There’s a funny thing that happens at conferences. You arrive expecting an abundance of answers, but more often than not, leave with better questions.
For three days at Indie Week, smack bang in the middle of Manhattan, I bounced between conversations on AI regulation, record labels, fan commerce, and A&R. The panel titles revolved like the front door at the InterContinental on West 44th, yet the discussions hovered in similar spaces. Unsurprisingly, every conversation wormed its way to artificial intelligence.
Like every other industry right now, music is experiencing that familiar Gold Rush feeling. Nobody wants to be the person who ignored the biggest technological shift in recent memory. Some speakers embraced it; others approached it with caution. A few looked visibly exhausted by the sheer speed at which the conversation was evolving.
The genie, as one panellist put it, isn’t going back in the bottle.
But somewhere between all the chatter about robots replacing musicians (shoutout SUNO) and the mountain of LinkedIn posts promising AI will save the music business. I realised Indie Week wasn’t obsessed with technology; it was actually obsessed with people – the passionate industry pros sitting in the same rooms as I.
One of the first panels I attended explored critical lessons of running an independent music company.
The panellists unpacked some hard truths, like the fact that those who championed your project might disappear overnight, executive teams change, company cultures shift, and the relationships you’ve spent years nurturing suddenly belong to somebody else. It made me wonder whether the industry’s best currency isn’t ownership anymore; it’s continuity.
Millions of dollars continue to flood into music rights, and investment firms are buying catalogues at a record pace. For artists, that usually means more competition for their work and fatter cheques on the table. For independent companies, however, the picture isn’t as straightforward.
There’s a certain pride that comes with remaining independent. Sometimes it’s worn almost like a badge of honour. But the conversation wasn’t romanticising independence for independence’s sake. Instead, it challenged what independence actually means.
Vera Savcic of Secrectly Distribution waxed lyrical on how they’d built their business around a sense of family, a culture artists genuinely want to become part of. That idea stuck with me because it reframes independence entirely. It’s less about staying small and more about staying intentional.
During discussions around AI regulation, no one seemed to entertain the fantasy that the technology could somehow be stopped. Instead, the question became much more practical. How do we live with it? There’s a tendency online to divide the debate into two extremes.
AI is either going to destroy creativity forever, or it’ll magically democratise everything. The reality is it sits somewhere in the middle. One panellist described AI as trying to replicate our souls. Another argued that the technology itself deserves a degree of grace because innovation has always unsettled creative industries before eventually becoming a useful tool.
The real challenge isn’t whether AI can generate music. It’s whether we can build systems that reward the humans whose work taught those systems in the first place.
A panellist recalled that Napster forced the industry to rethink distribution. AI forces it to rethink creation. One is about getting music to listeners. The other asks who gets to call themselves the creator.
Legislation is scrambling to keep up. Licensing conversations are evolving almost monthly. The Protect Working Musicians Act surfaced repeatedly throughout the week, highlighting just how quickly governments are being forced into conversations that barely existed a few years ago. The technology is moving faster than the rulebook, exciting yet at the same time…rather uncomfortable.
We’ve spent the better part of two decades optimising reach – playlists, algorithms, monthly listeners, follower counts. All useful metrics, but they’re increasingly poor measurements of community.
The artists finding success through direct-to-fan strategies aren’t necessarily attracting millions of people. They’re creating smaller groups that care more deeply. Discussions buzzed around WhatsApp communities, exclusive listening sessions, and unreleased songs quietly dropped into live chats.
The panel made one point that felt impossible to ignore. Direct-to-consumer doesn’t work unless the artist actually wants to participate. Technology can’t manufacture authenticity. Fans know the difference; they always have. Perhaps the most interesting discussion wasn’t about launch campaigns at all. It was about what happens afterwards. Streaming has conditioned us to think in release weeks; communities think in years.
That idea of patience quietly became the conference’s recurring theme. It popped up again during the A&R discussions. Maya Kalev of Stones Throw Records offered perhaps the simplest advice of the week.
Find listeners, not viral moments or algorithms – focus on those people who choose to come back. Everything else follows from there.
Another speaker delivered a line I haven’t stopped thinking about since. “You can’t unspend money.” It sounds obvious, yet it’s probably one of the smartest observations anyone made. Our instinct is often to throw resources at potential. Instead, the better strategy is patience. Wait until something catches, then pour fuel on the fire.
Good A&R, it turns out, looks remarkably similar to good friendship. I’m talking about shared expectations, honest conversations and long-term belief. An artist needs someone willing to be by their side through the quiet periods, not just celebrate their peaks.
For an industry that often feels obsessed with acceleration, it was refreshing to hear so many experienced people advocating for slowing down. And of all those I heard on the mic, I really believed they were in it for the right reasons.
By the end of Indie Week, I’d stopped jotting the letters A and I down. Not because they weren’t interesting, but because they all seemed to orbit the same underlying idea. Technology is changing almost everything about how music gets made, discovered, marketed and monetised. What isn’t being replaced is trust, taste or that feeling of joy music lovers get when nerding out with one another.
Connecting and sharing sounds is at the heart of it all. Maybe that’s why I left feeling optimistic, not because AI suddenly feels less significant, quite the opposite. The technology is moving astonishingly quickly, and the music industry would be foolish to ignore it. But every key conversation I heard eventually landed on two new letters, “U” and “S” – Us.
The future of independent music won’t be decided by whoever builds the smartest machine. It’ll be shaped by the people who continue building the firmest and most meaningful relationships. And in an industry obsessed with what’s next, that feels like a beautifully old-fashioned idea.