Creative Technologies Research Lab

NIME 2025 Workshop: Global Entanglements, Music and the Commodification of Cultural Labour in the Age of AI

Tom Willma, University of New South Wales

Oliver Bown, University of New  South Wales

Held June 24, during the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) 2025 conference (Australian National University, Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, Canberra, Australia: June 24-27, 2025).

Joining us will be local industry guest panelists:

Aakanksha Sidhu
Artist Manager | Operations Manager at A New Approach (ANA) | Board volunteer at MusicACT & GUTS Dance.

Bryn Evans
Songwriter and composer for TV, film, and media.

And NIME regular:

Andrew McPherson
Imperial College London.

Motivated by global discussions of socio-technical change and recent Australian legislative lobbying, this short-form, 3-hour workshop targets the commodification of cultural labour and current entanglements between social, political, corporate and technological actors in the music industry. The objective of this workshop is to hold a critically minded discussion between panellists from the Australian music sector and NIME colleagues, grappling with these sociotechnical imperatives both generally, across the industry, and particularly, within the context of live performance. The workshop offers an overview that survey’s sociotechnical change and AI use across global music industries and invites critical discussion of:

  • Key political-economic concerns in the music sector
  • Proposed frames for the NIME research community to engage with industry and develop strategies for ethical AI adoption
  • Directions for future discourses, policy considerations and further dialogues of sociotechnical transformation in the music industry

Discussions between panellists and attendees will be guided by three questions:

  • How to frame the political-economic changes that have been taking place in global music cultures, including but not limited to those involving AI and live virtualisation technologies.
  • How the NIME research community interfaces with music cultures beyond academia in an age of AI, particularly in the development of live music technologies.
  • What blind sports are being neglected by the current trajectory of political, industrial and academic discourses.

The content of this workshop will be documented and may be referenced in future research with appropriate permissions and acknowledgements from participants.

Workshop Structure

This 3-hour, short-form workshop would be partitioned into three 1-hour sections. Each section will target one of the three core questions put forward by the workshop.

  1. What political-economic changes have been taking place in global music cultures, including but not limited to those involving AI and live virtualisation technologies?
    • This question is primarily aimed at knowledge exchange across sectors, helping NIME researchers learn about global trends and inviting NIME researchers to share experimental, technical and speculative perspectives that inform future projections of a changing live music scene.
  2. How does the NIME research community interface with music cultures beyond academia in an age of AI, particularly in the development of live music technologies?
    • This question invites NIME colleagues to consider how, as experts, leaders and developers in the field of new technological innovations, their work fits into these conversations. This question also invites industry professionals to hear from NIME technologists and experimenters about technology research that imagines alternative futures.
  3. What blind sports are being neglected by the current trajectory of political and industrial discourses? How is our work being affected, what voices are being heard above others and what could/should be done?
    • This final question pushes us to consider the power structures and untested assumptions at play in these discourses and reflect on the implications of these discourses flowing back into our own work. It challenges us to consider what is being asked of researchers, artists, politicians and society and what foundations their assumptions rest on. It seeks to gauge international perspectives to establish how academia works with policy and social movements to assist, advise and shape discussions, laws, boundaries and governances.

Each 1-hour section will begin with a 20-minute structured discussion between workshop panellists that aims to overview key insights regarding the central question and raise specific points of thought and contention. The workshop will move to open discussion between all workshop attendees.

Background

As NIME arrives in the heart of Australia’s capital territory, it also arrives amidst an entangled discussion of music practice, society, politics, AI technology and the role/rights of artists. As of late, algorithmic and generative AI systems have been receiving critical industry attention, presenting new industry dynamics and commodification logics, and these discussions have important implications for music, both practically, as industrialised cultural labour, and socially, as a communal interface of identity construction. The purpose of this workshop is to scope these challenges and discourses, interrogating the role that NIME academics could play in informing and evolving these discussions.

To give an idea of these industrial changes, in January last year, Goldmedia reported on behalf of SACEM (France’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music) and GEMA (Germany’s Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music) that the global revenue represented by generative AI in music will skyrocket from US$300 million in 2023 to $3.1 billion by 2028 [1]. Since this prediction, APRA AMCOS (the Australasian Performing Right Association and Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) has responded by commissioning Goldmedia to specifically survey AI use across the Australian and New Zealand music industries. Releasing their results in August 2024, Goldmedia reported that 23% of music creator revenue would be lost due to generative AI use across both countries [2]. Taken together, these two reports demonstrate a burgeoning music technology market that has the potential to upend a quarter of the music industry’s workforce. Importantly, the Australasian report comes as an auxiliary to wider legislative lobbying throughout the region, culminating in the recent November 2024 Senate report on AI adoption across Australia [3]. Here, the parliamentary committee identified a unanimous concern across the creative industries regarding the impact of generative AI on “jobs, career pathways, the quality of creative outputs and the health of the creative industry labour market” [p.104]. Beyond Australia, similar concerns are also being echoed throughout global conversations, from the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on music AI [4] to Europe’s foundational AI Act [5].

To confuse these entanglements even further, these legislative reviews (that grapple with the socio-cultural, economic and political ramifications of emergent technologies like generative AI) are coming to the fore now, in the immediate aftermath of the live music industry’s post-COVID-19 recovery. CISAC’s (the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) global report provides a review of 2024’s live music revenue, and although their figures must be tempered by the compounding effects of inflation, they only now present a return to pre-COVID revenue levels [6]. Locally, however, Australia’s live music scene has failed to reach this evaluation, even despite inflation, with revenue remaining below its post-COVID levels at an estimated loss of AUD$600 million since the pandemic [7]. The compounding effects of technological change and post-COVID market uncertainty pose crucial areas of concern for academics and music practitioners alike.

This workshop aims to engage these challenges across a discussion between music practitioners, industry representatives and a globally situated cohort of NIME technologists. It does so by discussing live music as both a socio-cultural and technologically mediated event, wrapped in logics of commodification and industrialisation. One that is transformed by political-economic change and shaped by prospective imaginations, academic, corporate and political investigation, and that demands realignment when blind spots become neglected.