We Speak Music
Cheerful Music, Harvard, and the Fight for Meaning in the Age of AI
At Harvard Business School’s China Classroom in Chengdu, the future of music wasn’t debated in terms of software upgrades or automation curves. It was debated in terms of relevance.
Snow Jiang (Snow.J), Founder and CEO of Cheerful Music, returned to her alma mater as a featured case-study guest to explore how the industry must adapt as AI pushes music creation toward zero marginal cost.
Her core argument was blunt: when music becomes infinite, value collapses — unless something else takes its place.
“What becomes scarce,” Snow told students, “is the ability to be heard.”
Cheerful Music’s rise offers a case study in that reality. The company’s biggest successes — from Xiang Si Yao to Luo Le Bai — didn’t rely on novelty alone. They fused sound, image, and emotion into participatory cultural moments, engineered for an attention economy dominated by short-form video.
The economics are unforgiving. Snow acknowledged that promotional costs have increased four- to five-fold over the past five years, a reflection of saturation rather than inefficiency. One student cut to the heart of the model: Cheerful Music isn’t selling songs — it’s building emotional networks.
That philosophy informs the company’s technological bets. Instead of outsourcing AI creation to opaque platforms, Cheerful Music is developing a fully proprietary system where every note, vocal, and arrangement is owned outright. It’s a structural answer to the copyright chaos already rippling through the industry.
Virtual artists, meanwhile, are treated less like pop stars and more like cinematic devices — visual systems that give music memory, shape, and longevity in algorithm-driven feeds.
Globally, Cheerful Music is expanding with precision. From a strategic partnership with Sony Music to becoming the only Chinese company hosting an independent stage at Amsterdam Dance Event, the brand has positioned itself as a connector rather than a disruptor. SXSW 2026 looms as the next proving ground.
In the end, the Harvard session wasn’t just about Cheerful Music. It was about a broader reckoning: in an age of infinite content, relevance is no longer about origin or output — it’s about connection.
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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