AI agents for artists?

Hi,

This week’s newsletter is somewhat of a Part 2 to last week’s newsletter focusing on the emergence of YouTube channels uploading music entirely created by AI.

The conversation around AI and the music industry is nothing knew, however with OpenAI’s introduction of ChatGPT Tasks last week, it got my gears turning about what the future of AI in music might look like and how AI agents can play a part.

This newsletter highlights:

• AI agents in the music industry

• Resources for those affected by the California wildfires

• 10 music industry job roles

Let’s dive in ⬇️

Last week ChatGPT introduced the beta version of a feature called “tasks” and it’s exactly what it sounds like - ChatGPT is giving users the ability to assign it recurring or future tasks that it will store, retain, and complete information and behaviors.

The new functionality is essentially an “AI agent” - an automated system built to perform a specific task or a series of tasks. “AI agents” are possibly the biggest buzzword in AI at the moment and one that has the potential to redefine the workflow of how we conduct business.

It feels like every week a new agency emerges with the focus of building AI agents / automations to help make workflow more productive and efficient. They design their own code and then share it (or sell it) with others to implement in their own workflow.

An example of an AI agent I recently saw was an automation that takes YouTube channel links that you paste into a Google Sheets and then automatically scrapes the descriptions of videos uploaded to that channel, finds its contact info, and auto generates a tailored cold email based on the content of that channel.

What ChatGPT introduced last week is an example of what AI agents could be at scale - instead of unique code for each task, you can just type it into an LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude) and it will automatically do the task or action for you.

The ChatGPT tasks feature is essentially your own personalized assistant. To test out the feature, I entered in this prompt:

“New task - Every Friday morning at 9am EST, please scan social media and the internet and send me the 10 most popular music industry stories from that week.”

At 9am on the dot last Friday, I received this message in ChatGPT along with an email reminder from them to the email I have connected to my account.