Carrie (00:57)
Hello, James. Welcome to Artificial Breakdown. We'd love to welcome you to the show. So to everybody who's listening, this is James O'Brien. He is the co-CEO of Sound Ethics. He's an ethical data advocate. He's a composer. He's a producer. He's out of Los Angeles. Very cool. We're so excited to have you on, James.

James O'Brien (01:18)
Thank you, thank you so much for having me. Excited.

Carrie (01:22)
Me too. This was another kind of interesting how this came about. Somebody just sent me your website and said, Hey, Carrie, you're into AI and you're a musician. Isn't this interesting? And I was like, this is the most interesting thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I'm going to ask this person to be on the podcast immediately and here you are. So it's very exciting.

Peter (01:36)
Ha ha.

James O'Brien (01:36)
really? awesome. Love it.

Yes,

Carrie (01:43)
before we get into sound ethics, why don't we hear a little bit about you and kind of how you got here and where you came from.

James O'Brien (01:51)
Yeah. So, um, yeah. So I was one of those kids that was just like obsessed with music and I would play all day and ditch school and do all kinds of bad stuff to, um, yeah, to constantly play, um, learning different instruments and, um, just really obsessed and also with technology. And, uh, you know, I was, I was learning to do scripts and like, I was basically copying code out of like magazines. This shows like.

Carrie (02:04)
James.

James O'Brien (02:20)
how dated I am and my age, but those were the days. And yeah, and I started playing in bands and I was in school band and orchestra and all that kind of thing. That's when, yeah, when I went to school, exactly. Then I did that. Yeah, I actually had a tragedy where I lost my family in my like teenage years.

Carrie (02:33)
That's when you went to school, was for band practice.

Peter (02:40)
Did.

James O'Brien (02:49)
And I ended up in foster care and a boys home and I lost access to playing music and to computers and technology. And yeah, it was like, it was rough to have the absence of that. And that's been a big part of my story and what's driven me since then, because I'm very grateful to have those things in my life.

Carrie (02:59)
that's awful.

Yeah,

wow.

And then, obviously very sorry to hear about your family and sorry to hear about that. I'm interested though, in this idea of like, well, you found this thing, but then it was kind of taken away from you. So then, I mean, the passion grows, I'm assuming.

James O'Brien (03:30)
Yeah.

Yes,

it was much more intense. Yeah, that was kind of, I didn't really, I don't know if I like really put it the right way. I was trying to figure out how to articulate it, but you know, the absence of something, right? It's that there's so many like song lyrics that are that way. It's like, you don't know what you have till it's gone kind of thing. And I did have that actually, like I was really involved with bands at such a young age and playing in multiple bands and I was already just in love and.

So yeah, and also technology because those types of programs, there was just no access to anything like that. It's basically completely removed being in the system in that way. So immediately when I was emancipated at 17, that, honestly don't even know if I would have had a whole career in music, for sure.

you know, because it emboldened me. I was immediately like on tour with a band like before a year, even though I was like living out of my car and I was immediately just in a band and then multiple bands. then, and then I just was like, went to Hollywood and started going into agencies and film studios. Like I, I do music just all totally stupid, you know, but it, it, it worked.

Peter (04:48)
With a sandwich board on front of you.

James O'Brien (04:53)
so I went, I was actually a PA. That was it. I was a PA at a photography studio is what it was. And like a production assistant. So I was like running, I was, it was, I'd only been doing it for a few weeks really. And, I quickly, I was then like working on a, they were doing a commercial shoot for Pepsi and I just like went up to the director and was like,

Carrie (05:01)
Sorry, a P-A being... okay.

James O'Brien (05:20)
I'm actually a musician and I don't know shit about like art direction, like, which is, I was doing like props and things like that. And, so I just asked him if, you know, do you think I could like do some music and give it to you? And, know, you have no, you know, there's no obligation for you to like use it or whatever, but you can just consider it. he was like, yeah, sure. And, so I, you know, recorded a thing and, which is like a, it was sort of a house dance. It was like these kids like partying in an elevator.

So was pretty music driven and I landed the gig and that was it. Within a year I had had many commercial jobs that all built off of that one little thing. that's what I mean. I don't know if I would have had, I was so, you know, like just determined that, you know I mean? To just walk up to him and just say something pretty bold. I think that's kind of what it takes. And there's a fine line before you're annoying.

Carrie (05:54)
Wow.

James O'Brien (06:19)
which I probably like, you know.

Carrie (06:21)
Yeah, you have a lot of gumption.

Like that's a pretty bold thing to do at 17, to just be like, yeah, listen to my stuff.

James O'Brien (06:30)
Yeah.

Peter (06:31)
So James, what are we talking about? Were you playing keyboards, singing, or playing a guitar? Like what were you doing? All of it?

James O'Brien (06:33)
Yeah.

Well, yeah, there I was produced. was, I wrote and produced the whole thing, recorded it, played the instruments. I actually went to this little studio and this guy, Victor, really awesome producer worked like on like parliament and like seventies funk stuff. So it was kind of perfect for what I was doing. And, and, he was, he engineered it and that, cause that was still new to me. And, I learned a lot from him, like in the process and.

played the instruments. then, so like the thing with AI that's so interesting for me is that the way that I was able to have that career like explode is because I was at this disruption of digital music. You know what mean? Like this was like this transition period of composers and stuff that we're used to like you bring all these players in and you got analog tape and it takes days to turn something around. Whereas I just had a Mac computer with like, you know what I mean?

I was just doing it directly in the computer and it was tough because the computer could barely handle it. But it enabled me to, to, you know, I had this like little nickname of drive through music because like, cause people could give me stuff. then within like, you know, by the end of the day, I'd be like, here you go. Here's, here's some things to check out. And it was that period. It was really funny. Cause I remember like everyone was moaning like, yeah, the budgets, like you're killing the budgets. Like I was hearing from other composers and I was like,

Carrie (07:43)
You

Wow.

James O'Brien (08:08)
It was $20,000. for what do you like that is so much money. Like it was 30 seconds and it was $20,000. Like insane amount of money in there. Yeah. Well, it was like 30, 40,000 before, you know what I mean? It was like.

Peter (08:20)
Alright.

James O'Brien (08:23)
So, you know, those were the days.

Peter (08:26)
Yeah.

Carrie (08:28)
Yeah.

Peter (08:28)
I think there's so many industries like that. It reminds me instantly of video. know, when we used to deal with the big video production companies that would put like 30 people on a shoot and they'd have TV town and they'd have grips and everyone's on part of the union. And they were trying to use that model as the digital era grew. And they were just finding it harder and harder to try and like force feed this model into every single thing that came up.

a marketing firm, little contractors started cropping up with their little digital SLR and they could shoot video and they could run around and kind of make their own little steady cams out of wagons and stuff. Suddenly, everything got disrupted and they had to change and some of them did, some of them didn't, but it reminds me of that same cycle.

James O'Brien (09:16)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of like what I'm always, you know, when I'm talking with producers and composers and artists like, you know, every day and the fear, you know, and I'm trying to remind them like, hey, it's the, where the challenges are is where the opportunities are. Like I literally wouldn't have made it in that old like setting of analog tape and all of that. How do you even break in? I have no idea, you know? So.

Carrie (09:43)
but then you kind of

got to come in on top of it all in this digital. And were you pretty self-taught then with the digital aspect of it? I mean, and the music aspect of it. It sounds like you kind of taught yourself the instruments and the production.

James O'Brien (09:58)
Yeah, yeah. It's always been, I just always really loved learning and same thing with programming and technology. And you can't see, but my studio has like a gajillion wires everywhere and all kinds of boxes and things. And it's how I stay like, it's how I get my spark of like creativity, you know, like to keep it fresh is to always like learn something new, you know, like it's like always be.

uncomfortable a little bit because I'm trying to do something that I don't know how to do. And I'm still doing that today with all the AI stuff. yeah.

Carrie (10:27)
Hmm.

Clearly.

Peter (10:36)
So how is it morphed since then? So you got into the biz kind of on that digital kind of back door, let's say, and then you started doing these little bits and they grew and grew. How did it get to where you got to now?

Carrie (10:37)
That's amazing.

James O'Brien (10:45)
me.

yeah. So there was quite a few things that went through those decades of the two thousands, but, I started a commercial music company, like a group basically into a commercial music company where I built studios and several studios out in Santa Monica and, got a little larger where we had multiple composers and producers and went through, you know, so it was like our primary bread and butter was ads. you know, it was me.

Carrie (11:10)
wow.

James O'Brien (11:23)
very familiar with ad agencies and got really comfortable with that. I spent a lot of years going into ad agencies and working with creative teams. That, yeah.

Peter (11:32)
That's unfortunate for you.

Carrie (11:36)
think that's great.

James O'Brien (11:40)
Which is exactly how I would say like depending on what day, right? It'd be like, yeah, I got to go to some agencies, you know, and then other days like, it's pretty cool. Like, there's some nice people there.

Peter (11:43)
Right.

Carrie (11:43)
Yeah,

totally.

James O'Brien (11:53)
so yeah, so everybody, everybody transitioned eventually. I would say that was around 2005, maybe somewhere in there where it was then the definite norm of everything being done digitally and using the internet, um, instead of tapes and, the, the sag strike in what was like around 2008, 2009 really disrupted things. shut the whole music industry down.

essentially, I mean, sorry, the whole, everything, all of entertainment, right? They weren't shooting ads, they weren't shooting TV episodes. I think it was like a year or something like that where there was just nothing in production. And that was a big shifting point for sure. And obviously around there was the, a big downturn in the economy. so there was a lot of adjustments. For me, I decided, you know,

that I got into doing advertising and commercials because I felt like this was going to enable me to work on projects I really wanted to work on. And that was around that time when I realized I'm spending all of my time working on these projects to keep the overhead up to, keep the studios filled. And so I used that opportunity to actually build a studio up in the mountains far and away. And I've actually been up here ever since. And it's

been fantastic where it, know, so I stopped doing kind of like the big bigger studios and bigger teams and focused more on individual projects.

Carrie (13:28)
That sounds very peaceful.

Peter (13:28)
All right.

James O'Brien (13:30)
Very nice. Yeah, and like a bit of a hermit. Until recently. But yeah, there's many years that by.

Peter (13:31)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You need one of those. What are those big long horns that you can blow at the top of the mountain in Switzerland? Switzerland is it?

James O'Brien (13:43)
Oh, like a big,

yeah, what they call it? It's like a bugle, basically. Yeah. A Viking war call. Yeah, I love that imagery there. Yeah. Exactly.

Peter (13:47)
Yeah, totally.

Perfect.

So let's talk, I wouldn't mind talking a little bit around, because when you think of disruption, that was the first one, right? The digital disruption. And then I think, you when you think of the poor old music industry, at least from an outsider perspective, it feels like it's gotten blow after blow in some ways. Like last time we were chatting, we were chatting a bit about Napster, maybe the beginnings of seeing that disruption to the, you know, good old album in the music store, how

the things have changed so much for the artist. Do mind just touching on that a little bit? Because I think you had a really great perspective on it.

James O'Brien (14:34)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people don't realize it usually, but like the music industry, like we have a really long standing history of this pattern, like for literally over a hundred years, like when music was first starting to be transcribed and then sold, like sheet music being sold, then it was like, that was where it really began. Cause it was like, well, wait, you can't just like print my music and sell it and not give me any money. And then, and then it became.

Radio was that way, same thing. I bought the record. Why can't I play it on the radio? You know what mean? Like I paid 20 cents for this, you know? And it became that way with tapes and then their digital sampling and obviously Napster and then digital streaming revolution, Spotify. And so here we are, you know, and there has been this, so we're a bit used to it because it's always kind of the same thing where there's a disruption.

Carrie (15:06)
Hmm.

Peter (15:08)
Haha, yeah.

Right?

James O'Brien (15:27)
And then there's a bit of a Wild West era where people are just like, woohoo, we can use all this music to do whatever we want. And then there's lawsuits and legislation and the industry sort of like reshapes and refines and changes and adapts. And there's ups and downs. There's definitely pluses and minuses, I would say, in each one of those generations.

Peter (15:52)
Right. where are we now? Do you find the AI side of things, is this bigger? Is it different? Is it the same? How are you reacting to it right at the front of this now?

James O'Brien (16:07)
Yeah, so, so yes, it's definitely different, right? So this is this is like a massive game changer on a different level. So even though I'm like, well, we're used to it. And you know, it's like, okay, that's what we that's what we tell ourselves. Like even when we I just did a roundtable and that was our whole thing. Rock, paper, scissors. We're like, yeah, this is where we've done this, you know, we're ready for this shit. And then I'm pretty sure we all turned our cameras off. I'm here like, I got

Peter (16:11)
Okay.

Ha ha ha ha.

Hahaha!

James O'Brien (16:36)
I hope we're okay, Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, there you go right there. Like I didn't use LinkedIn until, you know, like maybe a year and a half ago, somewhere on there. But so for me, I mean, like as I said, my story, you know, I started in on that machine learning AI thing like long ago now, right? So, you know, I started training models and

Carrie (16:36)
Wow, everybody else seems ready, but I'm not ready.

Peter (16:39)
Yeah.

Opening up LinkedIn. Yeah.

Carrie (17:01)
Mm.

James O'Brien (17:05)
got deep in Python machine learning stuff for years. And so I was all excited and feeling like this is the greatest thing ever. Like, look at what I can do now with my studio. Like, this is ridiculous. I can kick songs out in like 20 minutes. And, you know, I really saw that this was going to be the thing that was going to democratize like music and make it like where anybody could, you know, and that this is going to like open up new styles and genres. And this is fantastic. And a couple of years ago, I was talking to my brother-in-law.

about it and this is so cool. He's, he's a musician artist in England and he's just like, that's really scary. You know, like that was his reaction. was like, that's your reaction. I just told you like we could write so many songs. So I was like, yeah, it's pretty scary. You know, and then I was like, wow, everyone I talked to is basically like, that's really cool, but that just scares me. What you were able to do is quite frightening. And, so yeah, so I completely pivoted.

Carrie (17:43)
Yeah.

Peter (17:44)
Ha ha ha ha.

James O'Brien (18:03)
off of all of that and took that head on it. And it was a real, it was real. can remember the moment very well. You know, it was realizing like, he's right. This is the, I kind of being like, no, you gotta, like I was saying earlier, like this is the change. Like this is where you, you get in front of it and you grab it by the horns and you use this as an advantage and it's an opportunity. But realistically, I'm at a different point in my life now too, where it's like, yeah, all these artists that we're working with that are like,

Carrie (18:22)
Mm.

James O'Brien (18:32)
they're not going to necessarily be doing that and how are they gonna survive? And that's actually what, and that's how sound ethics began, is those conversations. How are artists going to survive? And specifically, it became artists, by the way, like as in musicians, composers, producers, because there's other organizations that are fighting for the music industry as well. And our focus is, we are definitely wanting a healthy music industry ecosystem, but.

Because my experience is as a non-famous, you know, working producer, composer type. That's what we're after, essentially.

Carrie (19:13)
Right. And I mean, you just feel like the perfect person to be leading a charge like this, because like you said, it's not like you're an artist who saw AI come up and were like, we need to do something about this. You were somebody who already had your hands in both sides of it. You already knew machine learning. Like these words weren't new to you like they were to everybody else in 2020, like when all of sudden this all started happening. or this, this public era of it, I should say.

James O'Brien (19:34)
Yeah.

Carrie (19:41)
So yeah, I would love to hear a bit more about obviously sound ethics, but also I'd love to hear how is it that you actually use AI in your music making? Like how does it, where does it come in?

James O'Brien (19:57)
Yeah.

Yeah. So, that's one of the projects that we're actually like, one of the new projects we're doing is this AI music incubator where we've partnered with a whole bunch of AI music companies, that create, you know, different types of AI tools. Some of them completely can generate you a song with the lyrics and the voice and everything from scratch. Other ones are entire systems that have AI tools kind of like embedded in them.

Carrie (20:06)
Mmm.

James O'Brien (20:26)
And then there's a lot of like little standalone tools. And yeah, so for me, like that's the most, that's like the fun part because there's no real, there's no real like set workflow or anything right now for that. Like there's no process that everyone's using because there's so many, it's, know, how it is with AI. It's just like every day it's like, wow, there's like a new thing like that. What can you do with that? So yeah, we're exploring that. And I would say like one of the, one of the like,

maybe main things that we'll start seeing is where like in our case, like we'll write songs, we'll write with me with my talented songwriting partner, Keely Hawks, by the way. And we'll have, we'll start with lyrics, we'll start with a melody, we'll start with chords, like we'll do that. That's kind of like in our, from our perspective, that's a little bit taking the fun out of it to rob that part. But then we take that and we use AI to like augment and add different parts and

Carrie (21:17)
Yeah.

James O'Brien (21:24)
And a lot of those we end up actually even re-recording. So for us, it's more of an exploratory tool. With writing, it's actually the analogy to writing is really good. You know how it's like, you can have it kick out an article, but realistically how you use it day to day, maybe it shapes something, you give it some stuff, you're going back and forth. It's actually really the same. You might even have it generate an audio idea from scratch and then you're like...

Well, if it was like this, you know, and I think it depends on your abilities. mean, for me, it's different, obviously, because I can just, let me like, that gives me an idea. I can use a little bit of that, but I'll rerecord this and I can quickly rerecord and change it. And so it was more of just like a muse, you know? And, but then of course you had the other end of the spectrum where somebody could just entirely do it in AI too.

Carrie (22:08)
Mm-hmm.

Peter (22:14)
James, I'm assuming that the final output for a lot of these AI models is make me a song, right? Like put in some prompts, it generates music for you. If they're not sampling, like artists and songs, is the idea that they get permission to pull these songs into their learning model, or that they're

only pulling old songs that are passed, I think, what is it, 100 years or something that you're allowed to use royalty free or they're supposed to make their own, where are they supposed to source all this stuff?

Carrie (22:40)
50, I think, yeah.

James O'Brien (22:47)
Yeah, so that's like really the heart of sound ethics and kind of how, because being like a machine learning engineer like myself, it's like frustrating because there isn't like access to the data. So like, know, like I actually don't personally blame at all the unethical, as they would say, AI companies, because like, I mean, this is like, this is shit that's like from when we were kids and we would like think of sci-fi.

Like I'm literally like making sci-fi shit and just like manifesting it like in a night and you just kind of freak out. Like you're like, I can't believe I was able to just like make that. Like what is that going to the implications of this or you know what I mean? You go on this thing. It's like it's it's a there's a lot of adrenaline and it's exciting. And and so, yeah, you don't want to be like, man, I really could do this really cool sci-fi thing. But, you know,

Carrie (23:23)
Yeah.

Peter (23:29)
Yeah.

Carrie (23:30)
You

James O'Brien (23:44)
I really shouldn't, you know what I mean? It's like, there's not, there isn't a framework right now, really. There is a company, like in the music industry, there's a company, Musical AI, which they've also, they've been able to forge where they do represent libraries and you can get training data from them along with models and there's proper attribution and there's even like some royalties and those type of backend payments that are built in, but it's still early days.

Carrie (23:48)
Hmm.

James O'Brien (24:11)
you know, a really big challenge in music is that, you know, like a lot of the songs that I'm on, there might be like eight songwriters and then you have like four publishing companies and there's like, you know, all these different versions in different languages. And then you have all of these different versions by different artists of that song. And then some of them augmented. So like the, the music rights is so complex and to, get everyone's permission and try to figure out like a framework of, you know, how it is that we can get everyone's permission so that we can

make money on it and even allow the licensing is a massive hurdle. And that's basically where we're at now, right? And so, it's sound ethics. We partnered with universities and we're working on research projects in the data science departments at universities, focusing on these exact challenges, trying to really go after the hard stuff like that. And this is something that we see in every industry right now. Because it's the same thing where

the publishers are winning, they're starting to win these lawsuits where it's like, hey, now that you have to pay, you know what I mean? Like maybe the Associated Press to have access to those articles, to be able to use those. But of course, even though there might not be eight authors and publishers like within an article, it's still very difficult and complex to deal with the attribution of who wrote and owned what and.

Peter (25:36)
Hmm.

James O'Brien (25:36)
Right.

Because publications use so many different writers. You know, I see it. It's in a lot of different industries. We're in the same kind of the same boat.

Carrie (25:44)
Mm-hmm.

Peter (25:46)
can we talk a little bit about sound ethics? How did that start? Like, is that you? Is that you joining a group? Like, how did that begin?

James O'Brien (25:54)
Yeah, that's, um, that's a good question. um, my business partner, who's my co CEO is Richard Blakely and his back. He's been a developer and had multiple companies as well as he currently has multiple AI companies. Um, he's a pioneer in streaming technology. Um, he is, uh, one of the original founders of a company called millicast, which, um, got bought by Dolby, um, in 2022. And it's all of their streaming technology is.

Carrie (26:19)
wow.

James O'Brien (26:24)
basically based on the stuff that Richard and Jerry and the original founders and they are both partners in sound ethics. Keely Hawks, who I mentioned earlier, my co-writer's songwriter is the head of education from the standpoint of working and because she works with up and coming artists and does artist development and does like singing vocal production.

She's a fantastic singer and songwriter. So, you know, she's, she's, we've gotten to travel around and work with a lot of different songwriters and producers over the years. And, and now we're starting to, we also have Austin Raishbrook who has a Netflix series. He's our operations manager. Like there's a movie of Jake Gyllenhaal of you guys. I'm trying to, my mind's escaping me right now. Is it, I think it's called Nightcrawler where he's like.

where he goes and he films like police chases and stuff that's actually based on Austin, our operations guy. Yeah, he's like a really super interesting guy, photographer, and it's very Hollywood. He has his own Netflix series as well called Shot in the Dark that is a reality documentary based thing on him and his brothers that have this business. And so since he comes from the published, that same sort of thing, like, you know, cause,

Peter (27:24)
Yes.

Carrie (27:28)
Whaaaa-

That's so Hollywood. That's amazing.

Cool.

James O'Brien (27:49)
you know, licensing images like that paparazzi have taken and, they, they have complex licensing issues as well in that industry that, that's where he comes from. And he has a background in development. So he's a big part, a big partner with us as well. And we've been really steadily grabbing a lot of partners lately. There's a bunch of stuff I'd love to say, but you know, it's a little bit too early to, we haven't released it, but yeah, really exciting stuff. Definitely.

Peter (27:53)
Hmm.

Carrie (28:14)
Cool. Exciting.

Peter (28:18)
Yeah.

James O'Brien (28:19)
Yeah, really happy.

Peter (28:20)
And you feel like you're, you're as a group, you are getting heard and you're starting like, it obviously sounds like the ball's rolling, but you're getting some, is it legislation you're, you're working on? You mentioned education a little bit. Like what is the, what are the tips of the spear for you guys?

James O'Brien (28:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, so it was advocacy, you know, as like I said, in the EU AI Act, I was, you know, constantly sending in annoying letters to them and trying to force my opinion into the discussion and also the California Transparency Act and also the US Copyright Office. But it was around, it's been a little over a year now where it was like,

What can we do? Like, I don't want to just be petitions because there's other like organizations as well that it was like they made an even better stink about it with like Billie Eilish and Christina Aguilera coming out, you know, getting and it was kind of like, okay, cool. This is awesome. Like we now there's like, you know, some education in the general public, but you know, we want to get into some action and in all the deep research that we did, the solution for us is in education.

And the way that is, is that we're working with the graduating classes at universities and their data science departments by like working with them. Like, so as I mentioned, those research projects that we're doing, but we're also like instilling best practices. Right. So we basically said, look, like even if legislators and all of that, if we just like, what can we do that has nothing to do with them? And that's when we realized, well, the education institutions, I mean, they're the ones that teach.

like machine learning and data science and data engineering. And every educator I've spoken to completely agrees with, you know, there being attribution. And I mean, that's the way it works in research, right? Like with, they'll release research papers and they're like, here's our code and here's our findings. And then they'll have all these citations. You know, that's not necessarily, you know, it's funny saying this now. I'd actually like to know, I don't know whether that's actually law or not.

Carrie (30:09)
Right.

James O'Brien (30:23)
But certainly, you wouldn't release a research paper and expect to get published without having attribution of your sources and where you got your information from. And so that's where we've really jumped in full force. So right now we're working with UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine, and we've just expanded to a bunch of other universities and also in some other countries coming out as well.

Peter (30:30)
Hmm.

Carrie (30:31)
Mm-hmm.

Oh, you guys

coming up to Canada? It doesn't sound like you can talk about it, but...

James O'Brien (30:51)
Yeah.

Would love to have the hookup there in Canada for sure. Yes.

Peter (30:57)
Yeah, wow, that's amazing, amazing work. And that must be pretty fulfilling from your end, right? Because you're doing commercial gigs at a fair bit, but you're also as a whole looking after kind of the music industry and the future of music. That's got to be rewarding.

Carrie (31:03)
Truly.

James O'Brien (31:18)
It really is. Yeah. And so like, if anything, it gets me into trouble because for me, I'm like having a great time. Like, you know, but I'm coming in on like a serious issue that for a lot of people, it's fear, you know, just completely fear, like, or they've just been laid off. mean, there's literally been thousands and thousands of executives laid off in the music industry in the last month. Before that, there was thousands and there's, you know, development companies are laying off thousands and thousands of developers and

Peter (31:26)
No.

James O'Brien (31:47)
You know, we're seeing it and in my opinion, like all of the political context that we're seeing is a reaction to this like overwhelming stress that is easier to argue about other things. Because from my point of view, this is the big thing. Like this is the most monumental thing that's ever happened to humankind, like next to fire.

Carrie (32:03)
Yeah.

James O'Brien (32:14)
You know, like, which I would say like there's fire and then it's like, well, now there's AI agents, you know, like it's kind of hard to argue something that had such a, the wheel was pretty important. Yeah. guy who invented the wheel. Yeah. Oh, there you go. That's bread of bread. But.

Carrie (32:15)
Whoa.

Yeah, fire, wheel, slice bread, AI.

Peter (32:28)
Slice slice bread is up there too. Yeah

Carrie (32:38)
And I think

that that, again, you know, why the world just works in mysterious ways and you just seem to be the perfect person to be doing this because it's like, or you and your team, I should say, seem like the perfect people to be doing this because it's so easy, because it's so overwhelming and there's so many things and, you know, there's the EU act and there's American stuff and there's all these different things and here you are writing letters to all of them.

And where it's so easy for anybody else to be like, whew, this is just too much. I can't fathom even caring or thinking about this. And you're like, yeah, I care so much. And I know what I'm talking about on both sides, on the music and the AI. And you've also been in this industry for a long time. So you understand the industry and the fact that you're like, yeah, no, I'm gonna do something about it. Like that's so commendable. I just think that's awesome.

James O'Brien (33:38)
well, I appreciate that.

Carrie (33:40)
I mean, we appreciate the people doing this kind of work. I think it's so great.

Peter (33:40)
Thank

I've got... No, no, no, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

James O'Brien (33:44)
Yeah, I mean, it's been a shift. sorry.

No, I was just going to say that like a year ago, I wasn't quite as like amped up, you know what I mean? Cause it did feel, and two years ago, like it felt, it was really daunting, you know, and it was really daunting. There was, I mean, there's many days that Keely and I would just be like talking till the middle of the night. And it's just like, it felt like every time we'd be like, well, we could try this and do this. And then musicians could make money in this way. And then artists and then there's royalties and you know, and then it would be like,

Carrie (34:05)
Mm-hmm.

James O'Brien (34:20)
wow, the cost of like doing the facilitating the licensing will be higher than any like income coming in without like all of these other things and how do we implement this? And it was hard, know? Yeah.

Peter (34:26)
Yeah.

Carrie (34:28)
Mm-hmm.

So what

Peter (34:35)
It's interesting. My son just started a band. He's 17. And Carrie, know you're in a band too. I just like, would be your advice to someone who's just getting out knowing that AI is part of their existence now and possibly the next era, right? So what would you say to those people?

James O'Brien (34:57)
well, I mean, in those cases, cause you're both saying that you like, you're saying that both your son and Carrie play in a band. And like, to me, I separate a little bit like from what I'm doing in the studio, right. And producing music that then goes into films or whatever it goes as you know, the band experience, like my, my experience, like touring and playing in bands and being an artist myself is.

Like in my mind, it's a little bit compartmentalized, like in a different zone, because, you know, like, I feel like we're really safe in that respect, you know, like, like that, like that's that connection of people enjoying live music and, and, a band, you know I mean? Like, like a bunch of people playing together is as far as I'm aware, you know, I mean, we'll, we're, we're gonna, we already have like artists that are augmenting their live performance with AI and doing some really cool stuff. Actually the guy from

Carrie (35:33)
Hmm.

James O'Brien (35:54)
Beat Dovin does a lot of that. yeah, we still, it's like, thank you, God. Like we still have, you know, this organic, like you get together with your mates and you jam and you play really loud and you don't really care if you suck and you don't care if anyone's like listening even. And you know what I mean? Like I can see Carrie's smile right now. like, you know, it's the best feeling. It's the best.

Peter (36:14)
Yeah.

Carrie (36:15)
it's the best feeling. It's the best feeling. And like literally nothing

could ever take that away. Like there's nothing that can replace that. maybe you're jamming and you come up with this cool song. And like you said, maybe in the production process afterwards, if you are producing the music or if you're not just jamming and you're making songs to record, then it kind of comes into play there.

James O'Brien (36:22)
Exactly.

Peter (36:25)
Well, maybe.

Carrie (36:40)
But, you know, hanging out with your songwriting friends around the campfire, just trying stuff out. I mean, that's the best. It's the best. It's so the best.

James O'Brien (36:50)
It's the best. And it's so hot. It's a really great

like note to bring up. I'm actually really happy that this moment happened because I'm going to carry this into for sure. And in talking with other artists, because it's not because most of the time I'm just like, oh, yeah, that's the safe place like over here on the side. You know, I don't know of anything threatening that right now, to be honest.

Carrie (37:10)
100%.

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't replace my bandmates with the AI. would be, they wouldn't be nearly as funny. They wouldn't be nearly as fun.

James O'Brien (37:17)
Yeah, exactly.

Peter (37:20)
Ha ha ha

ha ha ha ha

James O'Brien (37:21)
Well,

the humor might be funny, but that connection though of like, know, I mean, really like usually like with the technology, like remember like when people were sampling and there was the technology, there was like this weird moment in the industry where people were really utilizing those tools. And then they were like, wait, like it's not, it doesn't sound the same live. And then there was like, you know, fans would be like, yeah, it didn't sound quite the same as it did on the

Carrie (37:40)
Mm-hmm.

James O'Brien (37:50)
And then it actually shaped us to be like, okay, well, when I'm in the studio, I'm gonna make sure that whatever I'm doing, I'm already thinking, you know what I mean? Like, how would this work in a live situation? And it actually shaped that. And I think that that probably will play a major part, right? Because like you said, even if you're in the studio, you started to augment it with AI, you would instantly be like, well, wait, is this doing something that we wouldn't be like naturally performing this ourselves?

Peter (37:58)
Mm-hmm.

Carrie (38:00)
Hmm.

James O'Brien (38:19)
That's probably like, you know, a really, really good thing. Makes me smile.

Carrie (38:22)
Yeah.

Aw, that's so nice. I know I just saw, I don't know if you know, Lee Vullabeck, but he just performed here in Calgary and I went to see him and he like, he was literally playing four instruments at once and singing and he had his sound pad on top of his piano, holding his guitar harmonica here. And I just had this moment of like,

James O'Brien (38:39)
wow.

Carrie (38:47)
Yeah, that's not going anywhere. Like we're, we're going to keep doing weird stuff with music and, human stuff with music and it's going to be awesome.

Peter (38:48)
Ha

James O'Brien (38:49)
Yeah

Exactly.

Peter (38:53)
Yeah.

But James, what's the future of publishing an album? Is it going to be like, we can make an album, but we can also sample parts of the stuff we've generated and give it to LLMs and license it out as a revenue source for our band. Is it that kind of stuff? What are you thinking? Where do we go there?

James O'Brien (39:18)
Yes, it's really like in that round table I was talking about that there was a couple of them in the last few weeks that I went to and it was an open discussion. It was really kick-ass actually. Another little plug for Rock Paper Scissors. You guys are awesome to put that together. they basically were talking about how, as we talked about these transitions, you know what I mean? Then it would be like when we went to digital.

You know what mean? And it was Spotify and then they would track the numbers and they would say, you know, this is how musicians are going to make money. Like you make X amount off of plays on Spotify and X amount off of YouTube. And the big thing now is it's like, it's completely fractured. Like it's, it's looking more like it'll be like a hundred different ways that you're going to monetize your, your music and yourself, even your own self, right? Like your identity, your name, image, likeness and voice, your songs, the,

the create the stems of your songs, like the individual parts of your songs. And then obviously when you get into the creator economy and you're talking about content creation, know, and then that just explodes because you're going, well, there's collabs and there's all these different other ways to monetize content creation and AI now that's augmenting that it gets like even more to where the guy had this diagram showing like there was so many like fractured pieces. So yeah, and that's kind of part of this music.

thing that we're doing, a part of the incubator. That's why we're doing these partnerships because we have to figure out, we have to have a very clear game plan for artists like yourself to say, okay, look, here's this like step-by-step thing. Make sure you have your traditional rights are registered, like you're with ASCAP or VMI or whatever. If you're doing something with your voice or something related on screen, you wanna have SAG. First have the traditional rights and then you would get into

Am I going to monetize my voice? Am I going to monetize like, you know, like digital clones and that like deep fake kind of things. And, you know, and that's new. That's what's new. And that's what the industry is like, you know. And there's a new and that element of the creator economy. Right. Is so big where you say, well, you know, are like the people listening to the music are now taking part in. So it'll be a little bit collaborative between.

Peter (41:29)
Hmm.

James O'Brien (41:40)
you and your fans and other people. you might, like I think we're going to see a lot more stuff where like imagine you release a song and the style is like indie folk or something. And then it's just like, but then all over online, you'll, it'll be like, well, it's the same song, but this, this is, this version's like heavy metal and this is a jazz version of it. And this is Mandarin opera or whatever wacky things. And that would even be kind of humorous, right? If you were like,

I kind of recognize this weird sounding like Chinese offer thing. And then you might be like, wow, this is hilarious with this video in this context. But of course we go, wait, who gets paid in that situation? You know, so that it is, it's still some hurdles, but I think, yeah, in the future, it's going to be like, you, kind of have all these little like micro markets that you're, you're micro monetization and, AI agents will probably play a big part in.

Peter (42:21)
Yeah.

Carrie (42:32)
interesting.

James O'Brien (42:36)
facilitating and collecting all of your money.

Carrie (42:38)
I was going to say if we could just have an AI to do all of the, you know, do all the credits and do all of that stuff, that's the worst part. In my opinion, it's like, I forgot to put this song into this thing. Yeah. I know I find that really interesting because it is like as a musician, if I wrote a song and somebody decided to turn it into, you know, I do a lot of indie rock stuff. If somebody turned it into a metal song, I'd be like, that's epic.

James O'Brien (42:46)
Yes, exactly.

Carrie (43:05)
Like I would love to see that happen. That's it's the same as sampling. It's like, love that collaboration and that, that, you know, borrowing, but you have to still give that person the credit, of course. So I love that you guys are working to keep that happening. And I hope that that's the winner on the other side.

James O'Brien (43:06)
Exactly, yeah.

Exactly. Yeah.

Thank you.

Peter (43:28)
Well, James, it's been a real pleasure to have you on. We appreciate all the time you've taken with us and for sure check out soundethics.org and see what the good folks there are up to. I'm excited to see the unveiling of whatever you have in store that you can't talk about. That's super exciting. But yeah, we, we, think we could have talked all day because that was wonderful.

Carrie (43:31)
really.

James O'Brien (43:53)
Yeah,

definitely. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for reaching out.

Carrie (43:57)
Yeah, I was gonna say, Peter and I

are gonna have to do a road trip and come hang out with you. I'm having visions of us all in Hollywood, just hanging out, talking about music and...

James O'Brien (44:03)
I love it. I love it.

Peter (44:04)
Hahaha

Yeah.

James O'Brien (44:09)
definitely.

Peter (44:10)
Yeah, really. Okay. Well, thanks again. And we'll talk soon.

James O'Brien (44:11)
I will take you around. I promise. Definitely.

Carrie (44:13)
I love that.

James O'Brien (44:18)
Thank you.

All right, thank you.

Bye bye.

Peter (44:33)
Wow, that was pretty amazing.

Carrie (44:35)
Pretty amazing.

Peter (44:37)
Yeah, I'm so glad we got like this. It was never on our list. I don't think when we were first thinking of guests, as far as topics go, but I'm really happy we found

Carrie (44:48)
Me too, because when I think about the music industry and ethics in general, it's like my brain does summersaults and I couldn't possibly comprehend it. And I feel like he put a lot of it into ways that I could be like, okay, I kind of get that now.

Peter (45:07)
one thing that I thought was kind of cool, which we just said in passing, but he was talking about new genres. And I was like, Yeah, what if that's true? Like, You ever see sci fi movies where they they have music from the future usually goes along with their weird clothes. And there's someone's trying to imagine what that looks like in the future. But it's usually a lot of synth, right? Yeah, totally.

Carrie (45:16)
Ooh, yeah.

Hehehehe

Always a lot of synth, like the Cantina song in Star Wars.

Peter (45:34)
But it's just like, like our genres have been kind of fixed for quite a while, I think, and make the odd one or two show up. I wonder if this is going to be an explosion of just banana stuff or just one big genre called AI.

Carrie (45:45)
Yeah.

AI music.

And there's so many more people these days who it's like, I'm not in a genre, I'm genre bending or I'm genre exploring or genre whatever. And I think there's going to be more of that, but maybe they'll come up with some names for it. Maybe it will be country rap, you know?

Peter (46:08)
Right? God help us.

Carrie (46:10)
I mean, there's some of that out there.

Yeah, but I thought that that part really stuck with me too because it was almost like talking to somebody who was just kind of, you know, into music and into tech and found this new tool and was really excited about it before all of the fear and all of the, my God, what is this going to do to society? Stuff kind of started coming in. It was like way before that, you're just a person who...

is creative and likes these things and has this cool new tool that you get to use. And he was like, it was awesome. And I was dreaming about all these amazing things that you could do. And that's very cool.

Peter (46:52)
Yeah, what a story coming from an orphanage, essentially to leading the charge on changing the future of music literally. And being still one of the most humble people ever, obviously agreeing to do a podcast with us for some reason, right? Like it's, yeah, what a cool person. And it's such a, you know, such a neat way to meet people like this. Now it really does make it feel like we're

Carrie (47:03)
No kidding.

Out of the blue.

Peter (47:21)
we're onto something here which is kind of cool.

Carrie (47:23)
Yeah, I agree. And I think it's interesting, you know, we're starting to see some themes between all of our guests and, and you know, this idea early on where he talked about like, you know, when he was a kid and he just liked to play music, it's, it goes back to that idea of play that we just talked about in our last episode and how important that is and how that's what really gets you attached to something. And it's like, yeah, nobody told me I had to have music lessons. I just wanted to learn an instrument. And you're like, cool.

Peter (47:29)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Carrie (47:51)
No wonder you

love it. You wanted to do it.

Peter (47:54)
Well, and just like Nikola with graphics and this now with music is this thought of like, IA is really helping with ideation, but I need to do either redo it or put on the final touches on it. But it's helping me think of things or listen to things that I would never, ever imagined, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

Carrie (48:15)
very cool. And also

like, I mean, yeah, I feel like we're meeting people we never would have met. This is pretty cool. This was a pretty good idea.

Peter (48:23)
Speaking of super cool, we got something coming up, don't

Carrie (48:27)
yeah, Peter and I are going to be at the Inventures conference.

It is from May 21st to 23rd, 2025, and we're gonna be there with Artificial Breakdown as your official podcasters, which is very exciting.

Peter (48:42)
Yeah, it's gonna be

live which is maybe a first for us, so I'm gonna need a few extension cords I imagine

Carrie (48:49)
Yeah, that should do it.

Peter (48:52)
Yeah, bring my soldering kit. Yeah, hopefully it goes well, but it's exciting and it's very kind of them to invite us.

Carrie (49:01)
Ventures is three days of groundbreaking discussions and networking. and it's kind of a fusion of technology and humanity, which is obviously artificial breakdowns whole thing. So should be a wild ride. Get your tickets.

Peter (49:18)
Okay,

Carrie (49:19)
might be. All right. Okay.

Peter (49:20)
Okay, I'm gonna stop this. See you in a

sec.