(Un)read in the ledger: Monday 14–20 October 2024

My weekly reading list

Much ado about music, more AI creation tools and principles and young people in bookshops.

The Australian music industry is in crisis and Live Nation is taking advantage of it. Adobe announced its Firefly video module and Creative Australia put out AI principles.

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I had a busy week just gone and there were some complex topics doing the rounds so it’s a shorter list this week, but here’s what I’ve been reading this week:

Generative AI and creative work: Creative Australia Principles

Centering human creativity, ethical AI use, transparency and more in Creative Australia’s AI principles.

Creative Australia has released six principles about generative AI and creative work.

The principles:

• centre human creativity,
• encourage ethical AI use (by artists and others),
• call for transparency around AI use,
• want policy approaches that enable innovation and support Australia’s unique cultural and creative identity,
• caution that concentrated and global ownership of AI systems impact accountability of AI developers and effective regulation of AI.

Around the principles the document looks at the increase in the use of AI by artists and other creators in their creative practices, as well as use by other users. Unsurprisingly, it raises concerns about the unauthorised use of copyright material in training data without recognition, remuneration or disclosure, and the potential for creative labour displacement because of AI, particularly because “Creative work can now be produced by anyone, with significant potential impact on the financial viability of creative careers, and this content is being produced off existing creative work without compensation.” Ownership of AI systems by large technology companies, the costs for new entrants to the market and the difficulty regulating AI developers given their size and multinational operations is also mentioned. All in all there is nothing radical or unexpected in it but it does align with other AI regulatory work going on, including the Proposals Paper for introducing mandatory guardrails for AI in high-risk settings AI guardrails put out by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources.

Wednesday 9 October 2024

Creative Australia

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‘I love the whole atmosphere and can spend hours browsing’: how did bookshops suddenly become cool?

Younger generations in the UK are going to bookstores, but it may not be entirely about digital disconnection.

This came out at the end of last week but I only saw it this week. This Guardian article reports on the results of a Booksellers Association survey that indicates that bookshops are popular with UK gen Zers and millennials. It seems they are also more likely to make purchase decisions about books based on bookseller’s recommendations – 49 percent and 56 percent respectively, compared with 37 percent of gen X and 31 percent of baby boomers. What’s interesting is the way the article and quotes from survey respondents frame the IRL bookshop experience, the word-of-mouth value of booksellers’ recommendations and connections gen Z and millennial readers form with bookshops, their staff and the authors who do events at them as an antidote to algorithmic and influencer pushed book titles. I like that the article looks a range of digital and non-digital dynamics at play for different readers in the gen Z and millennial groups: everything from bookshops as social media backdrops and books as accessories to BookTok as a way to discover new books and bookstores and the appeal of special editions, signed copies and author talks to these readers.

Sarah Manavis – Friday 11 October 2024

The Guardian

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Adobe Launches Firefly Video Model and Enhances Image, Vector and Design Models

Adobe announces a range of Firefly AI video tools.

Adobe is the latest AI company to roll out a video AI tool. Their Video Model expands the current suite of AI tools under the Firefly brand. New AI video capabilities filling footage gaps, smoothing transitions, extending shots, creating video from text prompts, turning still images into video assets. It is currently in limited beta so it may be awhile before the general Creative Cloud subscribers see Video AI generation in their apps. We also don’t know what the pricing for the Firefly Video Model will be when it leaves beta. Adobe also announced faster image generation in Firefly, improvements to AI vector tools in Illustrator and new was to ideate and iterate in Photoshop.

In the media release Adobe hammers hard it’s focus on ‘responsible innovation’ and emphasises that its video model was trained “... on licensed content, such as Adobe Stock and public domain content” and “... designed to be commercially safe.” It rattles off brands such as PepsiCo/Gatorade, IBM, Mattel and Deloitte to add weight to the claim. This is punctuated by Adobe restating that it founded the Content Authenticity Initiative and championed the adoption of Content Credentials.

Monday 14 October 2024

Adobe

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Also worth reading on this topic:

Bringing generative AI to video with Adobe Firefly Video Model

Ashley Still – Friday 11 October 2024

Adobe Blog

Adobe’s AI video model is here, and it’s already inside Premiere Pro

Jess Weatherbed – Monday 14 October 2024

The Verge

Live Nation's industry takeover tearing the Australian music scene apart

Four Corners accuses Live Nation and others of opaque ticket fees.

The ABC’s Four Corners had a segment looking at live entertainment giant Live Nation and their operations in Australia. I have not seen the Four Corners episode this article is based on, but the article is telling enough. It made some pretty big claims, including that the average cost of a gig ticket here in Australia now hovers around the $100 mark and some punters may mistakenly think that most of the money is going to the artist but in reality there is a significant number of hidden fees that Ticketmaster (and its main competitor Ticketek) tack on. These are called transaction fees, booking fees, service fees, infrastructure fees and ‘inside charges’. Unsurprisingly Live Nation Australia hit back with a statement clearing up ‘factual inaccuracies’ . Interestingly, Live Performance Australia (LPA) also put out a statement which reads as highly defensive of Live Nation to me. Certainly, separate investigation by The Guardian shows that unquestionably Ticketmaster and Ticketek add significantly more additional fees.

I am by no means an expert on the Australian music industry but shit seems bad and the increasing presence of live entertainment giant Live Nation in the local scene is exacerbating things. Locally they own ticketing companies Ticketmaster and Moshtix, own or operate a few music venues, and, through Secret Sounds, they run Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival, booking agency Village Sounds, independent record labels Dew Process and Create/Control and much more. If Live Nation’s tactics in other countries such as the United States are anything to go by they are absolutely working their way up to a vertically integrated monopoly and monospony here in Australia, and hidden fees is only one tactic in their playbook. I remember reading about Live Nation’s thug-like tactics in Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism style: italics https://chokepointcapitalism.com/ which I have summarised in Re-read below.

Avani Dias, Amy Donaldson and Lara Sonnenschein – Monday 14 October 2024

Four Corners and ABC News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Read it??→

Also worth reading on this topic:

Response to Four Corners

Live Nation Australia

Australia’s live music industry: let’s focus on some facts

Evelyn Richardson – Tuesday 15 October 2024

Live Performance Australia

The crisis facing Australian live music is older and bigger than just Live Nation

Andrew Stafford – Tuesday 15 October 2024

The Guardian

Knives out for Live Nation after Four Corners doco

Tuesday 15 October 2024

CIM

Are market giants endangering Australia’s live music scene? Industry veterans and local artists are worried

Ben Green and Sam Whiting – Tuesday 15 October 2024

The Conversation

Australian concert goers pay higher fees to ticketing giants than independent agencies, industry modelling shows

Kelly Burke – Saturday 19 October 2024

The Guardian

Re-read

What I’ve circled back to this week:

Chapter 8 of Chokepoint Capitalism – How Live Nation Chickenized Live Music

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow detail how Live Nation uses thug tactics to control the music industry.

There’s been a lot of comments about Live Nation’s stake in the Australian music scene flying around recently which reminded me of Chapter 8 of Chapter 8 of Chokepoint Capitalism which looks at how they build their anticompetitive flywheel and defend it. Here’s my summary of the chapter:

Historically independent entities ran all the aspects needed to put on a music gig. Live Nation has bought up players in all these areas to vertically and horizontally integrate across the music industry in the United States. As Giblin and Doctorow say:

"Previously, running live events required artist managers, talent bookers, event promoters, venues, and ticketers, each operating largely independently from the rest. Now, though, a leviathan called Live Nation Entertainment has vertically integrated every element. It manages artists and books and promotes talent to play in venues it owns, runs, and tickets. It’s horizontally integrated too, tot he point where it’s the world’s largest live entertianment company, the largest producer of live music concerts, one of the world’s biggest artists management companies (representing more than five hundred of the world’s biggest artists), and the world’s biggest live entertainment ticketer. All this gives it enormous control over live music.”

Beyond integration, other actions the group of companies take firm up their anticompetitive fly wheel. Giblin and Doctorow detail quite a list:

• When Live Nation is ticketing competitor’s events “… it gets detailed real-time insights into their financial positions, programming innovations, successes, and failures, which is can then imitate or avoid.”
• This allows them “… to make better decisions about who to book and how much to pay them (in the venue market), and also enables it to swoop in and take over acts that hae been developed by independent managers when they’re just about to break through (in the management space).”
• Being in so many parts of the music industry creates conflicts of interest; as artist managers they should want to limit ticket scalping because it diverts money from artists by it can attract significant additional revenue from the reselling secondary market as a ticketer.
• Allegedly, while the organisation seems to try to stop scalping, it offers fee discounts to resellers who have half a million or more in annual ticket resales
• Live Nation tries to sure up Ticketmaster as the ticketing provider at venues they don’t own because “… refusing to contract with Ticketmaster w[ould] result in the venue receiving fewer Live Nation concerts or none at all.”
• This has reduced the ability for other ticketing companies to compete.
• Remedies placed on them by regulators such as the US Department of Jusice “art too easily ignored or abused … because the benefits of violation often outweigh the punishment.”
• Live Nation and Ticketmaster terms mean ticket purchasers have waivered their class action rights.
• Live Nation steps in and ‘strategically purchases’ small to medium players in the market struggling under current market stresses at ‘fire sale prices’.

It’s all pretty grim!

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow – 2022

Scribe Publications

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Disclosure

AI use

This article was drafted using Google Docs. No part of the text of this article was generated using AI. The original text was not modified or improved using AI. No text suggested by AI was incorporated. If spelling or grammar corrections were suggested by AI they were accepted or rejected based on my discretion (however, sometimes spelling, grammar and corrections of typos may have occurred automatically in Google Docs).

The banner image (i.e. the first image at the top of the article) was generated by AI using Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator.

Credits

Image: A pattern made up of a repeated icon of three books in a pile on top of each other. The top book has a bright yellow cover, the middle book has a bright pink cover and the bottom book has an aqua cover. The piles of books are on a bright orange background. The icon is an adaptation of an vector graphic generated by Elliott Bledsoe using the AI tool Text to Vector Graphic (Beta) in Adobe Illustrator. Prompt: ‘Hand drawn pile of books simple lines’.

Provenance

This article was produced by Elliott Bledsoe from Agentry , an arts marketing micro-consultancy. It was first published on 20 Oct 2024. It has not been updated. This is version 1.0. Questions, comments and corrections are welcome – get in touch any time.

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