Thinking On Paper Technology Podcast Making Music Got Easy. Taste (And Maths) Matter More Than Ever │ Nicholas Ponari
When making music took heartbreak, a thousand late nights and bleeding fingers, effort, passion and belief took the rare few musicians to the top of the charts.
Now AI lets anyone write a song, taste becomes more vital than it ever was. And it was always pretty important. But that's only part of the new reality of the music industry. In today’s show, Mark and Jeremy Think On Paper with Nicholas Ponari - investor, guitar player, and Chief Operating Officer at Overtune - about how to credit the right musicians, how the bass player, drummer and producer get paid and how AI musicians can exist alongside human melody makers. Nicholas also explains the vector mathematics of Overtune (https://www.overtune.com/) - convert stems into vectors in high-dimensional space, measure the “distance” between inputs and outputs, and use those weightings to decide who contributed what, who gets paid, and where influence stops being meaningful enough to count.
Please enjoy the show.
And remember: Stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep Thinking on Paper.
Cheers, Mark & Jeremy
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Trailer
(00:59) Why music feels like “magic”
(04:51) Overtune’s real customer: vocalists who can’t produce
(07:51) The hard problem: attribution, not “make a song”
(08:05) Why the easy button fails
(12:49) Training on licensed music and where the ethics line sits
(16:08) Who gets paid: splits, volume, and realistic expectations
(18:32) How attribution actually works: vectors, thresholds, and cutoffs
(20:44) Can scraped music ever be fixed after the fact
(27:07) Interactive music, live coding, and the future of performance
(29:14) The Kevin Kelly question: what do we want humans to be?