I’ve been living under a rock (or several) for I guess some time, because everything in this Wired profile about AI artist (clankercore?) Neural Viz is new to me, except this:

Before long, the filmmaker had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.

And also this sentiment:

Many commenters on YouTube told Kerrigan that his videos should be on Adult Swim. But when he met with producers affiliated with Adult Swim, he said, one of them suggested that he might not need them; that the power had shifted to creators. “That sentiment has come up multiple times in meetings with other various studios,” Kerrigan said.

This seems all too familiar, and has got me wondering the existential question of, why does an artist today even need a label? What exactly does that get them? Reach? Engagement? You can get those things on social media, in the press directly, by actually engaging with other humans. Without any kinds of obligations to a third party. All you need is a distributor, a platform, and some means of generating the materiel. And of course getting paid for it (but which ideally happens at the same place you upload).

I was surprised that instead of focusing on a not that good “Studio” experience, that they didn’t just make the much more obvious and in my mind probably more lucrative business step of offering distribution services, direct transloading your content out to Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube, etc. Maybe that’s in the works, but to me that’s much more valuable and a time saver than another AI editing experience that is tedious and somewhat user-friendly with unpredictable mid results. Just let me make my stuff, send it out, get paid, and get the hell out of my way. This is the way.

So what really could labels offer artists that’s the most valuable? Budgets for marketing, access to good editors and tools, budget and eng/ux team to build out custom tools for production. There are probably more, but that’s off the top of my head. Will give this more careful consideration as I digest this Wired piece more!