By Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO, Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP)
In January, I stood at Jazz at Lincoln Center and delivered opening remarks as the Doris Duke Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announced the Artists Make Technology initiative: an $11 million commitment, joined by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation, ensuring that performing artists are not just responding to technological change, but driving it.
The energy in that room was something I’ve been turning over ever since. Not because the announcement was surprising, but because it felt like a turning point that, instinctively, we’ve known we needed, and because the stakes of getting it right have never been higher.
The performing arts have always done something distinct. We reframe what is. We imagine what will become. In real time. That isn’t a tagline; it’s a functional description of what happens when artists go to work. And it is precisely why the question of who shapes this technological revolution is not only a question for engineers and investors but also a question for humanity. The values embedded in the tools being built right now – the value of creativity, of labour, of what counts as authentic human expression – require human beings at the centre of the process. And who better to hold our humanity than artists – not as stakeholders to be consulted, but as architects.
Which is why the conversation later that month at the Folk Alliance conference cut so close to the bone. In a session titled “The State of AI and Creativity”, musician and advocate Tift Merritt named what many in our field are feeling when she described AI as potentially “streaming 2.0” – another wave where corporate players cut deals that define the industry’s future while the people who make the work are left outside the room. That fear is rooted in history. When music went digital, streaming wasn’t designed around creative livelihoods. By the time the terms were set, artists were negotiating for fractions of fractions.
And yet – and this is what I want us to hold together – that history is not our destiny.
Other panellists at that session were already building responses. Musician and technologist Charles Alexander developed Vinil – a platform that fingerprints content so creators can establish what they’ve authorised and what they haven’t – out of exactly these concerns. His framework is simple: control, consent and compensation. Like arts advocates before, this is an example of our field building infrastructure that will help us realize our full power and potential.
Here’s what I know about our field: the performing arts have built the civic, cultural and community infrastructure that every technology company now wants to reach. We are not a niche market. We are a $1.2 trillion industry, with over 122 million adults attending cultural events annually and more than 200 million engaging with arts through digital media. Every other sector of comparable economic impact – biotech, fintech, edtech, medtech – has a dedicated technology investment ecosystem. We don’t.
Not yet.
But the door is open, and we have a choice about how we walk through it. We can continue being consumers of technology – patching together tools that were never designed for our specific operational needs, always customising, always catching up. Or we can become architects of the next generation of arts industry tech infrastructure.
Imagine a performing arts AI designed from the ground up around how this industry actually works – not a generic tool retrofitted for our sector, but something built from the inside out. It might help maximise options for mapping a tour, surfacing the known venues and relationships but also those that our human capacity hasn’t yet reached. To cut through the friction and surface new opportunities is a win-win. Technology designed with us doesn’t just make our work more efficient. It changes what technology can do, whether that means audience development tools, distribution platforms, CRM systems, immersive technologies, or new models for collaboration. All built by us, with us, for us.
The goal isn’t just better software. It’s a different relationship to technology entirely – one where the performing arts sector is a producer and a partner, not a consumer waiting to see what someone else builds.
The Artists Make Technology initiative is evidence that serious investment is beginning to flow in that direction. This time, we aren’t waiting for a seat. We are building the table.
