From First Major Label Download to AI + Beyond: Remembering Jim Griffin 

Nancy Kwamboka

In this special episode, Larry Miller remembers his friend Jim Griffin, a pioneering figure in digital music who helped bring the music industry into the internet age.

Recorded just months before Jim’s passing, this conversation originally appeared on Smartest People in the Room with Tom Truitt. Larry and Jim revisit the early days of digital music, including the groundbreaking 1994 release of Aerosmith’s “Head First,” one of the first full-length commercial songs made available as a digital download.

From 90-minute downloads over dial-up connections to today’s world of streaming and AI, Jim reflects on more than three decades of technological change and the lessons the music business is still learning. The conversation explores Napster, licensing, streaming economics, copyright, AI-generated music, the future of record labels, and why Jim believed the next major technological disruption could go far beyond AI.

What We Talk About

  • How Aerosmith’s “Head First” became a landmark moment in digital music history
  • What it took to download a song over a 14.4 modem in 1994
  • Why the early music industry saw the internet as both an opportunity and a threat
  • What Napster taught the industry about consumer behavior, piracy, and access
  • Why Jim believed licensing remains the key to navigating disruption, including AI
  • How streaming transformed music from a product business into a service business
  • Why access ultimately beat ownership in the transition from downloads to streaming
  • The challenges surrounding creator income, metadata, and fair compensation
  • Why record labels and collective rights organizations are unlikely to disappear
  • Jim’s belief that quantum communications could become an even bigger technological shift than AI
  • The importance of building communities, relationships, and, in Jim’s words, “drawing a crowd”

The episode also looks ahead at how copyright, licensing, labels, and music distribution could evolve over the coming decades, while revisiting the people and ideas that helped shape the digital music business we know today.

More than anything, this conversation captures Jim’s curiosity about what comes next and his belief in bringing people together to exchange ideas, build relationships, and challenge assumptions about the future of music.

Who Wins After the Catalog Gold Rush?

Nancy Kwamboka

For the past decade, success in music rights investing has largely been measured by one thing: how many great catalogs you could acquire before everyone else did. But every gold rush eventually matures. Capital floods in. Competition intensifies. The biggest players start buying each other instead of buying songs. The question is no longer who owns the most music. It’s who can build the best business around it.

In this special crossover episode of Musonomics and Music Moneyball, Larry Miller is joined by Tom Mullen, CEO and Co-Founder of Standard Innovation, to explore what the next chapter of the music investment industry might look like. Together, they trace how streaming transformed music into an institutional asset class, why mergers and acquisitions are accelerating across the sector, and what history can teach us about competing in markets increasingly dominated by giants. Looking beyond music, they turn to A24’s rise in the film industry as an unlikely blueprint for how smaller, more focused companies can outperform far larger competitors by embracing specialization instead of scale. Along the way, they examine why platform businesses are replacing simple catalog acquisition, where investors should be looking for untapped opportunities, and why the biggest competitive advantage may no longer be having the most capital, but knowing exactly where not to compete.

5 Billion Reasons to Train AI on the Music Traditions of the Global South

Nancy Kwamboka
Artificial intelligence is doing to music what the printing press did to books and what the mp3 did to the album. But as the tools multiply and the investment pours in, a harder question is starting to surface. Who exactly are these systems built for? On this episode, Larry talks with Drew Thurlow, former senior executive at Sony Music, Pandora, and Warner Music, and author of Machine Music, the most clear-eyed account yet of what is actually happening at the intersection of AI and the music industry. Then Rithvik Kundu, music technology researcher and co-founder of the NYU Gen Audio AI group, and Jad Al Masri, violinist, composer, and founder of Motif, join the conversation fresh off winning the Berklee College of Music AI Hackathon. Their work asks a question the major AI music platforms have largely ignored: what about the five billion people whose musical traditions, modal systems, and microtonal instruments don’t fit neatly into the Western tonal framework these models were built on? Drew’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Music-Transforming-Musics-Next/dp/1032813555

Finishing the Unfinished: AI, Schubert, and Who Gets Credit for the Final Note

Nancy Kwamboka

Most conversations about AI and music collapse into two camps: fear that it will replace artists, or excitement about how much money there is to be made. Lucas Cantor sits outside both.

Lucas is a venture investor at Mindset Ventures and an Emmy-winning composer who got his start at Hans Zimmer’s studio before going on to finish Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony using AI, a project that became a live orchestral premiere in London. He’s also the author of Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Larry talks with Lucas about what it actually took to complete a 200-year-old symphony with machine learning, why he thinks Suno’s multi-billion dollar valuation rests on a fundamentally wrong premise about what music is, and why, after spending a career building tools that make creation easier, he remains convinced that the hardest and most valuable skill in music has never been technical at all.

The Future of Music + AI Is Already Here – It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed

Nancy Kwamboka

With apologies to cyberpunk author William Gibson, the technology is out in the wild.  The lawsuits are filed. The licensing deals are being signed. The future of the music industry is already here.  It’s just not evenly distributed.

This is the third episode in Musonomics’ AI series, and it’s the one that looks forward — beyond the fear and hype to what’s already taking shape. When content becomes infinitely abundant, what gets more valuable? And who wins?

Larry sits down with Cherie Hu, founder of Water and Music, and Daniel Rowland, VP of Strategy and Partnerships at LANDR to map where things actually stand — and where they’re heading.

They cover why professional AI adoption is far higher than anyone publicly admits, how major labels are quietly re-centralizing by buying up indie distributors, what the “DAWification of everything” means for the line between assistive and generative tools, and why the music company of the future might look like a label, a tech company, and a data company all at once.

One thread runs through all of it:  authenticity is still the industry’s most fragile — and most valuable — asset.

 

AI, Music, and the Law:  Innovation vs Compensation

Nancy Kwamboka
Artificial intelligence is the force reshaping the music industry’s future. And the legal battle over who gets paid, and for what, is just getting started. In 2024, the major labels sued AI music companies Suno and Udio. Music publishers sued Anthropic this year for $3 billion. The AI companies say training on copyrighted music is transformative, and protected by fair use.  Rightsholders say if you’re building a business on music, you have to pay for it. The courts haven’t settled it. Congress hasn’t touched it. But the marketplace is already moving. Larry talks with David Israelite of the National Music Publishers Association and Judge David Strickler of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, both adjunct professors at NYU Steinhardt, about fair use, the shadow of litigation, why voluntary licensing deals are quietly multiplying, and whether greed, fear, or good old-fashioned bargaining theory will ultimately draw the line between innovation and compensation. In this episode:
  • Why the fair use argument is the central legal battleground, and what the courts have said so far
  • How settlements with Suno and Udio are reshaping the landscape before any landmark ruling arrives
  • Why voluntary licensing deals are multiplying, and what the YouTube era teaches us about where this is headed
  • Whether Congress will step in, and why the best-case scenario is that it doesn’t
  • What the next three to five years look like for creators, rights holders, and the AI companies caught in between
 

AI & Music: Tool or Threat?

Nancy Kwamboka
Artificial intelligence is the force reshaping the music industry’s future. And the legal battle over who gets paid, and for what, is just getting started. In 2024, the major labels sued AI music companies Suno and Udio. Music publishers sued Anthropic this year for $3 billion. The AI companies say training on copyrighted music is transformative, and protected by fair use.  Rightsholders say if you’re building a business on music, you have to pay for it. The courts haven’t settled it. Congress hasn’t touched it. But the marketplace is already moving. Larry talks with David Israelite of the National Music Publishers Association and Judge David Strickler of the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, both adjunct professors at NYU Steinhardt, about fair use, the shadow of litigation, why voluntary licensing deals are quietly multiplying, and whether greed, fear, or good old-fashioned bargaining theory will ultimately draw the line between innovation and compensation. In this episode:
  • Why the fair use argument is the central legal battleground, and what the courts have said so far
  • How settlements with Suno and Udio are reshaping the landscape before any landmark ruling arrives
  • Why voluntary licensing deals are multiplying, and what the YouTube era teaches us about where this is headed
  • Whether Congress will step in, and why the best-case scenario is that it doesn’t
  • What the next three to five years look like for creators, rights holders, and the AI companies caught in between
 

What’s a Superfan?

Larry Miller

Superfan is a strong contender for Music Industry Buzzword of 2025-26. But what does it mean, exactly? And what does it mean for the industry?

On this episode, Larry talks with Olivia Jones from MIDIA research who is watching the space closely, and Musonomics correspondent Mariel Darling sits down with Mag Rodriguez, founder of EVEN, one of the leading platforms doing the heavy lifting to talk about the challenges and rewards of superfan engagement.

Catalogs + Capital

Larry Miller

In this episode, we take a look back at the first half of 2025. Larry sits down with Tatiana Cirisano of MIDIA research to discuss underlying industry trends across the globe, including where music meets audiences. Larry also talks with Paul Sipio of Apollo Global Management, which has invested billions in the industry over the past few years, about why music catalogue has been, and continues to be, an attractive investment on Wall Street and beyond.