[Keeping Tempo With Music Biz] — Vibe Coding Is About to Reshape the Music Business — And the Industry Is Finally In the Driver’s Seat: Op-Ed from OpenPlay’s Edward Ginis
In more than 20 years building and investing in music and entertainment companies, I’ve watched technology transform this industry over and over. Streaming alone now drives nearly 70% of global recorded-music revenue (IFPI), and Goldman Sachs projects the broader business will reach $155.5 billion by 2030. But anyone who works inside the machine knows the truth: every wave of growth has exposed an even bigger backlog of unsolved problems, including messy metadata, disconnected systems, content saturation, and royalties that never quite reach the right hands.
Here is what I’ve come to believe after two decades of watching the same problems get re-discovered: the music industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas. It suffers from a shortage of access — to the engineering talent, the build cycles, and the budgets needed to turn an idea into a working tool. The people closest to the problems have almost never been the people allowed to build the solutions.
That is the wall vibe coding just knocked down.
What “Vibe Coding” Actually Changes
Coined in early 2025 by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, “vibe coding” describes a new way of making software: you describe what you want in plain language, and an AI assistant produces a working application. The skill being rewarded is no longer syntax. It is taste, judgment, and domain knowledge — knowing what to build and why.
For the music industry, this is not an incremental upgrade. It is a structural shift. A label operations lead who has spent fifteen years wrestling with rights data can now prototype a tool to fix it on a Saturday afternoon. A sync agent who knows exactly which step of the licensing chain is broken can build a draft of the fix before Monday’s meeting. The expertise that has always lived in this industry — hard-won, deeply specific, often undocumented — can finally be expressed as software by the people who hold it.
We Tested This. It Worked.
At OpenPlay’s first Music Biz hackathon last year, we ran the experiment in real time. More than 40 participants — the vast majority with no engineering background — were given a single day, a problem track (Social Impact, DSPs, Distributors, or Sync), and access to AI build tools. What they shipped surprised even us.
Music industry professor Serona Elton, who had never written production code in her life, took second place with Samplify — a tool built on Lovable that detects sampled elements in songs and streamlines the licensing attribution that has tied up rights teams for decades. She is not an outlier — she is a preview. Across the room, lawyers were building compliance tools. A&R staff were building discovery dashboards. Distribution operators were building reconciliation engines. Each of them solved the exact problem they had been complaining about for years, because for the first time, no one was standing between their idea and a working prototype.
That is when we knew this had to become something bigger than an annual hackathon.
Introducing OpenPlay CoLab at Music Biz 2026
On Tuesday, May 12th, OpenPlay is bringing CoLab — “Break the Silos. Build the Future.” — to the Music Biz Conference in Atlanta as an official conference event. CoLab is a one-day, hands-on innovation sprint designed for the people who will define the next decade of this business: artists, managers, labels, publishers, technology partners, investors, and students, working side by side.
Participants will get:
+ Hands-on time with leading AI build tools including Cursor, Replit, Lovable and Claude
+ Direct access to OpenPlay’s APIs and to engineers from our partner companies
+ Mentorship from senior music-industry operators and AI specialists, in the room, all day
+ A live afternoon pitch session with prizes for the strongest ideas
You do not need to know how to code — you need to know what is broken. Bring the problem you have been carrying around in your head for years: the workflow that should not still be a spreadsheet, the report nobody can generate, or the gap between two systems that costs your team a week every quarter. By 5 PM, you will have a working prototype and a room full of people who understand exactly why it matters.
This Is The Moment
The music industry has spent twenty years waiting for technology to catch up to its problems. With vibe coding, the wait is over — and the leverage has flipped to the people who actually understand the business. CoLab exists to put that leverage in your hands for a day, and to start a community that keeps using it long after the conference ends.
If you have ever thought, “Someone should build that,” May 12th is the day you find out that someone is you.
Written by: Edward Ginis, Co-Founder, OpenPlay
OpenPlay CoLab — “Break the Silos. Build the Future.”
Taking place during Music Biz 2026 | Atlanta
Tuesday, May 12th, 2026 · 10 AM – 5 PM ET
Learn More & Register: events.bizzabo.com/843933
You can read past Keeping Tempo’ articles via the portal linked here. And, stay tuned for more insightful discussions from our members and partners from across the industry!
