Music Non-Stop

There’s an interesting piece on WonkHE this morning, reflecting on the potential impact of GenAI on higher education via the impact of digital sharing and piracy on music. In brief, what happens to an industry when the limited resource from which it’s derived its profits suddenly becomes abundant (and when its previous means of controlling supply and getting paid don’t work any more)? Obviously I’m a sucker for comparisons between music and education (and have a vague recollection of writing a post comparing the promise of the ‘long tail’, i.e. obscure artists getting more exposure, with the reality of the dominance of a tiny number of very popular acts, echoing the tendency of GenAI to entrench the most conventional views of topics). So, this is worth reflecting on. But the obvious objection is that the analogy has a fundamental flaw that the article neatly hos over. With music, we are indeed talking about the impact of new technology on the distribution of a product: the…