I recently had the honor and pleasure to sit down with my good friend and long time peer Ryan Kairalla on his popular music business podcast Break the Business. We discussed how the industry has evolved over the years and how AI is further shifting strategies across industries.
How Has the Industry Changed?
Believe it or not, I spent a lot of time in my early days of publicity with some Jurassic-age tools. I used to spend all my time using 3 specific tools that are not often used today:
The first – I used to physically package and ship albums and EPK’s! Yep, you don’t see that anymore. Now, it’s mostly email, submission forms, or platforms like SubmitHub or MusoSoup.
The second – the telephone! I used to actually pick up the phone and call news outlets, magazines, and radio stations to get features for my clients. I haven’t received or left a voicemail in a decade.
The third – a fax dongle. If you know you know…
How Have I Adapted?
I have always been on the forefront of change within the industry. I helped artists navigate social media as it rose to prominence and how to make money in unique ways.
AI has been the most significant thus far. I have found that I’m the most excited I’ve ever been in a long time about this industry shift, and I lived through the rise of streaming services, NFT’s, and social media. When I got onto ChatGPT and used it for the first time and realized the effectiveness of AI tools, I knew that this could revolutionize the way artists approach their own marketing, PR, and social media strategies.
Are You Threatened By AI?
No, I am not threatened by AI and it’s potential. Why? Because AI not yet perfect…
A lot of what my team and I do is help artists do tasks they HATE to do. This is content calendars, social media posts, and email series. AI takes hours of time and energy away from tasks artists don’t want to do in order to allow them more time and energy for creative brainstorming with my team and I instead of writing email series of a months worth of captions for Instagram.
I emphasize this point a lot: you should always put in your own touch what the AI spits out.
As Aileen and I talk about in our AI Music Marketing Course, garbage in, garbage out. In other words, what ChatGPT and other language models spit out is only as good as the prompt it was given.
Favorite ChatGPT Prompts
There are endless possibilities with prompts for ChatGPT. My personal favorite prompts are the fun ones where you ask ChatGPT to write a poem about finding parking outside a music venue during rush hour or asking it to come up with cocktail ideas for your song. It’s better for crafting creative ideas than informational content.
What Are Some Mistakes Artists Are Making with AI?
Garbage in, garbage out.
Lazy social media approaches and just an overall lazy attempt at creating content in general is the biggest mistake artists are making. Don’t focus on the amount of content from AI, but rather the quality.
ChatGPT needs to be trained in your voice in order to produce quality content. Want it to write a bio for you? Ask it to interview you then write a bio based on the information you give it. Want it to write captions for you? Give it examples of your past posts and what you want from your posts now.
