How will AI impact music? Who knows!

But studying the past may reveal some answers. In this session, music lover and internet gadabout Chuck (that's me - I'll speak in first person now) looks at how past technologies have impacted music, its players and its economics.

A focus of the session will be to see how various technologies have actually impacted music songwriting and even birthed whole new genres. I try to look at how revered forms of music and music consumption were really just an outcome of the economic imperatives of the day. There's loads of fun trivia in there as well, which I'll conduct intermittently as a quiz - all very guessable answers.

All this will hopefully give us some answers - or at least a framework of thinking - about how music will evolve (or not!) in the brave new era of AI. And how the lessons from here can really be extrapolated to any other form of art.

I mean, why not spend your Sunday evening with an event that has 'economic imperatives' and 'framework' in the description?

It'll be fun, slightly geeky, hopefully thought-provoking, and if nothing else I promise you a lot of good music.

Who is Deepak 'Chuck' Gopalakrishnan?

Chuck is a marketing consultant who is fond of overthinking about how technology impacts culture. He has worked at ad agencies like Ogilvy and Leo Burnett and event firms OML and Insider, and taught digital marketing at several places. Chuck runs a content coaching programme called The 6% Club, where he and a friend help working professionals turn their interests into their very own podcasts and newsletters. He has run several content projects - podcasts, newsletters and more – on topics ranging from the origin of brands to irreverent humour to politics to technology. Some of these are Simplified, The Origin of Things, Things of Internet, To Your Heart's Content, and more - many of which owe their good total listen time thanks to Bangalore traffic.

Chuck loves music, especially the world of rock and heavy metal. He is fond of deep listening – putting on headphones, shutting off the internet and just zoning out to his favourite songs. But he is ALSO fond of thinking about how music and technology are intertwined – something that's the subject of this talk. He constantly tries to find historical parallels – something he feels will be very useful as we try to navigate the brave new world of AI. In other words, if you ask him "how will AI change music?" then he's likely to think about how past technologies have changed music, musicians, the economics of music, and so on. Needless to say, this is a favourite topic of his once he's two beers down. Chuck is currently working on (meaning he has scribbled several notes that may find their way into a Substack) a theory about how any event is a combination of technology, economics, psychology, culture and politics. Consider this talk to be an outcome of those scribbles.