports teams and other companies outside the music industry.

Its system provides templates to help create Messenger bots, which can then sign up fans; send and respond to messages; and sell merchandise, tickets and music.

Posted inNews

Mark Zuckerberg’s AI butler also recommends music

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Every year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chooses a ‘personal project’ to focus on, with 2016’s being the development of an artificial-intelligence butler named Jarvis.

It’s an app and Facebook Messenger chatbot that controls various aspects of he and wife Priscilla’s home, but in an interview with Fast Company, Zuckerberg has also revealed that Jarvis has music-recommendation features.

Posted inAnalysis, News

BPI boss Geoff Taylor on AI, music and the technological singularity

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Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI and Brit Awards, wrote this foreword for Music Ally and the BPI’s recent Music’s Smart Future report, addressing the potential of machine-learning, chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) composition technologies.

“For most of us, the notion of artificial intelligence may conjure up visions of replicants from Ridley Scott’s dazzling sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, or the more recent humanoid offerings in Ex-Machina or C4’s Humans.

Yet AI is no longer the province of science fiction. In many areas of life, computers are now taking decisions or undertaking tasks (such as medical diagnosis or driving cars) that we previously assumed required human judgement and intelligence.

The technology has the potential to revolutionise the way we live and to shape the nature of our society. It also raises profound questions about the very essence of consciousness, our identity as humans, morality, and, yes, the Meaning of Life itself.

Thankfully those broader questions are beyond the scope of this report, but we feel it is time for us to reflect on the impact that AI technology may have on the music industry – and on music itself.

Posted inAnalysis, News

AI could be the music industry’s next Napster moment – but much bigger

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“It’s probably fair to say that AI will change the music industry and lots of other industries a lot more than the internet did.”

Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of startup Jukedeck, set the tone at last night’s ‘Music’s Smart Future’ event at the BPI’s headquarters in London. His company has developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology capable of composing music, with more than 500,000 tracks under its belt already.

The implications for the music industry of AI composers was just one of the topics discussed at the conference, alongside machine-learning based music recommendation tech; music-focused chatbots; and smart voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.

Posted inMarketing, Sandbox

Sandbox 168: Archive Mind Catalogue Marketing In The Social Media Age

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Lead: As we approach “peak Q4”, it is a time of year when catalogues get a major push as part of the Christmas gifting market. But catalogues, like dogs, are not just for Christmas. How are catalogues maintained and how can they stay relevant at a time when digital is trying to shepherd listeners towards […]

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Posted inMarketing, News, Startups

Octane AI launches chatbots for 50 Cent, Kiss and Aerosmith

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Battle of the bots! Or at least battle of the bot platforms.

We’ve written several times about UK agency We Make Awesome Sh’s development of a platform to help brands and labels create and run their own chatbots – including Hardwell and Olly Murs.

Now it’s got competition from US firm Octane AI, which has just announced a $1.5m funding round while launching bots for 50 Cent, Aerosmith and Kiss among other clients.

Posted inMarketing, News

Chatbots, emojis and Spotify: together at last!

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2016 in a nutshell? Try Martini’s latest digital marketing campaign, which involves a Facebook Messenger DJ chatbot.

“A DJ chatbot asks social media users on Facebook to sum up their summer using emojis… to create a Spotify playlist of summer anthems,” is how Martini described it in a press release.

Expect Calvin Harris and Drake’s big 2016 hits to feature prominently. The chatbot launches this Saturday (29 October) on Martini’s Facebook page.