Denis LADEGAILLERIE, Fondateur et Président-Directeur général de Believe sur le Bang à BIG 2024

Good morning everyone, this morning I would like to tell you two stories and take you back 148 years. The first story: imagine you are in a laboratory in the suburbs of New York, a lab with shelves, test tubes, large tables, and it's a Thursday morning like today in December, and a man approaches a table. There is a large object on that table and he begins to recite a nursery rhyme. He starts 'Mary had a little lamb' - it's a very well-known American nursery rhyme. And while telling the rhyme, he turns a crank, and after a minute he stops, he closes his mouth, and begins to turn the crank in the opposite direction. There are about twenty people with him in the laboratory. He turns the crank and his voice rises, his voice rises: 'Mary had a little white lamb' and his voice is replicated - obviously it crackles. It is the first time in human history that a man's voice, a voice, is fixed, fixed on a tin foil cylinder. Immediately the newspapers talk about the revolution of technological progress, opportunities, commercialization potential, and at the same time we hear voices saying: but what will it be used for? The voice quality is not good, replicating the human voice does not give, this tool does not replicate the emotion of the voice. What will it be used for? Artists begin to worry, artists begin to say: what's happening? We won't be able to perform shows anymore. Progress is underway. Ten years later, in the suburbs of Munich, Germany, another engineer, another entrepreneur, a European entrepreneur named Emile Berliner takes Thomas Edison's invention and invents the first gramophone, the flat disc. That will be the beginning of the explosion of the record industry. And you know the rest.

Second story: a few hundred kilometers away, 100 years later, another laboratory, a researcher named Karlheinz Brandenburg has been working for 6 years on a project at the Fraunhofer Institute, and in December 1987, for the first time, he presses a button and we hear a song that you all listened to in 1987. It is the voice of Suzanne Vega rising a cappella and singing 'Tom's Diner'. Why did he choose this song? He chose this song because replicating emotion and replicating the voice is the hardest thing to do, and it is the first time. This song 'Tom's Diner' is the first song ever to be digitized. The rest of the story you know: it's 1987 when the invention arrives. Ten years later, development of telecommunications, Napster, Shawn Fanning invents peer-to-peer. The technologies are not perfect, encoding is extremely important, the quality of tracks is low, and we have an explosion of peer-to-peer, worse, saying the music industry will lose 60% of its value. Before another European entrepreneur in 2005, Daniel Ek, launches Spotify. In 2030, you will have more than a billion subscribers to a service like Spotify or Deezer or YouTube Music around the world, which will allow more than a billion people to have access to the entire musical heritage of humanity, like each of you at any time on your phone. And the community of artists who today are able to live from their music thanks to innovation is larger, more diverse, richer culturally than it has ever been in human history.

These two stories, what do they have in common? They are the story of progress, 100 years apart. And the story of progress, what is it? It is first of all scientific innovation and technological innovation: the wax cylinder, the CD, the digitization of tracks, the development of networks, the development of terminals. What is it also? It is all the tension that comes with this innovation: the risks, the fears. The technology is not sufficient to replicate emotion, the human voice. The technology will not be put at the service of humans, it will replace humans. The disc will prevent artists who performed shows from doing shows. It is all of these elements. And what do they tell us today, to us, to me, an entrepreneur in the field of music in Europe? They tell me, they tell us: innovate. They tell us: do it with responsibility, ensuring that the technologies you develop are put at the service of humanity. Ensure that these technologies are democratized, that access, whether for music to all users around the world or for artists, benefits the entire ecosystem. Create the conditions for trust, for adoption of progress. And if you do that, progress will arrive in our lives, and humanity, at least in the field of music, will be strengthened. So these are the two stories I wanted to tell you today, leaving you in a few moments with this title you heard in the 80s that will arrive right now, which is Suzanne Vega's title that was the first digitized title in human history. There, I thank you, I thank you for your attention.