We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yichao Liu a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Yichao, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.

A few trends that I could see are the growth of independent artists group, social media and short film content is getting crucial for an artist’s success, and the use of AI during music creation will be more common. As a result, we will be probably facing an anti-creativity era of music industry.
It is not difficult to understand the emegence of this trend, people spend about 3 to 4 hours per day on their smartphones on average nowadays, and the time can go up to 5-7 hours with Gen Z & Millennials. Compare to the old days when people acquire music content from CDs or radios, TikTok and Spotify playlists are the major resource for people to discover new music, and the content they received. On the other hand, with the growth of the DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation) and VSTs (Virtual Studio Technology) , making music or relative content is getting much easier, you can pretty much have an industrial-level outcome just by working from home, especially with the development of AI within these audio softwares, it is possible for people with scant knowledge to make music and probably become big. Since the majority of the audience are young generations without too much familiarity with old music, there are bunch of music that takes old trending music’s melody with modern production process got popular among these people, which can be really concerning as such behaviors can demotivate a lot of musicians who seek success by crafting good music with considerable amout of time and creativity. A good example can be Ava Max, who has bunch of hit songs based on interpolation (incorporating elements (melodies, chord progressions, lyrics) from an existing song into a new composition) and samples (reuse of a portion (or sample) of a sound recording in another recording). You might found one of her hits “Kings and Queens” similar to “You Give Love a Bad Name” by Bon Jovi, or “My Head & My Heart” to “Around the World” by A Touch Of Class, and a even horrified fact is that these original songs’ streaming times were outnumbered by Ava’s interpolated version of these songs on spotify, this leads us to a even more disturbing future: AI generated music might actually become profitable soon as this type of interpolated music can be just processed by AI, because that is literally what AI does: gathered information from existing music and add some variation to them, although it is almost impossible for AI to invent a new music style or reform a music genere, this will hurt those creators who’s trying to be creative and innovative while AI generated music can easily take away a huge part of the market by repacking an old song.
In conclusion, you can say this trend might expand the oppotunities for making music and get it viral through the internet, but there is definitely a huge damage to creativity and development of new musical ideas.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My stage name is Pivotor, I am a guitarist, songwriter and music producer. I started receiving classical guitar training since 7 years old, later on I got chance to learn more styles and techniques on guitar and found myself super interested in contemporary music, eventually I decided to go to music school and got my bachelor degree in music performance at Musicians Institute in Los Angeles. During my time at college, I learned more things about music arranging and music production and really got into them. Now I’m working as an artist, guitar instructor and music producer in Los Angeles. I write songs, play shows and produce music for all kinds of different music generes. I am aiming for making the most industrial level music at lowest cost in order to help more independent artists to grow their career. I am proud of my ability to create music that is both radio friendly and creative, I am proud that I can always find the balance between staying mainstream and having uniqueness when I’m making music.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal is to break into the mainstream music market and get enough fame then bring pop music to a brand new era with my creative ideas and new musical styles.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Beethoven once said, “where words fail, music speaks.” The most rewarding aspect of being an artist to me is that you are able to connect people with different cultural background simply under your music, and I feel we musicians have the responsibility to bring more peace and love to this world.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pivotormusix/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61575561630540
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/yichao-liu-523b93306
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Pivotor-Music