Royalty Free Music Blog

The Impact of Automation on Content Creators

Company News :: February 24, 2021

The world is in constant change, and we have technology to blame. Whether these changes are good or bad are highly subjective. We all can agree that regardless, the world is set to be totally different in a decade, even more different than it was a decade ago. It’s created new jobs from nothing, such as content creators and influencers, but it’s also erased other jobs. It’s helped us in new and interesting ways, from how SmartSound has impacted the stock music scene, to how easy it is to find your way on a map.

It’s not just technology though, but specific trends in technology. More than anything, smart technologies and automation have revolutionized our workplaces, streamlined our workflows, and transformed how we work – even to the point of allowing many to successfully weather the pandemics and allowing others to completely adopt their lifestyles.

GETTING THE TERMS STRAIGHT

We often confuse the terms smart, automation, and artificial intelligence. Some might imagine a world where no one works but waits for their own personal robot assistant to do everything for them. Others perhaps a dystopian reality of war machines hunting down the last remnants of human society. The truth is that these three spheres are already being integrated into the world around us, and are likely to propel us into a future that’s perhaps a bit more tame than either vision.

There are huge differences between the meanings of these words, though they do supplement each other. Before even talking about automation and creators though, it’s necessary to separate these terms.

SMART

Smart means “self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology”. We usually hear this term applied to phones and televisions. It means that those technologies are reading all the information we are feeding to them, from what channels we watch and what web pages we visit to the conversations we have. It analyzes all that data to give you future suggestions: what webpage you might like to visit, what product you might want to buy, or what television show might be more interesting to you.

AUTOMATION

The goal of automation is to minimize human intervention by reducing the need for active inputs. The goal isn’t to remove human decision-making, but to streamline it. This is especially true when it comes to high volume tasks that take active monitoring, but with consistent criteria. There’s no need for a human to be spending their mental – and thus creative – energy on rote tasks when those tasks can be pre-determined and set on cruise control. This greatly reduces the chances for the controller to tire out and make mistakes, and enhances their ability to do work of consistent quality.

We typically think of factories when we think “automation”, but it can includes a lot more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial intelligence in the current sense usually implies the union of machine learning and symbolic learning and focuses on developing ways of unsupervised learning. It’s the ultimate goal for AI to have machines be able to be “smart” and apply the collected data to fulfil the requested needs, creating its own criteria for automation to do so. By nature, it will, within the frames of current understanding, always be limited by only being able to predict future patterns based on previous patterns.

We are yet a long way from the point of true artificial intelligence, but with the technologies we currently have, we can, simply put, get machines to do a lot of the dirty work for us. And that frees up time for creative jobs, among other things.

This is all to say, that when put simply, none of these things are frightening to humans or to human labor. If anything, the role of technology is to augment and enhance work, not to remove it.

PAVING THE WAY FOR A NEW ERA OF CONTENT CREATION

Without the emergence of these three directions of technology, we wouldn’t see creators – from musicians and video editors – and social media in the same form as today. Automation has taken huge steps in leveling the playing field already, transforming both the music and video industries and making content creation accessible to the masses.

For both fields, automation has already done a lot to break down many boundaries of creativity. Musicians are more capable of working and communicating directly with a client – whether a fan or a marketing company – as are video makers. With automation came Digital Audio Workstations and video editors that can run on a PC, and now people are able to create professional quality projects at home, no longer bound to studios. A lot of the effects and workflows that the every day user takes for granted used to take a lot more rerouting wires, hooking up new equipment, and getting loads of money from executives in order to buy all that equipment. But now, a lot of those processes are done automatically using bits of code behind the scenes, making it all easier and faster.

Creators who have really been able to tap into the benefits of automated technology have seen their careers take new turns otherwise impossible before. Where before, creators were tied to small armies of behind-the-scenes staff, they now can take control of the entire process and work more horizontally – it’s now easier to collaborate with different people, getting new and unforeseen results. Various functions can be outsourced much more cheaply, either to other people (who in turn, take advantage of automated workflows) or to programs and apps that offer high levels of customization.

In fact, one can say that the emergence of the “creator” in modern terms, along with influencers and others who rely on content creation, is tied solely to the development of automated and smart technologies. The DAW and video editor created the content creator, and now it continues to streamline their capacities and abilities, evolving them further in various seen ways that are not even dreamed of yet.

 

A video editor taking advantage of a lot of the automated processes in software

With technology today, it makes it easier to fill the gaps in skills, greatly lowering the cost of production. Even those lacking professional skill in content creation itself can still have a strong presence in social media with an incredible cost savings.

THE EVOLUTION OF CONTENT

Propelled by these advances, content creation is further developing. At first, only the basics of online marketing were available at home. People were focused on emails, blogs, and pictures. It was the non-computer world directly applied and adapted. But as more technology made doing more complicated work increasingly easy, it has pushed content creation to new boundaries. It’s no longer enough to have a picture with words – we now need videos, soundtracks, animations, and new layers of interactivity. The goal is to envelop all the senses, to fully embrace and touch the content receiver.

Of course, we’re not yet capable of this level of interaction in marketing and social media. But the creation of high-quality videos is definitely now in the grasp of the common user, especially with newer tools that are being developed. As creators advance, more opportunities for niche services emerge, demanding new apps and programs that fulfill specific needs. SmartSound and Viddyoze are both good examples of this growing trend.

TWO EXAMPLES OF NEW TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIAL MEDIA

SmartSound and Viddyoze show the true potential of automated software. They both allow people to be more independent in the creative process, allowing them to produce higher quality and better content.

SmartSound’s Sonicfire Pro 6 makes creating and adapting soundtracks, theme songs, and sound effects for video content or podcasting easier than ever before. Though it’s capable of a lot more, all you really need to do is to first choose from their large selection of stock music. Decide how long the music needs to be, and their algorithm automates the process of matching the intro, body, and outro, creating a seamless and natural track that perfectly suits the project.

Viddyoze uses automation to adapt brand labels, logos, or slogans to video content. Choose from their long list of different pre-made animations. Load your content, and through their app’s automated process, your content appears on their animation as though they were made to be together.

These are just two examples from a growing list of different ways that automation has touched content creation in different ways, radically improving the content creator’s experience with just a few simple clicks.

THE FUTURE

Automation is the future. It’s not a scary one, but an altogether exciting one, as we enter a world that is seeking to unleash the true potential of human creativity. Improvements in automation, artificial intelligence, and smart technology, though they do come with drawbacks and caveats, also have a great deal of potential for changing the creative experience. They allow for new industries to be created, for new forms of art, and to streamline the workflow process.

Check out for yourself how you can easily customize stock music to create your own soundtrack with Sonicfire Pro 6 and how easy it is to get your own animated logo with Viddyoze, use the code SmartSound21 to get 20% off. The code is valid thru March 31st, 2021.