Ask HN: Music tech, what's next?

That's not music tech, that's salesmanship tech.

Well if by music that includes music production:

Check out Google Magenta for machine learning applied to music: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/

As for industry: probably more ways to sample sounds on the fly into new instrument presets, new ways to organize music (both live and arranged), better ways to collaborate, and better ways to self-market.

You mentioned Spotify, which is tech for music streaming. I saw this and remembered an idea my old bandmates and I came up with once. I'm going to share it anyways, even though it's more about music performance than streaming.

Has anyone ever used an Fractal Axe-FX or Kemper or any other amp modeler? If not, it's essentially a digital replacement of tube amp technology, with the capability of modelling a whole bunch of guitar amps and effects. We dreamed up the idea of having one device like this, but capable of handling the whole band. Essentially, we'd want a small but powerful PC, running a custom Linux distro built for audio processing, with enough inputs for several instruments. The machine should be able to record, have outputs to plug into PA, have effects processing, etc. The technology for all of this already exists, it just needs to be combined into one box.

Maybe this is a little bit off-topic for this thread, but I still think this would be a great idea for any recording/performing band.

What's happened in the last 5 years is the rollout of multiple streaming services (Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music) and the partial collapse of a few players like Pandora, SoundCloud, LastFM. The real challenges to creating music platforms are music licensing and being able to create enough revenue to offset licensing costs. Enough people have left Youtube or the labels that licensing systems are now common at the large players. Expect that the advertising players without them to build/acquire them in the near future (Facebook purchased source3 to do that about a year ago). The big push over the next year is to update these systems for the Music Modernization Act, which was passed in 2018. The other big change is expanding internationally and getting music licensing to work with each country's laws and regulations. I'd expect a new streaming service to appear in the next 5 years and at least one to collapse. I personally suspect that there's going to be a continued increase in services that help artists monetize, especially self-published companies.

New standards and techniques for B2B interchange of metadata to help solve licensing and payment problems. Blockchain is a potential part of this.