Will.i.am is using AI to re-make radio

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

WILL.I.AM: Because I love radio so much, I want to innovate and help out the realm that changed my life. Radio.fyi is the dawn of intelligent media. In a year and a half, two years, Radio.fyi will be in every single car’s dash. 

BOB SAFIAN: No small aspirations for this, huh?

WILL.I.AM: Yo, bro, let me tell you something about aspirations. You can’t spell ambition without ‘a.m’ and you can’t spell Will.i.am without ‘a.m.’ 

SAFIAN: That’s Will.i.am, the musician, investor, and entrepreneur. Will’s company FYI recently launched an app called Radio.fyi, offering curated radio stations with AI hosts that users can interact with in real time. I wanted to talk to Will to understand how Radio.fyi plays into his wider view on the future of AI and how AI might impact music, media, and commerce. Will’s getting his MBA at Harvard right now, and so he shares why the lesson that’s stuck with him most is a case study about spinning lollipops. He also talks about how a musician’s early influences are like AI training data, how AI developers are like rappers, what’s behind his partnership with Mercedes, and so much more. In classic Will fashion, I never knew quite where he was going next. Let’s get into it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. 

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Will.i.am. Will, thanks for joining us. 

WILL.I.AM: Ah, man. It’s great to be here.

Copy LinkWill.i.am explains Radio.fyi

SAFIAN: You’ve been on Master of Scale as a guest, as a guest-host, sharing lessons from your career. For this show, I want to ask you right now about how you’re managing in this crazy world of ours. You’ve been on tour with The Black Eyed Peas, but at the same time, you recently launched Radio.fyi to re-imagine radio as a media experience. Can you explain what Radio.fyi is? 

WILL.I.AM: Radio.fyi is, you know, text to station. So we know what text-to-action is. And in this case, the action in our architecture is the format of radio. So I could ask any question about any topic that is presented to me. Where, you know, this AI host is speaking over this mood music, then throwing to song, then grabbing information as information is unfolding in the internet, and then presenting it back in the form of radio and then throwing to song and then asking you along the way if I have any questions on anything that is presented, and then it could then answer those questions.

SAFIAN: It’s part AI assistant and part listening experience. It’s like this blend of information and entertainment? 

WILL.I.AM: It’s what we call the dawn of intelligent media — where the media itself is interactive, engageable media rather than a passive leanback experience. It’s the lean-in, dig-in, dive-deep media experience.

SAFIAN: Where does the information come from that you’re getting? I know you’ve said you have a team of journalists, but like, are you citing news sources? 

WILL.I.AM: I’m going to pull up politics right quick. If you go to the politics station on Radio.fyi, it’s doing its radio thing from our curation. So we see these stories… 

SAFIAN: Right, the same way that a radio station would decide what they’re going to tell you about. 

WILL.I.AM: Or write about. So we have our who, what, where, and why. And then we have the essential information. And the essential information has come from, you know, the embargo feeds that these entities have pushed to journalists to write about. So we receive the same type of feeds that everyone receives their stuff, and then our journalists write about those, but we write about them to be presented, right? We look at this, our station, like a new type of magazine, but instead of reading it and then having questions about it, we then allow for a deeper dive, and promote engagement to ask questions about what was presented.

SAFIAN: So I don’t have to just read it? I can have a conversation with the DJ, I guess, about the things that are there, right?

WILL.I.AM: Exactly. What we’ve been able to do with our architecture is allow for human-like banter. If you were to be on a radio station and you could call in and talk to a person, you’re able to talk to the information itself. And that’s pretty profound to be able to say, like, “yo, what do you mean you’re able to talk to the information? That sounds freaking ludicrous.” Bro, you could talk to the information, bro, you could literally have a conversation with silicone freaking lithium now because of the technology that we’re living in. 

SAFIAN: And now there is music on there, right? Like, are you linked into, like, Apple Music or Spotify? How do you get or pay for the music rights? Do you, like a radio station does again? Like, is that the model? The app is free to download, I just wanted to say that to everyone but yeah… 

WILL.I.AM: So, this is the project that the politics is playing from, right? And so if I go to the folder, these 40 songs, like top 40, there’s the 40 songs that it’s playing from. it’s human-curated.

SAFIAN: So you’ve got your library that you have curated from other places and you’re paying for the rights to that as opposed to through a separate streaming service?

WILL.I.AM: Yeah. We’re not a streaming service like Spotify. It’s like radio-like radio. You can’t like fast-forward or rewind. Most you can do is pause. It’s not streaming. It’s not a la carte. It’s not on demand like that. It’s like radio.

And because I love radio so much, I want to innovate and help out the realm that changed my life. And what changed my life is radio. What changed Lionel Richie’s life is radio. What changed Stevie Wonder’s life is radio. And so innovating around the space that urgently needs innovation, for our community of music, the artists that make it… Radio, radio, radio.

Copy LinkWhere the idea for Radio.fyi came from

SAFIAN: Is there a moment where this passion you had for radio and this experience, you were like, ‘I got to build something around this?’

WILL.I.AM: I have a radio show on Sirius XM. I didn’t want to have my own radio show. Someone was like, “Yo, Will, you’ll be great doing a blog or your own radio show.” I said, “the only way I’ll have a radio show is if my co-host was an AI.” I think that’d be dope. I’ve been doing TV in the UK for 12 years. There’s one thing I cannot do, and that is be available for anybody to ask me questions unlimitedly. If somebody had questions on what I said on TV after broadcast, maybe I could talk to a couple of people on Twitter or Instagram stories. And that’s it. I’ma tap out and be like, “yo, I need to go get something to eat.” We hit a ceiling on engagement. But if I had a co-host, it could do it all day, all night, a million people at once. 

And so when I started doing my show on Sirius XM, I was like, “yo, every person that has a radio show or a podcast needs to be able to have a co-host like me.” I need to build that. If I can make a system that automates going from segment to song — yo, that’d be freaking. This means I could create a whole new type of ad unit. Wait a second. What is a commercial when I can ask the commercial more about the pro… Wait a second. This means the product could speak for itself. Get out of here! We got to do this fast. We got to build this. Oh my gosh, this is going to change everything! This is a whole different way to engage. This is a whole different way to have commerce. Because a commercial is not a commercial if I could just buy it from the radio. Get out of here! When’s the last time radio actually sold…? Wait a second…

Copy LinkInside Will.i.am’s partnership with Mercedes

SAFIAN: I know that Mercedes is one of your investors. Like I was wondering whether, you know, the idea that like FYI radio would be installed in the dash of every Mercedes?

WILL.I.AM: Yo, wait a second. Wait a second. Were you not on our freaking Mercedes call this morning? Wait a second. Yo. In a year and a half, two years, Radio.fyi will be on every single car’s dash as the preferred radio experience.

SAFIAN: No small aspirations for this, huh?

WILL.I.AM: Yo, bro, let me tell you something about aspirations. You can’t spell ambition without ‘a.m’ and you can’t spell Will.i.am without ‘a.m.’ Yo, I’m ambitious, bro. That’s if you’re going to dream it, make it real. If you’re going to know, ideate, you want to like materialize you need to find partners that help you with your ideation and materialization to deployment.

This has been a three-year journey working with Mercedes, finding ways to aim my brain at identifying issues like – “yo, yo, let’s fix this.” I can make a system to be able to play music that’s based on the driver’s driving, and they can recompose, re-imagine, reconfigure songs, just driving. So that product’s called Sound Drive. That will be launched in September. I’m really excited. 

Copy LinkWill.i.am on getting his MBA from Harvard

SAFIAN: You were on Jimmy Fallon recently. You talked a little bit about the MBA you’re getting from Harvard — your first degree, no high school, no undergrad, but you clearly, you’ve had plenty of education in your life and you’re hardly a novice in the world of business. It’s like, are there any surprises that you’ve learned at Harvard? Like, has it changed how you run your company or how you think about your career? 

WILL.I.AM: Yeah, so the things that are the valuable lessons from Harvard are the case studies from people’s failures. That’s valuable lessons because as an entrepreneur, you know, really good entrepreneurs, they bounce back, and they’re not afraid of failing and falling because the whole premise of entrepreneurship is learning and applying. And if you could learn from someone else’s trials and errors and then apply that, you know, it’s like how planes are able to detect turbulence… Part of the reason why they know turbulence is coming is because there’s a plane that went before them. 

SAFIAN: Is there a specific case that hit home for you? 

WILL.I.AM: So not a failure. There’s this one case study that we learned, about this guy that created, you know, that spin pop? 

SAFIAN: Uh huh. 

WILL.I.AM: It’s like a spin pop, this dumbass lollipop that spun. Anyways, this dude sold that shit, right? And the architecture was something that went around this way. And then he sold that architecture, I think to Hasbro or Mattel. And then he took the tech, the architecture, instead of it spinning, he had to go up and down. And then he sold that to freaking Colgate for a toothbrush. And he was like, “okay…,” then he took that same architecture, and instead of going up and down and spinning, he had to go left and right. And then he sold that shit to Tide for washing clothes. I’m like, yo, this cat took his architecture and slanged it three different times. Because a lot of times when it comes to innovation and creative people, they think that every idea has to be a brand new idea rather than just reimagining their last idea. Their arrogance and their ego tells them that, you know, “I gotta really take it to the next level,” when really taking it to the next level is re-imagining the last level. 

SAFIAN: Will is an unconventional thinker, connecting dots that others don’t see. But he’s also practical — that impact and change don’t have to come from the next new thing. You can redefine an old thing, too, even radio. After the break, we go deeper into old and new, as Will compares James Brown’s music to AI training data, AI developers to rappers, and his own business team to the Golden State Warriors. Stay with us. 

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Will.i.am shared the inspiration behind his new Radio.fyi app, which he describes as the “dawn of intelligent media.” Now, we talk about the legal battles facing AI music generator Udio — which he uses Radio.FYI to explain. Plus, how Prince and Michael Jackson relied on training data just like AI does, why everything in life is math, and why AI can’t write music like Will…yet. Let’s jump back in. 

Copy LinkReacting to Udio’s legal dispute with Spotify

You were the first one to tell me about Udio, which is this amazing AI-based music generator that you’re invested in. I mean, you prompt it to create an original song for you. It’s amazing. The record labels are suing it for infringement. How do you think about squaring this sort of awesome tech for creative work and the kind of creative work that underlies it, that trains it? How do you think about those things fitting? 

WILL.I.AM: Hold on one second. At some point in time in the past, did the record company sue Spotify? 

RADIO.FYI: Yes, record companies have had legal disputes with Spotify in the past. One key early legal tussle was with the National Music Publishers Association, an MPA in the U.S.

WILL.I.AM: Thanks. Yeah. That’s one of our personas. So, say for example, Spotify had no users, the record companies wouldn’t have sued them. So, the reason why they sued them is because there’s like growth. The reason why they sued Udio is because Udio has growth. So it’s a good thing because that means they’re going to come to some type of agreement faster and artists, and how they trained their stuff on.

It’s going to be resolved, but we’re on tricky grounds now. For example, let’s say, Prince was alive, and you went to Prince and said, “Hey, Prince, who’s your inspiration?” Prince is going to obviously tell you James Brown, Sly and The Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix. If you would ask Michael Jackson, “Hey, Mike, who’s your inspiration?” Michael Jackson’s going to say James Brown, Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gene Kelly. What they both have in common is James Brown. And it’s clear that James Brown is their big inspiration. You could see it. So in this case, from human to human, we call it inspiration. Machines call it data set and training, what you trained on. If you would ask like an artist, you’re like, “yo, who’s your inspiration?” It’s the same shit because we have a neural network, and that neural network was based off of our neural network. So now we’re in touchy ground here because last time I checked, Prince did not give James Brown royalties because he was inspired by him. Like, his pathways were part of his data set. So that’s where it gets blurry, where we are now.

SAFIAN: Do you use Udio? Like, is there something you use it for in your songwriting and your process?

WILL.I.AM: No, because Udio doesn’t do Black Eyed Peas right.

SAFIAN: Well, you should be able to help them with that. 

WILL.I.AM: Yeah, but I don’t want to help them with that. The way I write music, the AI doesn’t write music like that, is I mean by that. It doesn’t do… It can do like, “yo, give me like trap.” It does that awesome. It can do, like, jazz great. But if the moment I’m like, “yo, give me, give me Samba with a little bit of blues and a little bit of rock and a little bit of calypso,” it’s not going to do that.

SAFIAN: It’s better with pure flavors, right? Like more, more subtle flavors or creating new flavors, it just doesn’t do that as well. 

WILL.I.AM: Yet. 

SAFIAN: Is that what people most misunderstand about AI? The ‘yet?’ Like that, you know, like right now it can’t do Black Eyed Peas, but maybe it will be able to?

WILL.I.AM: This is the worst it’s ever going to be because it just gets better from here. And that’s being optimistic in every sense of the way: ethically, morally, business practice, legally, you know, compensation-wise — this is the worst it’s ever going to be. Being optimistic, let’s be optimistic that the powers that be don’t lead with greed. This is the worst it’s ever going to be… That sentence’s it: Let’s be optimistic that the powers that be don’t lead with greed. This is the worst it’s ever going to be. 

Copy LinkHow Will.i.am prioritizes his time and ideas 

SAFIAN: It’s always awesome to talk to you, Will. You’re straddling these sorts of multiple careers in music, in tech, you do TV, you know, and I wonder how you manage all that, whether Harvard gave you any hints on that? Like Jack Dorsey was CEO of Twitter and Square at the same time, and he had designated days for each company, right? Like, how do you prioritize all the different things that are part of your world? 

WILL.I.AM: It’s really on the teams you build. The premise is to build a Warriors-type of team. You want a Stephen Curry, but then you need Draymond Green. You need the squad. So the same is here for FYI, where my squad allows me to go out and hunt and find other partners that complement the things that we’re trying to do.

When I’m working with Mercedes, Mercedes needs to know like, you know “we thought Will was just a musician, but he’s more than that. He’s great in our workshops. He always has good ideas.” And then when I’m there, I can’t flood them with my idea faucet. I have to be super strategic and aim it. You could drown somebody with “and then, and then, and then, and then!” You don’t want to ‘and then’ people. So you have to go in there with being super like focus with what and then is the one you want to leave them with. 

SAFIAN: I worked with someone once who had a ton of ideas, and I felt like my job was like to say “no, no, no, no, no. Yes, that one I like!” Do you do that for yourself where you’re going through your own ideas? You’re writing them down and you’re putting them down and then you’re saying, “no, no, no. Oh yes. That’s the one to strategically push?” Or do you use other people around you to help you do that? 

WILL.I.AM: You have to have a different sounding board. I have a great sounding board outside of FYI because if it’s FYI, a lot of times, like you could get lost on your own sauce. And what’s grounding, you need an outside team of trusted truth-tellers, and you have to be super you.

SAFIAN: Own your own bullshit, right?

WILL.I.AM: Yeah. Like, “I don’t know about that one, bro.” Yeah. Okay. Why though? Why? Why don’t you know about that one? “Well, here’s why.” All right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. You bring up some good points, and then you take those points, you go to a different person like, “yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. What do you think about this? Do you think this point is valid?” “Oh yeah. Now that you say that…” Yup. Okay, cool. You go to seven other people, nine other people, And then after you corral that, you go back to your team. Be like, “hey, I got this idea. Here’s the flags that are circling around it. Do we want to implement it?” Because if you just come with an idea, then you’re just a dictator. If your idea is not grounded in plausibility, network ability… 

And you can do all that even before somebody then asks like, “who’s your target audience?” Like, okay, bro, somebody got in your head. And now you think you’re supposed to ask that for everybody. For example, let’s say this is 1980 and somebody got a turntable and went (record scratch), was that the target audience for somebody to get a turntable and scratch on it? If somebody was like, “yo, I want to make a needle that doesn’t jump,” somebody would be like, “yo, who’s your target audience?” Well, turns out there’s a few kids over there in New York that are scratching on the record. They’re like, “why are we going to make that? There’s like 10 people doing that shit.” Fact is, someone did that. And the target audience was a small group of people. But if they were just basing it off a target audience from that perspective, it’s like, what does that target audience do? Who else do they impact? So sometimes your target audience is a very small group of people that impact a larger group of people, but let’s ignore the larger group of people just to focus on these impactors that sound really small and pointless at the time, but trust me, I’ve done my research and the flaggers have flagged the theory to be optimal.

And this is humans, not AI. You have to ask humans this because the AI is only aggregating known stuff. And we have this other method of knowing that’s emotional, that’s connected to like reason. And like, it’s connected to just human experience. And AI, hopefully will never ever have that type of insight. 

Copy LinkInside Will.i.am’s song-creation process

SAFIAN: You go to people for your business ideas. Do you do that for your creative ideas, for your songwriting, your music too?

WILL.I.AM: No, usually the ideas come from… I ideate. It’s a gift and sometimes a curse — the ideation. The curse is they’re all my children. And which one do you love the most? 

SAFIAN: Because if you’re making an album, you’ve got to pick one, like you’re not doing every idea on the album? 

WILL.I.AM: Oh no, no, I’ll record every idea. And just because it’s not ready for today, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be ready tomorrow. There’s a song that we recorded with… I wrote and recorded with Shakira called Girl Like Me in 2008. That song didn’t come out ‘till 2021. So not everything is ready and made for right now.

I aim to love and breathe life into every idea. And so some people can say like, you know, I chase shiny objects. Yeah, I do. But I also know how to delegate and have other folks sit on the egg and hatch it. You know, yeah, I can make music by myself, but that’s like tickling myself. I ain’t going to laugh. Like, you know what I’m saying? Like anybody that tickles themselves, that laughs like… Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they’re kind of weird. 

Anyhow, my point of what I’m trying to get at is I like collaborating. Collaborating is team building. You’re team building to make music or you’re team building to make experiences and technologies like Radio.fyi. It’s still the same type of like, “we’re missing something. What do you mean? Who are we missing?” So I know how to identify what’s missing and hunt through my Rolodex of all the people that I’ve ever networked with and met in my path. I’m able to either find developers, whether they’re developers in Bangalore or Chennai or Israel or Ukraine… 

SAFIAN: You know a lot of developers!

WILL.I.AM: Yeah bro, developers are like, it’s the 1980s. I’m trying to find rappers, like if AI is hip hop, you gotta find the lyricists. And so, you know, a developer, a rapper, they’re dealing with large language. Turns out when they used to say music was math… Udio, b****! It is math. Like, God damn it. If I only would have known that it truly is math and algorithms could really compose, wow, they were f****** right. Music is f****** math. Everything’s math. Damn everything, everything. Everything is math.

SAFIAN: With just a little bit of heart in there. Just a little bit of heart though, no?

WILL.I.AM: Heart’s math too. If you were to ask, ‘what is the trajectory of what type of organs are going to be printing 20 years from now?’ They’re going to be printing hearts and that’s math. Are you talking about heart, like physical hearts or emotional, spiritual hearts?

SAFIAN: Emotional, emotional. 

WILL.I.AM: Oy ve! I thought you were talking about like.. Know what I mean? Yeah, no. You’re right. Emotional, spiritual. 

SAFIAN: A little bit of it, just to keep us on the right path, man, you know?

WILL.I.AM: Yeah, soul. 

SAFIAN: Soul. Soul. I’ll give you that. I’ll give you that. Well, Will this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it. 

WILL.I.AM: Thanks Bob. Appreciate it. 

SAFIAN: Talking with Will is a blast. One of my favorite moments was listening to him compose a mini-rap on AI, organically: “Let’s be optimistic that the powers that be don’t lead with greed. This is the worst it’s ever going to be.” Optimism is at the core of so much that Will preaches. We need to stay focused on what might be possible, to bring about progress, whether we’re talking about radio, commerce or the human heart. As a song and video Will produced back in 2008 said, “Yes We Can.” I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.