Hello Reader — happy Tuesday!

Following our Wavelengths Summit, we took a pause to reflect, regroup, and realign our research priorities for the upcoming months.

We're back in the swing of things for the summer, rolling out several exciting collaborations with aligned communities and organizations across the Water & Music network. All of these partnerships are connected by our enduring goal of getting more accessible education on music-tech innovation into the hands of artists, their fans, and their teams.

We're thrilled to share our latest such collab, hot off the press — our first-ever print publication!

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WHAT'S GOOD: Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

What's Good is a new zine focusing on insights, learnings, and creative applications of AI technology.

Co-created with Refraction, this zine is centered around practical advancements and happenings in AI, and core ideas on how AI changes our understanding of artistic practice, economics, and curation. Our collective ideas are presented via short essays, Q+As, prompts, and imagery throughout.

Our goal is to encourage a proactive rather than passive approach to futurism — emphasizing how artists and their teams can be active participants, rather than bystanders, in harnessing AI for their creative practice and career sustainability.

We’re thrilled to be partnering with Metalabel to offer both digital and physical copies of this zine, with both fiat- and crypto-based support options. There are only 300 physical-only copies and 200 on-chain records available, so get your copy while they’re still hot!

Reserve your copy now

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How we made this zine

What’s Good is the result of nearly two years of research, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing with our friends at Refraction, a DAO focused on music, art, and culture.

W&M and Refraction first crossed paths in fall 2021 as fellow cohort members of the Seed Club accelerator. We bonded over our shared interests in using technology to build new kinds of creative communities and amplify critical artist perspectives that are otherwise left behind in the wider tech discourse.

In December 2022 at Art Basel in Miami, we co-hosted two roundtables on how AI is shaping music creation and curation, featuring input from our members as well as local music community leaders. Two months later, in February 2023, W&M published our Season 3 report on creative AI for music — giving an early look into key commercial, legal, and technological trends that we’re seeing play out in real time today with the latest AI wave.

What’s Good builds on these ideas and conversations with a curated slate of essays, interviews, interactive exercises, and more from over 20 contributors across W&M and Refraction. The zine's contents reflect the questions, concerns, and hopes that our community members have voiced in response to our ongoing research into creative AI.

Our lines of inquiry include:

• How does AI blur the lines among ideation, creation, and consumption, enabling a wider group of humans to participate in the making of art?
• How can AI promote collective intelligence by helping us coordinate global networks of curators and contributors?
• How will automation change the structures of creative art markets, especially around creative attribution?
• Are glitches in AI art bugs to be fixed, or sources of innovation in themselves?

We aim to ground otherwise abstract or speculative discussions around AI in practical, accessible terms that artists can understand and take into their own hands. Our voice balances curiosity and hands-on experimentation with realism and critique, which we believe is a key engine to fostering improvement and progress.

Thank you for joining us on this journey as we unpack the potential of AI to redefine the world of art — and therefore our social, cultural, political, and economic worlds at large. Hopefully, this zine sparks new inspiration and questions for you, and helps you apply AI and emerging technology to your own work and life in more thoughtful, informed ways.

​Explore our zine and get your copy today!​

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What our members talked about this week W&M members received an exclusive preview of the What's Good zine, as well as regular analysis on how AI and other emerging technologies are changing the music business. ​Join today to get access — we'd love to have you!

[ZINE PREVIEW] Building a new AI music format, with Bronze CEO Lex Dromgoole. Bronze is a new technology format that allows music creators to use AI and machine learning as creative tools for dynamic composition and arrangement. You may recognize the company for their generative music experiences with artists like Jai Pau, Arca, and Richie Hawtin. We interviewed Bronze co-founder/CEO Lex Dromgoole to dive into the underlying technology and philosophy behind the company, and the role AI could play in musicians' careers and workflows in the future at large.

[ZINE PREVIEW] The cost of automation: How AI will affect the livelihoods of working musicians. In our research, we observed two separate camps of music AI companies emerging, with different operating philosophies around whether music is a creative practice to be augmented (artistic), or merely a content production activity to be automated (functional). This essay dives into the complications of the artistic/functional dichotomy when it comes to evaluating the music AI market — especially considering the underrated importance of mundane, “functional” gigs in the financial tapestry of creative careers.

​Balancing niche and mainstream on the road to Web3 adoption. For many observers, it can feel like Web3 is in the grips of an identity crisis. Is embracing scale a necessary next step on the road to mainstream adoption? Or does it fly directly in the face of some of Web3’s more alternative, niche-oriented principles — which, for many early adopters, were the key driving force which inspired them to explore Web3 in the first place?

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Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback or suggestions, please reach out to us at newsletter@waterandmusic.com — we'd love to hear from you.