Lucas Cantor has an unusual claim on the AI conversation. In 2019, Huawei asked him to finish Schubert's Unfinished Symphony using artificial intelligence, and he did it. He's an Emmy-winning composer who has worked on every Olympics since 2002, produced a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde, and now invests in music technology. His new book is Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

In this episode Georgie Healy gets Lucas to take apart the story we're all being told about AI. Why he thinks nobody actually knows what the term even means. Why every single person he asks assumes AI can do the job they're not an expert in, and can't do the job they are. Why the claim that AI democratizes creativity is a fallacy sold by AI companies, and what it actually democratizes instead. Why B2B SaaS isn't dead, and who benefits from you believing it is. And why the music industry, supposedly murdered by Napster, is bigger now than it was before.

If you build, market, or operate anything, this is a useful hour of pressure testing. Lucas isn't a doomer and he isn't an evangelist. He's someone who has been inside the technology long enough to tell the difference between what it does and what it's sold as.

Recorded ahead of his first trip to Australia for BIGSOUND - which is September 1st - 4th in Brisbane!

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open

00:54 Welcome, and who Lucas Cantor is

02:49 The AI hack: stem separation

04:14 Taylor Swift's wedding

04:55 BIGSOUND, and the fear around AI in music

06:23 Why the purist argument falls apart

07:25 Tuning has drifted since the Renaissance

10:02 Composer, producer, author, investor

11:16 What Suno is, and the ethics problem

12:20 Why all music sounds better now

15:33 What it actually means to have your music stolen

16:56 Covering Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde

19:19 Source Connect, Audio Movers, and remote studios

20:22 The fallacy that AI democratizes creativity

22:38 Black Swan, conductors, and the war on expertise

24:26 The doctor who said AI could write a pop song

27:38 Why he called himself a Luddite

30:18 Hans Zimmer's studio, and saying yes to Huawei

32:34 Finishing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony

37:00 "I don't think anybody knows what AI is"

38:49 Every AI agent ad shows something nobody needs

42:14 Hot take: is B2B SaaS dead?

45:13 AI is a story, and that's the problem

46:25 What actually wins in music tech

49:28 Amusing, but not amazing

50:20 Ben Affleck, Scorsese, and AI in the creative process

53:30 Two Emmys and a coach of the year award

55:36 The one takeaway from Unfinished

57:33 Georgie's Substack, Attention Is All I Need