At SXSW, It Used to be Good-bye NFTs and Hi AI Track

The place have all of the NFT brothers long gone? That was once not unusual at this yr’s South-by-Southwest, the super-sized music-tech-culture convention in Austin, Texas.

In 2022, some 40 panels and shows desirous about previously trendy now-fugitive non-fungible tokens.

A panel closing yr featured FTX crypto-exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried and e-sports entrepreneur Andy Dinh, described on the match as “two massive marketers … now not handiest converting the panorama in their very own fields, Fairly the commercial panorama as we realize it.”

3 months earlier than this yr’s SXSW, Bankman-Fried was once indicted and arrested on fees of securities fraud, cash laundering and marketing campaign finance regulation violations. He was once later launched on $250 million bond, at the situation that he stay at his oldsters’ house in California.

The SBF scandal and the new cave in of crypto-friendly Signature Financial institution equated to large web losses in NFTs at this yr’s confab. A seek of the time table confirmed as many as part of the NFT-related panel.

“The sector of era strikes in no time towards the following large factor,” stated Mollie White, a era skeptic and Wikipedia editor who was once a keynote speaker. “I feel the cycle of mythmaking and propaganda that society is going thru isn’t excellent.”

Instead of NFTs, this yr’s era dialogue revolved round synthetic intelligence, together with “Can Robots Create Lifestyles-Converting Songs?” and “Welcome to the Gadget: Artwork within the Age of AI,” together with composer Dan Navarro, author of Pat Benatar’s hit “We Belong.” Those panels took a extra conservative way to the AI-meets-art craze than closing yr’s NFT birthday party’s Cavalier Parade. AI-generated ditties sound too trite and clunky for top time, however AI can lend a hand with tricky and trivial musical duties like movie rating orchestration and song observe mastering.

At the day of the ones two panels, the USA Copyright Place of job launched its much-anticipated directive on AI song copyright, pointing out that song created fully through AI modelers like Google’s GOOG text-to-music generator MusicLM can’t be copyrighted. May Handiest the human-authored facets of a piece which are impartial of AI-generated content material. This ban might really feel like a splash of ice to scorching AI firms attempting to draw funding in line with monetization fashions that depend on copyright protections.

So what’s going to be the new tech subject subsequent yr?

The lanyard in this yr’s Pageant Laminates might be offering a clue. LabelCoin, which has been known as the “Robinhood of Track”, is one among a rising choice of “song marketplace” companies providing artists an alternative choice to the foremost label programs with the promise of a song “inventory change” the place fanatics should buy stocks. and will promote. Of songs

Different firms browsing that rising wave come with SongWest, JKBX, and Royal.io, whose founder Justin Blau aka 3LAU is an EDM celebrity who spoke at SXSW this yr. Blau made headlines in 2021 through promoting $11.7 million in NFTs of his album ultravioletWhich you’ll additionally get on maximum streaming services and products.

Within the mid-Nineteenth century, Austin was once stuffed with cowboys and Comanches on horseback. These days, its tech and song connoisseurs are chasing the Subsequent Large Factor on birds and different stylish scooters.

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