I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
It takes me months before I find a new song I absolutely love and keep on infinite loop repeat for days.
As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.
Movies are the same way. I find a magical film maybe every three years or so. There are lots of good films. Some fantastic films. Very few brain melding moments of nirvana.
(Actually, most films are slop. There are some good films, fewer great films, next to negligible numbers of stories that speak directly to the soul.)
I want perfection. We're not making enough or experimenting enough. AI helps us do more weird stuff and explore more state space sensory and conceptual territory.
I wish this stuff had come twenty years earlier.
In a few years, we'll be making more every year than all of recorded history to date. And that's going to be amazing.
> As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.
Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.
Oh that's what you're banging on about. You think AI is like a demon, or you think LLMs are people too, something like that, hence "I don't care what makes the music". That would otherwise be a spooky and implausible phrase that says something strange about what gives music quality, as if quality in music is something ethereal and mathematical and objective and detached from the human condition, and detached from artists. But if you think the AI counts as a person too then it seems less cold and abstract.
Electronic music exists but has limited commercial scope because most people don't see the point of music if they can't form an emotional connection with the artist through the music. Popular music has an intense focus on the artist.
AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
That's a dangerous game to play, though—the only value record companies have is their intellectual property, especially if they are no longer financing recording new material. Convincing people to listen to slop is a great way to completely obsolete yourself.
There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing
You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
Actually, it is more human, because there are humans involved at each level. Doesn't matter if you think the music sucks, it's definitionally more human than AI music.
It is sort of a blend now. Beats and rhythm tracks are often generated. Vocals are auto-tuned. There's still some humanity in it, but it's not what it used to be.
AI music is generated from the result of training on far more human-made music than any human could ever consume in their lifetime, so there are even more humans involved in its creation.
If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.
Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
It isn’t indifference, it’s obliviousness. My mother keeps on listening to AI music, and I’ll be like “why are you listening to this slop” and she’ll then argue back that it isn’t AI, it’s actually really very good and I’m just jealous, as the synthetic voice continues to warble nonsenses like a fucking arcade machine full of snakes in the background.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
> I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human.
I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).
As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.
As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
BIAB is still best in class (even if the UI is practically Soviet era) simply because of the sheer number of RealTracks, which are actual performances by musicians that dynamically adapt to your chord progression.
I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.
What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.
> I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...
The code is only a (very important) part of this type of program. The samples are critical and (for the time being anyway) can't be generated by AI.
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
Agree 100%. The multivariate ways a note can be expressed is almost unlimited. For example, I first heard Bach's Cello Suite #1 played by some random cellist. Fell in love with it and listened to it endlessly. Then I heard Yo-Yo Ma play it and it was a completely different piece.
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.
> This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.
I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.
These days I'm programming drums on dedicated hardware but Logic Pro's Drummer feature had been immensely helpful for me as a guitarist who hadn't done much drum programming but wanted to play along with interesting drum beats while arranging a song. Just a few options but that's what makes it so approachable. It's helped me keep the song "mine" without the hassle of sourcing loops/samples manually, even if only temporarily.
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
> people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
I think your starting definition of value is basically worthless. Value is not about what things cost to make, but what people are willing to pay for them. You reached this conclusion by the end of your comment, but I think it's important to emphasize. My friend group has created incredible value with suno, mostly making meme songs we forget about after a day, but every once in a while we create lasting memories that have real emotional impact. It doesnt matter that anyone can do that, I dont think that cheapens the output at all.
My comment was mostly that it lacks value to _others_. It was probably worth to your friend group roughly the time and money you spent on it. Nobody else is ever going to care.
I played around with Suno a little too. It's actually kind of crazy what it can produce. I mean I don't think it's objectively good in any way but for many applications this (and a lot of other generative AIs) are what I'd call "sufficiently good".
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
So this kind of music has a name, it’s called production music and it’s been long expected in the industry that AI-generated music will compete with the lower-end production music, basically elevator music or background music for corporate training videos etc. It is unlikely, however, that it will get much traction in scripted long form productions, partly because studios believe it’s a legal minefield, and partly due to resistance from creatives (whether justified or not).
My favorite example of resistance from creatives was the space shuttle landing gear button. The space shuttle orbiter was technically capable of performing an automated mission, with the exception of opening the landing gear doors. This was ostensibly so that there would be no risk of the heat shield being compromised, as the landing gear doors were in the heat shield. But it is widely acknowledged that this was an effort by the astronauts office to ensure the continued need of a human crew.
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Red herring. The Puritan work ethic that seems to always resolve to "human value=human income" (regardless of the ethic's stated intentions) is what causes this, not creatives in and of themselves.
I get that there is a strong online movement to destroy the traditional American Dream value of "work hard, and become rich" but that does not apply in fields where money is not the motivator. No single astronaut has ever expressed financial gain as a motivator for moving into that profession.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
I've noticed this too. I have a few theories about this. Disclosure: I know a little about audio, and very little about audio generative AI.
First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.
I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.
Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).
I suspect it's because AI generates music as a waveform incrementally not globally so it favors smoothly varying sounds, not sharp contrast. If it generated MIDI data and then used a MIDI synth to create the audio, you wouldn't get that.
Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
This comment is like 20 years out of date haha. People shifted to single hits when the iTunes store was selling songs for 99 cents. Now (and by now I mean for over a decade) we’re in the age of streaming, and you can easily access whole albums with zero friction. It’s the best time ever for the full listen through experience. And artists are responding by releasing long albums.
What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.
I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
I can tell you that myself (and many others) still create concept albums as our primary format. It's not that people aren't still creating it.
The choice is still there for any listener that cares about albums as a format. I don't mean that in a negative way. I suspect that many people listen to both playlists of singles, and albums of their favourite artists, depending on mood.
No, the game has changed. Back then, the singles were typically accompanied by an album, even if it was just filler. It's better to release singles now due to the way the Spotify and iTunes algos work. Best practice is now to release your songs one at a time rather than a full album (at least if you aren't an established player).
On one hand this pretty much destroys thematic albums (like classical music, prog rock, Tool or for example, something like Alice in Chains' Dirt), but on the other few could pull it off and those who can are still doing it (ex: the latest Opeth album). So maybe discovering new music is hurt, because itunes and spotify look like crowded ERs, but there's just as much good music out there - regardless of your tastes.
Right, there's less unnecessary dressing of an "album" of filler. But I don't think that's a meaningful change. Singles drove the market then and they do now. Albums were still produced then and still are now.
music has been a product of its form factor for a long time. It's no coincidence that the wax cylinder, 78, 45, 33, cassette, CD, and mp3 dictated changes in how music was packaged (single, lp, ep, album, b sides) and the average length of a popular song.
Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.
ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
it's become a much larger section of music. Notice, there are no bands any more. Try finding a metal band with musicians under 40, or a Greenday, Linkin Park or, the itself automated Kpop industry aside, a spontaneous boy or girl group.
Solo pop or hip-hop performers with a focus on social media have crowded out collectively made music, likely due to the general social atrophy and technology enabling production from their bedrooms.
Anecdotally, I used to be a guitarist and a lot of my friends are musicians and teachers, teenage bands are pretty much nowhere to be seen.
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
>honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
> where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
It genuinely warms my heart that the Flying LIzards did what they did .. but I also think it kind of stupid in a fun way and don't got out of my way to listen to it.
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
> completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
The AI comment push on that video is certainly an interesting look into the future. Record labels have their work cut out for them in this brace new world.
At least what I’m seeing in dance music is online sales and streaming seem kind of dead, and everything is about events, personalities, and unreleased tracks that all the big names have but you can’t get for a year after if ever.
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.
I searched Spotify and Apple music top 100 songs and Eddie Dalton is not on either. I think the majority of users do not buy singles on iTunes anymore so this may be an easy chart to manipulate. The source mentions the name of the creator in the second line leading me to believe this is some clever advertising for Dallas Little's AI.
I don't like most AI music I've heard, but you shouldn't be voted down for expressing a preference.
I do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.
If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.
I think you touched on the point: people who don't actually care about music think musical pablum is 'good', because it slides in their ear and out without challenging them with actual 'listening'. This guy even assigns a genre to his slop while clearly knowing (and, really, caring) nothing about what he claims to like listening to.
Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?
I admit that the bands I play in aren't at a level where we play "shows" with high ticket prices. More often we play in bars that host live jazz. I hope you don't give up on live music, but find a way to enjoy it on terms that you prefer.
You hit upon perhaps the solution to the other commenter's issue - scale back to smaller, local (or near local) bands.
Check they local college; they likely have free concerts at their auditorium of a variety of genres, though probably more likely you'll get orchestras and jazz bands (which are great).
I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.
AI music is generally not going to be copyrightable unless they can show genuine human creativity was involved. So if a song is 100% AI, you could just go around performing it or straight up selling copies yourself and there's nothing* they could do about it. Though I do wonder if a human writes the lyrics, but AI generates all the music parts, if it becomes sufficiently human for copyright. Because the lyrics at that point would be actual creativity.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.
But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.
The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.
The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.
I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).
Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.
However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.
There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.
So if I:
1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)
2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)
Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.
"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
So absolutely tasteless it should be banned.
I think it's fine if people want to generate music at home like this but also, isn't it questionable what is even copyrightable? Apple makes you pay for this?
oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!
I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
>But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing.
Isn’t this an argument against all new music, even human made?
Either we have it all already, or there’s room for new things that we haven’t heard before.
It takes me months before I find a new song I absolutely love and keep on infinite loop repeat for days.
As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.
Movies are the same way. I find a magical film maybe every three years or so. There are lots of good films. Some fantastic films. Very few brain melding moments of nirvana.
(Actually, most films are slop. There are some good films, fewer great films, next to negligible numbers of stories that speak directly to the soul.)
I want perfection. We're not making enough or experimenting enough. AI helps us do more weird stuff and explore more state space sensory and conceptual territory.
I wish this stuff had come twenty years earlier.
In a few years, we'll be making more every year than all of recorded history to date. And that's going to be amazing.
> As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.
Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.
I'm so tired of this anti ai malaise.
There's nothing wrong with machine tools.
We're machines too.
Oh that's what you're banging on about. You think AI is like a demon, or you think LLMs are people too, something like that, hence "I don't care what makes the music". That would otherwise be a spooky and implausible phrase that says something strange about what gives music quality, as if quality in music is something ethereal and mathematical and objective and detached from the human condition, and detached from artists. But if you think the AI counts as a person too then it seems less cold and abstract.
> what's the argument for it
Record companies can sell it and don't have to pay any royalties. They only pay the artists pennies as it is, but that's too much for them.
Electronic music exists but has limited commercial scope because most people don't see the point of music if they can't form an emotional connection with the artist through the music. Popular music has an intense focus on the artist.
AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
That's a dangerous game to play, though—the only value record companies have is their intellectual property, especially if they are no longer financing recording new material. Convincing people to listen to slop is a great way to completely obsolete yourself.
There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing
You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
Actually, it is more human, because there are humans involved at each level. Doesn't matter if you think the music sucks, it's definitionally more human than AI music.
It is sort of a blend now. Beats and rhythm tracks are often generated. Vocals are auto-tuned. There's still some humanity in it, but it's not what it used to be.
AI music is generated from the result of training on far more human-made music than any human could ever consume in their lifetime, so there are even more humans involved in its creation.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
And as everyone knows, some commodification of some thing means we must go ahead and totally commodify all the things.
That's disingenuous. The point is that "human" isn't a particularly good dividing line if you want to distinguish music with value vs music without.
Also, a lot of the people who hate and resist AI slop also hate and resist corpo slop, we're just outnumbered.
If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.
Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Uhh... Cheap, basically AI generated art for home decor definitely exists.
> And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly
Just like how most people are not sommeliers, most people just listen to pop music "slop"
Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
It isn’t indifference, it’s obliviousness. My mother keeps on listening to AI music, and I’ll be like “why are you listening to this slop” and she’ll then argue back that it isn’t AI, it’s actually really very good and I’m just jealous, as the synthetic voice continues to warble nonsenses like a fucking arcade machine full of snakes in the background.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
> I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human.
I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).
As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.
As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.
Deezer had an analysis where they found almost all the listeners for AI music was fraud bots.
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/18/up-to-70-...
Up to 70% of streams of AI music on Deezer were fraudulent!
Right. If we're not hearing these songs on the street, in a pub, etc. then it's just bots praising bots.
Yes it should be easy to find people in one’s immediate social circle who are listening to these tracks if they are that popular. I’ll wait…
Time for a cross, like the New York Times bestsellers.
I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
BIAB is still best in class (even if the UI is practically Soviet era) simply because of the sheer number of RealTracks, which are actual performances by musicians that dynamically adapt to your chord progression.
I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.
What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.
https://mordenstar.com/blog/dutyfree-shop
> I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...
The code is only a (very important) part of this type of program. The samples are critical and (for the time being anyway) can't be generated by AI.
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
Is this the vid? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YL8pwF7Mnc
Rick Beato travels to NeuralDSP in Finland.
Agree 100%. The multivariate ways a note can be expressed is almost unlimited. For example, I first heard Bach's Cello Suite #1 played by some random cellist. Fell in love with it and listened to it endlessly. Then I heard Yo-Yo Ma play it and it was a completely different piece.
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.
> This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.
I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.
These days I'm programming drums on dedicated hardware but Logic Pro's Drummer feature had been immensely helpful for me as a guitarist who hadn't done much drum programming but wanted to play along with interesting drum beats while arranging a song. Just a few options but that's what makes it so approachable. It's helped me keep the song "mine" without the hassle of sourcing loops/samples manually, even if only temporarily.
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
> people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
> is sampling/collage art
Yes.
You will owe royalties.
The latter part is the actual problem.
I think your starting definition of value is basically worthless. Value is not about what things cost to make, but what people are willing to pay for them. You reached this conclusion by the end of your comment, but I think it's important to emphasize. My friend group has created incredible value with suno, mostly making meme songs we forget about after a day, but every once in a while we create lasting memories that have real emotional impact. It doesnt matter that anyone can do that, I dont think that cheapens the output at all.
My comment was mostly that it lacks value to _others_. It was probably worth to your friend group roughly the time and money you spent on it. Nobody else is ever going to care.
So like 99.9999% of all music and art?
I played around with Suno a little too. It's actually kind of crazy what it can produce. I mean I don't think it's objectively good in any way but for many applications this (and a lot of other generative AIs) are what I'd call "sufficiently good".
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
So this kind of music has a name, it’s called production music and it’s been long expected in the industry that AI-generated music will compete with the lower-end production music, basically elevator music or background music for corporate training videos etc. It is unlikely, however, that it will get much traction in scripted long form productions, partly because studios believe it’s a legal minefield, and partly due to resistance from creatives (whether justified or not).
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Red herring. The Puritan work ethic that seems to always resolve to "human value=human income" (regardless of the ethic's stated intentions) is what causes this, not creatives in and of themselves.
I get that there is a strong online movement to destroy the traditional American Dream value of "work hard, and become rich" but that does not apply in fields where money is not the motivator. No single astronaut has ever expressed financial gain as a motivator for moving into that profession.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
I've noticed this too. I have a few theories about this. Disclosure: I know a little about audio, and very little about audio generative AI.
First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.
I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.
Perhaps this is what the human is for - to apply an EQ curve.
Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).
I suspect it's because AI generates music as a waveform incrementally not globally so it favors smoothly varying sounds, not sharp contrast. If it generated MIDI data and then used a MIDI synth to create the audio, you wouldn't get that.
The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.
Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
I saw a video of guy who became an Amazon bestseller in a book category pretty easily by buying his own book.
Through my professional / personal network, I know someone who advertises himself as being a “Best Selling Amazon Author in XYZ category.”
It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.
That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.
Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.
Likely not a bad way to clean money.
Today there are zero mentions of Eddie in the top 100: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
I'd really love to see an actual source on this claim.
Definitely still at #3 in the UK when I open “iTunes Store” (not Apple Music) and go to the Album Chart… at least it was the case two minutes ago.
This is no more art than a container of corn syrup is a proper meal.
So it’s perfect for the times. :(
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
This comment is like 20 years out of date haha. People shifted to single hits when the iTunes store was selling songs for 99 cents. Now (and by now I mean for over a decade) we’re in the age of streaming, and you can easily access whole albums with zero friction. It’s the best time ever for the full listen through experience. And artists are responding by releasing long albums.
What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.
I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
I can tell you that myself (and many others) still create concept albums as our primary format. It's not that people aren't still creating it.
The choice is still there for any listener that cares about albums as a format. I don't mean that in a negative way. I suspect that many people listen to both playlists of singles, and albums of their favourite artists, depending on mood.
No, the game has changed. Back then, the singles were typically accompanied by an album, even if it was just filler. It's better to release singles now due to the way the Spotify and iTunes algos work. Best practice is now to release your songs one at a time rather than a full album (at least if you aren't an established player).
On one hand this pretty much destroys thematic albums (like classical music, prog rock, Tool or for example, something like Alice in Chains' Dirt), but on the other few could pull it off and those who can are still doing it (ex: the latest Opeth album). So maybe discovering new music is hurt, because itunes and spotify look like crowded ERs, but there's just as much good music out there - regardless of your tastes.
It doesn't kill it as songs can be remixed for the album version.
Right, there's less unnecessary dressing of an "album" of filler. But I don't think that's a meaningful change. Singles drove the market then and they do now. Albums were still produced then and still are now.
> there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
agreed with this, I would almost go so far as to say there are more full length albums being created than ever before.
I think it's an AI-generated response.
music has been a product of its form factor for a long time. It's no coincidence that the wax cylinder, 78, 45, 33, cassette, CD, and mp3 dictated changes in how music was packaged (single, lp, ep, album, b sides) and the average length of a popular song.
Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.
Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.
Does it really matter since pop albums were/are (almost?) always "collections of singles + fillers"?
ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c&list=RDhtQBS2Ikz...
charts will become totally meaningless.
Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.
You're only describing pop music. Thankfully this is a tiny fraction of all music.
it's become a much larger section of music. Notice, there are no bands any more. Try finding a metal band with musicians under 40, or a Greenday, Linkin Park or, the itself automated Kpop industry aside, a spontaneous boy or girl group.
Solo pop or hip-hop performers with a focus on social media have crowded out collectively made music, likely due to the general social atrophy and technology enabling production from their bedrooms.
Anecdotally, I used to be a guitarist and a lot of my friends are musicians and teachers, teenage bands are pretty much nowhere to be seen.
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
the main article is about marketing/influencer noise completely replacing the artists, enacted by companies close to the search process
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQevuohJH8
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
>honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
For a reasonable comparison to a minor hit of yore, where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
Soulless and devoid of emotion, or an inspired end run about the minor issue of a (self confessed) inability to conventionly sing.
> where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
It genuinely warms my heart that the Flying LIzards did what they did .. but I also think it kind of stupid in a fun way and don't got out of my way to listen to it.
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
It’s slop for sure, but you’re right, it’s hard to label it AI slop because the model has pretty much mastered the human slop sound.
> If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI"
It sounds like AI.
> I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Why are you getting offended on behalf of a computer? Or is there a deeper reasoning for this logic?
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
I'd say the same thing about two thirds of the iTunes top 100. Different people love different songs I guess.
The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.
Pre-video ad served by YT was quite literally a scam.
Which says all you need to know about where all this is headed, I guess.
This channel is not even the official channel.
> completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.
the comments are very suspicious and very scary
A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
If the comments are from humans, that's tragic and frightening.
frightening either way, probably part of an operation that makes this AI chart so high
The AI comment push on that video is certainly an interesting look into the future. Record labels have their work cut out for them in this brace new world.
At least what I’m seeing in dance music is online sales and streaming seem kind of dead, and everything is about events, personalities, and unreleased tracks that all the big names have but you can’t get for a year after if ever.
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.
I've been making all my own music lately with suno 5.5. It's pretty sweet, it allows me to explore concepts in a different way. This sucks though. Here's hyperpop version of https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 -> https://suno.com/song/516c7e52-a03e-490d-ba26-8d9a332eeea7
Who still buys from iTunes? This is likely bot-driven.
I searched Spotify and Apple music top 100 songs and Eddie Dalton is not on either. I think the majority of users do not buy singles on iTunes anymore so this may be an easy chart to manipulate. The source mentions the name of the creator in the second line leading me to believe this is some clever advertising for Dallas Little's AI.
Thankfully I still buy proper music, what a sad state for human culture.
I mostly listen to AI-generated music. 8 out of 10 of my top listens in the last 180 days are AI-generated.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
I don't like most AI music I've heard, but you shouldn't be voted down for expressing a preference.
I do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.
Why?
It sounds great to me. AI-generated music is pretty popular with Warhammer 40k lore as well.
Also I tend to listen to songs for a few days, during which time I feel they're the best thing ever, which also helps with momentum during work.
After a few days I have to find other songs. Since AI music started getting more traction it's been way easier to find great songs.
I understand the criticisms of AI music, but that doesn't take away from the fact that for me and a growing number of people it sounds good.
The grift requires full commitment
If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.
I don't have strong opinions on whether the AI music I listen to is nerdcore or something else. Maybe I didn't use the correct term.
I think you touched on the point: people who don't actually care about music think musical pablum is 'good', because it slides in their ear and out without challenging them with actual 'listening'. This guy even assigns a genre to his slop while clearly knowing (and, really, caring) nothing about what he claims to like listening to.
I do care a lot what I listen to. It takes me while to find songs that I like.
Also I am not listening to AI generated music that I generate myself.
These are some channels whose music I like:
Live shows are the biggest part of music anyway
Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?
I admit that the bands I play in aren't at a level where we play "shows" with high ticket prices. More often we play in bars that host live jazz. I hope you don't give up on live music, but find a way to enjoy it on terms that you prefer.
You hit upon perhaps the solution to the other commenter's issue - scale back to smaller, local (or near local) bands.
Check they local college; they likely have free concerts at their auditorium of a variety of genres, though probably more likely you'll get orchestras and jazz bands (which are great).
I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.
AI music is generally not going to be copyrightable unless they can show genuine human creativity was involved. So if a song is 100% AI, you could just go around performing it or straight up selling copies yourself and there's nothing* they could do about it. Though I do wonder if a human writes the lyrics, but AI generates all the music parts, if it becomes sufficiently human for copyright. Because the lyrics at that point would be actual creativity.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
It's as if what William Gibson wrote about in Idoru has already become a reality. Soon we will see celebrity AI gossip.
“Soon” we will see celebrity AI gossip?
Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...
baby gronk got rizzed up by livvy?
I see many people claiming AI art has no value.
I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.
But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.
The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.
The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.
I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).
Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.
However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.
There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.
So if I:
1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)
2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)
Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.
"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.
What recommendations do you have for AI artists doing genuinely interesting work, or good places to find them?
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
right, but at least human hands used to touch the process. even in 2000s copy-paste boy band era it was at least human
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
I just checked Spotify, it has 368k followers and at least one song has over 1M streams.
This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
Wasn't there already some scandal with swedish criminals using this to launder money?
I am wondering when Dr. Phoxotic makes it to the top 10...
The top 40 has always been riddled with garbage, in my opinion, but at least real, human musicians were making a living from their art.
The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
No, back when there were actual musicians playing actual instruments the top 40 was legitimate art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
Alternate title: iTunes charts still easy to game.
Bullshit. This does not represent what real people are listening to, there are ways to game the system.
The idea is explained by Rick Beato here: https://youtu.be/rGremoYVMPc
I mean music in the charts has always been total shit anyway.
Grifters figured out several years ago that the iTunes sales chart is extremely gameable, and can be juiced for some cheap headlines.
So absolutely tasteless it should be banned. I think it's fine if people want to generate music at home like this but also, isn't it questionable what is even copyrightable? Apple makes you pay for this?
oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!