Marcus O'Dair - Distributed Creativity
Marcus O’Dair is an author, researcher, academic, music manager, consultant, broadcaster and an accomplished musician. He’s recently taken a position as Associate Dean, Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise at the University of the Arts in London.
Before that, he established a Creative Entrepreneurship MA course at Middlesex University and he’s been featured on, presented and written for the likes of the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, Independent, Financial Times and Irish Times. He’s written biographies of famous artists and edited a book about the history of Mute Records.
He’s now the author of a new book called Distributed Creativity: How Blockchain Technology Will Transform The Creative Economy.
He joined MTF Director Andrew Dubber for a chat on stage at MTF Stockholm about all of this and more.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
blockchain, people, music, book, written, creative industries, wyatt, problem, called, artists, academic, records, big, project, technology, academia, london, mtf, robert, umbrella
SPEAKERS
Marcus O’Dair, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. Marcus O’Dair is an author, researcher, academic, music manager, consultant, broadcaster, and an accomplished musician. He’s recently taken a position as associate dean of knowledge exchange and enterprise at the University of the Arts in London. Before that, he established a creative entrepreneurship ma course at Middlesex University. And he’s been featured on presented and written for the likes of the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, independent financial times, and the Irish Times. He’s written biographies of famous artists, and he’s edited a book about the history of mute records. He’s now the author of a new book called distributed creativity, how blockchain technology will transform the creative economy, we sat down and had a chat at MTF Stockholm about all of this and more hope you enjoy. Marcus is somebody whose name I’ve come across on a number of occasions through my career in academia in a number of different guises, because you wear a number of different hats and you think about a number of different things, but there is a bit of a thread to all of them do want to just sort of do kind of how you describe yourself in terms of what your interests are as an academic.
Marcus O’Dair
Okay, well, I ended up in academia from you know, playing music and writing about music. And completely, you know, what, what they would call a practice based appointment, I was just appointed on the basis someone who played music and managed music and wrote about music and talked about music on the radio. Since ending up in academia, I’ve become more of a researcher, I suppose. And I’d already written a book about Robert Wyatt, which is a popular press biography. But I’ve just written a book more recently, which is about blockchains. And the impact they could have on Creative Industries. And not just music, although my job title is Associate Professor in music and innovation at Middlesex, which is a university in London. But actually, when you start looking at that the problems and opportunities of a tech like blockchain are quite similar across the verticals. So it’s actually quite similar, where we’re talking about a music file or a piece of digital art, or whatever. So I ended up in that boat looking at games and images, and journalism and book publishing. But mainly music still play a bit, much less than I used to, I mean,
Andrew Dubber
you’re assigned artists and everything you were like, on the circuit. And
Marcus O’Dair
yeah, I’d started off, I used to be a main I’m not really a very classic session musician, because I’m definitely no virtuoso. But I was a session musician with an artist called passenger before he had an international hit record. But he already had a massive management deal. He was already managed by a music who had made their fortune managing Robbie Williams, well, it made a fortune in the 1970s running Island Records and stuff like that. As managers they done, already made their money off that that 80 million pound Robbie Williams deal. And so I did that for a period. And then, as a featured artist, I was signed to ninja tune with a duo called grass cut, which we’re still doing, although To be honest, we don’t, you know, I’ve got little kids, we don’t tour very much. I manage it. I’ve always managed it. And I’ve got I guess increasingly, that’s the side of it that I’ve enjoyed, which there’s some crossover there with the academic side, because it’s it’s basically about innovation management in No, it’s not like high tech innovation, but it’s basically someone’s creative idea how you monetize it,
Andrew Dubber
right? And that kind of tradition of one of these things is not like the other the Robert Wyatt thing sort of stands out as being kind of interesting that this is obviously it was a passion for you because you want a whole biography. what’s the what’s the connection?
Marcus O’Dair
Okay, so when I was doing much more journalism, and I was also doing radio, and there was a great period when I was presenting a music podcast for the independent, which is the newspaper in the UK, but it was a collaboration with aim, which is the Association of Independent UK record labels. So it was Independent newspaper and independent music. And I have completely free rein, as long as the people I put on the podcast were on an independent label. So it was great. I did weird things like kind of hanging out with Julian Cope, who’s sort of crazy shamanistic English, psychedelic visionary. And in his sort of world war two German officer gear, he took me around these Neolithic stones and stuff, which was a good day out and then another day out. That was even better was a day of Robert Wyatt. was when he was Domino records did a big anthology of all his independent solo records back to the 70s. And I had such a good day hanging out with him in his garden in Louth which is a little village town in the north of England. So a day to get there from London. I had such a good time and and I loved the music anyway. And he’s Robert Wyatt’s a very unusual artist because he’s, you know, on Top of the Pops, he’s done quite mainstream stuff. The Top of the Pops track was a cover of I’m a believer, the track The Monkees did have his version was quite weird, but it was a top 40 hit. And he had another top 40 hit during the Falklands War in the 80s with this kind of really anti war track written specifically for him by Elvis Costello and Clive Langer, who is a producer from the time so he flirted with the mainstream, but then he did really, really weird things, avant garde things left to jazz things, recorded lots of revolutionary anthems, you know, Latin America or just on all these weird things, brilliant music and also like this thread of amazing collaborators because through the decades from the 60s, so we have Peter Jenner talking last night about you fo and that kind of early Pink Floyd. period in London, Robert Wyatt was their Soft Machine were parallel to Pink Floyd. And he played on Syd Barrett records and stuff, but then, and he toured the states with Hendrix. But then, in the 70s, his his working with other artists. He’s working with Brian Eno or say, and then in the 80s, he’s working with other writers again, like Paul Weller, or, and then he carries on so a lot. You know, he’s the same age as Bowie or McCartney, or those kind of people, but his career or Bowie’s career came back at the end, didn’t it in a brilliant way, but McCartney’s career, let’s be honest, a sort of trailed off, where’s why he was never up there with those guys commercially, but he’s working with Bjork or hot chip in the last 15 years. And that nothing like that’s happening elsewhere. And plus, sorry, that’s a long answer. But you said it’s a passion. The other thing about Robert Wyatt is, there’s so much not to do if music is the first person in a wheelchair to play on top of the pops, because he fell out of a window in 1974 when he was drunk, and he’s a Marxist. And there’s very few Marxists in even in popular music, or even anywhere now, like the hardline Soviet Marxist, which is basically what he is like an old school, lefty. So in all kinds of ways, it was just a story that had to build on and no one had told it, you know, someone like Bowie, there’s about 40 books on Bowie already. And I just didn’t want to write the 41st was nothing on Robert Wyatt.
Andrew Dubber
So join the dots for me. Obviously, there’s a music connection and there’s an innovation connection, I guess. But, but still, Robert Wyatt, I’m gonna write a book about blockchains. How do you get there? What was what was the thing that sparked the blockchain? Thank you. Okay. So
Marcus O’Dair
yeah, there’s no connection apart from we did a report a couple of years ago, Nick Mason, who’s a mate, that’s a connection that came a different way. So yeah, there’s no link in what it was is that their rubber wire project was a combination of before is in academia, much more like journalism and broadcasting stuff. When I moved in, does more academic work, I started thinking about, okay, what is an interesting area of research, critical thinking, and I was looking for something current and industry facing. And I guess, and this happened to be exactly around the time when people started talking about blockchains. And I’d heard about Bitcoin, but I hadn’t taken any notice. To be honest, I didn’t see any relevance to what I was doing. And I saw I was going to, well, Imogen Heap here says I was going to some of her early hack events, which were in 2015, in London, and there was a buzz about what was going on there. But also, I felt like there was a place where you could there was there was a massive opposition to what was it’s changed now. There’s massive opposition to what some of the blockchain people were saying from the big rights holders, very, very negative comments by people like ppl and some of those type of people, and then mad evangelism from startups. And I was thinking that this is what academia can fit in. If you want a critical voice, that’s somewhere in the middle. That that’s a good place.
Andrew Dubber
Right? Right. But it’s not just the technology of blockchain that you’ve looked at. You’ve written this from the point of view of how does this make sense for creative people?
Marcus O’Dair
Yes. So I’ve tried, as I say, to tap the take out kind of middle way, said this book I’ve written which is unbelievably fast for for the academic world is only you know, I’m literally I’m calling I finished it last month, I’m looking at the proofs this month. And it’ll be out next month, which is not even the sort of timescale that popular press usually works, let alone the academic world. So that’s great. And it means that it doesn’t get out of day in a very dynamic and fast moving kind of world. And the book is looking at opportunities at the technology, but also barriers to adoption and also possible risks of adoption as well, which is like a neglected piece.
Andrew Dubber
Is that the structure? Or is it like
Marcus O’Dair
a study on introduction to the tech introduction to how it’s relevant to the creative industries, which is fascinating, and, to me really clear use case, but often neglected. And I mean, in the worlds that we’re all in, blockchain is quite a buzzy subject. But if you go to a mainstream blockchain event, it’s still seen as sort of weird side show. People are all music. Okay.
Andrew Dubber
So the the hype that we hear is music industry is broken or unfair or wrong. blockchain is this technology that fixes that somehow, and then you apply blockchain to music industry, and then everything’s fair. How plus the characterizations the reality.
Marcus O’Dair
Well, I, you never flew a technology, you’re going to solve the people bit, and see people have got to use it. People have got to use it in a particular kind of a way. So I always think is quite interesting to look at the parallel of banking, because in banking, I mean, Bitcoin was invented to circumnavigate banks that came along in the direct aftermath of the financial crisis. And yet, there’s now a huge banking consortium pouring millions into it. And the same could happen. The ways in which it can be used are enormously varied. And sometimes it’s sort of presented like there’s one way of using it. But
Andrew Dubber
yeah, because that’s a really interesting point. What does it do?
Marcus O’Dair
Well, lots of things. I mean, even a lot of what’s been discussed, and I don’t know if people were mycelia happy that was happening in parallel. Earlier in the week, but there’s various blockchain startups, they’re doing different stuff. And then there’s other people doing stuff, say with ticketing, which I don’t, I wasn’t at most of images at this time. But I’ve been to lots of them on there are some people involved in using blockchain for life, but I don’t think secondary ticketing people are part of their, that umbrella, and my seal is quite big umbrella. Different people are using it for all kinds of different stuff. But
Andrew Dubber
are those kinds of different stuff all under the umbrella of money changing hands? Or is there more to it than that?
Marcus O’Dair
Well, one of the sort of most the most prominent book on blockchains is one that Don Tapscott wrote is a sort of management theorist with his son, Alex Tapscott, who’s a blockchain CEO think, and they’ve set up something called blockchain Research Institute. And they’ve written a book called the blockchain revolution. And they call it the Internet of value. So they said, the first internet, the internet, we all think of is the Internet of information. And that’s great for transferring ones and zeros. But, and this is where the relevance of the creators comes in, not good for transferring value. And they talk about that, to some extent, in relation to creative industries, but in relation to all these other verticals as well. But it’s kind of the same problem. If you transfer a digital file, you’re not actually transferring the file, you’re transferring a copy of the file, right? And so you get content that can be infinitely copied with no loss of quality, whereas, you know, in the old analogue days, there would have been some decline.
Andrew Dubber
Just to be clear, when you say value, you mean monetary value?
Marcus O’Dair
Well, yeah, Yes, I do. I mean, I would argue that there’s, you know, social value can associate with the creative industries as well. But now, I guess I’m talking about financial value.
Andrew Dubber
And presumably, if you’ve written a book, there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. What’s the end? What’s the, you know, reveal?
Marcus O’Dair
Okay, spoiler alert. Yeah. The end is that Yeah, at the moment, blockchains are underperforming that technologically there are, there’s massive scalability issues with blockchains. So a lot of the things people are proposing are impossible, although there’s changing fast. I mean, even here last night, someone showed me something on his phone, which is not like a different. This has the potential to stage onto anything I’ve seen before. So things are changing fast. And you don’t always know what everyone’s doing because everyone’s behind NDA is. And so sometimes, for someone to show you something in private that they can’t put in public. And so it’s hard to keep up. But the conclusion is basically, this is a potentially transformative technology. The fact that it’s underperforming in the short term is no problem in the longer term. That’s the case with all disruptive technologies. They always underperform at first and that’s not the way to write them off. But the problem is that adoption at the tech is only
Andrew Dubber
a tool. How do we adopt?
Marcus O’Dair
Well, it depends who is adopting, because they’re already kind of long tail adoption. So like, two or three years ago, there were people doing projects were completely unsigned artists. Like there’s there’s a startup a bit, June’s was still around, they only work with artists who are not signed. And that makes it relatively easy, because you’re not dealing with big rights holders. But on the other hand, it’s hard to get traction because they’re not artists who have big followings. Right. Now you’ve got Bjork had did a crypto project, other bigger artists are starting to do stuff. And that’s how people start to take notice. And there was a big umbrella project.
Andrew Dubber
Sure, because it seems very fragmented. There is there is a basically a blockchain per song that’s released on a blockchain and like there’s the tiny human, there’s a big thing. That’s the and is that a problem of interoperability? Or, you know, what is that causing problems?
Marcus O’Dair
There are people looking at interoperability in general, because this is a recognised problem that the whole point of blockchains is supposed to be about getting rid of silos, and we could just make a whole lot of new silence. So much beyond music, there are people looking at interoperability, and there are these big organisations, I mean, mycelia, as I said, image in hips project is kind of an umbrella. And then there’s a big umbrella, which is based in Berkeley, which is the open music initiative. Rmi. But again, there’s about 200 companies. Now, I think, in our mind, some of them huge, I mean, the major labels and Spotify, and people are part of AI. So lo and behold, it doesn’t move at hundred miles an hour. The things that move fast, that are long tail ones, but then then you’ve got the adoption problem.
Andrew Dubber
There is a theory that the reason that all of these organisations are involved in this project is because that is the opportunity to sabotage the project. And is there any truth in that? Do you think
Marcus O’Dair
I haven’t seen that happening myself. But you would be naive to think that wasn’t part of the motivation. But also there’s there’s use cases for them that I just about efficiency. And that is obviously going to be of interest. So you could well have, you know, the majors, it will take a mindset change for people not to be proprietary about their data, which is how you get the real value of a blockchain. Otherwise, you could talk about some other kind of database.
Andrew Dubber
The next kind of chapter of the book, if you’re going to sort of write, you know, issue number two, seems to be there’s a lot of things that are coming out about blockchains that are not about block chains, and and these new technologies that are about the same sorts of things, but that actually kind of circumvent the the kind of blockchain methodology is that kind of part of the same family or how does this work? I think of them as part of the same family yet some people make a distinction between blockchains and dlts which is distributed ledger technologies. And yes, there are these things. I mean, for instance, there’s one called Iota, which isn’t really running on blockchain at all, but it’s running on tangle
Marcus O’Dair
runs on a tangle exact, which is worse? Well, it is a dag, which is what came up in our research day yesterday. It’s just it’s a brockless. blockchain is blockchain. It’s the same family. It’s the same family of technologies. And I mean, I think that that it’s what a lot of people have said about blockchains. And I found this in my own teaching, actually, I’ve used it did an interesting project. In my own outside the whoever wanted to actually one of the students involved, this is now working for imaging. So that’s like a success story I’m, which I’m proud of. And it was part of my own process of trying to come to understand this was anyone who’s interested come to these workshops, and we’re going to talk through and we ended up having academics from computer science or incident Bitcoin, academics for music and students all kinds of organic fruit from these different angles. And the thing that came up was it was just a thought experiment to say, imagine you had nothing, what would you build? And imagine you were starting again, clean slate. And the funny thing is that what you end up with something pretty similar to what you have now, because you actually most of the intermediary do add value. In my view, this is potentially the end of those that don’t, but most of them do. It’s just about two things. One, do they take too large a cart, and two, did they slow up the payment photo might show that do create as a waiting months or years to get paid. So could you just move that position in the value chain, they still take that card, but everyone gets paid at the same time, instead of this person pays that person and that person pays the next person and so on, and you just have an inefficient system, which if you start designing the system from now, you would never come up with, but historically, that was the way that it’s been done. And that has been very, very just in itself, just to think it through from scratch.
Andrew Dubber
Just Finally, if there was a metaphor to help us understand blockchains if we were sort of still struggling with this as a concept, because it is very abstract. For people like me who don’t programme computers, I kind of get what it is. But I need a metaphor. It’s like electricity for you know something, where’s like the internet for whatever? How do you describe it to people who like me are a bit kind of
Marcus O’Dair
boil. yet. Lots of people have been struggling for this and trying out these various analogies. And I know that coders don’t like this one. Technically, it’s not quite right. But I still like the Google Docs without Google, because it captures the idea that things are synchronised there’s one source of truth. But it’s got that sense of taken out the big corporate middleman. And so yeah, apologies to any coders. But that’s the nearest I think that we’ve got.
Andrew Dubber
Marcus O’Dair. What’s the book called?
Marcus O’Dair
Distributed Creativity
Andrew Dubber
There we go. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, Marcus O’Dair now running knowledge exchange and enterprise at the University of the Arts in London. His book Distributed Creativity, how blockchain technology will transform the creative economy is out now. And that’s the MTF podcast. Thanks so much for listening. If you have any thoughts on this, or any feedback at all, please do drop me a note I’m Dubber at Music Tech Fest dotnet. We’d love to hear from you. Don’t forget in the meantime to subscribe, review, like post it to Facebook, tweet a link or screenshot, send it on to a friend on Snapchat, slack it to a colleague. Whatever it is you do to spread the word much appreciated.
