What Will a World of Udio Like Content Be Like?

One of the defining characteristics of our modern world, one that would be notable to a time traveller brought back to earth from a mere 40 or 50 years ago, is how noisy it is. Not just the noise from trains, planes and automobiles, nor from the neighbors or from the general hullabaloo, but the ambient music that surrounds us everywhere we go. In the airport lounge, the supermarket, the restaurant, the dentist’s waiting room, the DMV, the barbers, the client’s office, the phone line as you hold for a bot or a bod - just about everywhere we go and everything we experience, swims in human generated sound.

Sometimes this surround sound is recognizable; the latest Matty Healy diss from Taylor Swift, or a Season from Vivaldi. Often though it’s not - simply a beat and some simple chords, and, if you’re really unlucky, the saxophone riff of an instrumental version of something that, sort of, sounds like Careless Whisper.

This latter type of music is often referred to, derisively, as muzak; not real music, but as quasi music - as disposable and as easy come easy go as taking a picture with a Kodak camera, from when its name originates.

Thinking of this muzak, as I rode skyward in a huge office block the other day and became momentarily aware of the “elevator music” worming its way into my consciousness, it struck me that we are on the cusp of (indeed may already be some way into) a deluge of AI generated content, not just of music a la https://www.udio.com/ but across all content forms - thought leadership reports, white papers, marketing messages, books, social media posts, movies, news - which could be regarded as little more than contzak. Ambient content that has the appearance of content but bares as little relation to real content as muzak does to real music.

At one end of this continuum is the spam that already fills in our in-boxes; increasingly made in content factories in low rent places by algorithms replacing low cost labor. At the other, are the glossily made reports from consultants and technologists in high-rent places, which are also increasingly leveraging Generative AI and which are allowing these organizations to bombard their clients and prospects with “thought leadership” and “position papers” on the “future of x” and the “state of y” at a frequency far greater than was possible when this type of material was laboriously hand crafted.

Contzak, aligned with account based marketing and micro niche targeting, promises an era of content surrounding every experience and transaction.

Originally the concept of muzak worked; its inventor, one George Owen Squire, started pumping music into malls and waiting rooms and offices in the post World War One era, with the goal of improving people’s moods and productivity. Spreading like wildfire, Squire and a succession of corporate ownership lived the American Dream as muzak seeped into every nook and cranny of American life. It wasn’t until its ubiquity was so noticeable and pop music, aka “foreground music”, became so triumphant that its uncoolness became apparent. Turning into a subject of ridicule, the mood for moderns turned, and in 1986, Ted Nugget put a stake through its heart with his $10m bid to buy the company behind Muzak to shut it down - “Muzak is an evil force in today’s society, causing people to lapse into uncontrollable fits of blandness. It’s been responsible for ruining some of the best minds of our generation”.

Muzak became unhip. And yet, despite the best efforts of Mr Cat Scratch Fever and others, lives, and surrounds us, to this day. As I found out on my elevator ride.

This is the lifecycle I imagine ahead for contzak; in the next few years, as the possibilities of producing content quickly and easily and cheaply became apparent to more and more marketeers, contzak is going to explode and be stuffed into the sales funnel at a rate which would make a French goose blush. Just as muzak initially worked, contzak will initially work. The prospective purchaser’s mood will be elevated by the very interesting article about the “iridium coating process that occurs during the process of making our super enhanced spark plugs which are unbeatable in today’s market conditions”. This elevated mood will close the sale. The disillusioned and low productivity employee will suddenly have a new lease of life (and employer margin improvement) with the end of week work completion summary that comes with suitable GenAI manufactured encouragement - “Kapil; you knocked it out of the park this week buddy; that save on the Johnson account, the way you handled the tension with Patrick, the beautiful line of C++ that you wrote on Tuesday at 2:34pm - WOW, what a week. What a legend!!!”.

Contzak will boom and become an inescapable part of our day to day lives. Then, over time - time to be counted in decades probably and unfortunately - a new Ted Nugget will show up, and contzak will tip over from the ubiquitous and all encompassing to the laughable and embarrassing. The Sons and Daughters of Ted Nugget will appear on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’s Successor or Real Time with Bill Maher’s Successor and proclaim the immortal line, “Contzak is an evil force in today’s society etc etc …”

And then, fast forwarding from that historic moment, contzak will recede out of the limelight and retake its place all around us, in every nook and cranny of American life. Just like muzak in 2024.

GenAI heralds much that is good in our unpredictable future but Contzak is not one of them. Although of course, as one who labored in the artisanal thought leadership workshops of the pre-AI era, I have a perspective and an interest which is disinterested (in its legal sense) and perhaps nostalgic for the times in which I lived and worked, I think it is fair to say with a genuinely disinterested view that a world of contzak is a world few of us will relish.

“Unreal” (though strikingly real) communication that follows us everywhere, resembling the famous scene in Minority Report where John Anderton is pursued by living adverts within an inch of his life …

Perhaps, over time, our tastes will revert to the real, to the human made, to the artisanal, to the product of difficulty, not ease. To Taylor S or Antonio Lucio Vivaldi. Perhaps. We shall see.

What does a world of Udio like content mean? More, content, no doubt. But a more that is, in sum, less.