Stop listening to Spotify or Apple Music or any other streaming source. Respect music and musicians and songwriters enough to listen to their source recordings. God I can't wait for these platforms to go belly up!
Really. Constant hand wringing & complaining about all this, so WHY are you listening to, participating in & furthering their objectives by continuous mention of these platforms ?
After resisting (although I use Apple computers, I deep down hate the damn company), I signed up with Apple Music.
I am two months in and underwhelmed. Lousy search function. When you find an artist's niche, it's attenuated for no discernable reason. The algorithm is deeply convinced I want to listen to nothing but HipHop and Rap (won't touch the crap). Pushes weird new musicians and buries anything remotely interesting--and they have a complete record of everything I've bought from their store so they know my tastes...except they don't.
I like to use Apple music to listen to artists I know that come out with new music and there is a huge catalogue of musicians and artists I like. I use it, as I use most technology to pull what I want out of it, not for it to push things to me. I never use Apple Music to find new music. And that’s fine for me. I find new music elsewhere and through other methods that I control. Not an algorithm.
Excellent points and subtleties made here by you Richard Cheverton, the previous comments and certainly the well thought-through essay here by our resident aesthetician on Cyberian premises, Ted Gioia.
You end with the "Orwellian" punctuation point and that is the weakest link amid your otherwise well-founded chain of thought. Might I suggest "Bernays-ian"?
Big High Tech has ushered feudalism back into government surrender style as Matt Stoller's BIG and now his first hire Yosef Weitzman's SubStack coverage from the anti-trust trial that is otherwise barely news-worthy on United States of Amnesia (kudos to Gore Vidal) multi-media platforms. Or Anand Giradharadas's longer form booklength essay and study on our self-appointed Lords of Neo-Feudalism titled Winners Take All: The Charade of A Changing World.
Or that now paperback brick of a book by too long silo'd in academia Shoshana Zuboff's Cyberia Scriptures on the neo-liberal\neo-conservative E-CON grifting graft known as the undermining of Civics via the Public\Private Partnership.
The roots of our domestic national political fitness litmus test (passed by Trump and often policed by Lawrence Summers) so central to the Political Economy of our late 20th Century and hopefully only early 21st Century of the existentially-challenged MUNICIPALITY can be tracked back and studied through such books, talks, dialogues even dialectics (like Town Hall gym rat Noam Chomsky even well into his presence of mind 90's!).
For more particular analysis easy to grasp conceptually, search up every talk in any language that other silo'd academic superstars are trapped in like Saskia Sassen, Anat Admati, Aaron Glantz, Claire McConnell, John Quiggin, Amartya Sen, David Dayen, Vandana Shiva rarely if ever invited into the U.S. of Amnesia living room or more commonly normalized now our "SHELTER IN PLACE" homeless tent etc
Yeah, I’m a pretty hardcore Apple ecosystem resident but no Apple Music, no sir. The only streaming I can tolerate is Pandora, and that’s because I’ve been curating my account for over 20 years.
I'm not sure that the majority of people really care whether their "music" is AI generated or not. It seems to me that most people regard music as something to have on in the background. They don't care what it is as long as they do not have to endure "dreaded silence". For me, AI generated pap, or even musician generated pap, elicits a visceral reaction that sets my teeth on edge. I want real, quality music on in the background even less, because then my attention is drawn to the music and I can't do the thinking that is required for the task at hand.
I recently retired from being a veterinarian because I am tired of having the fight that I cannot work or think with music going in the background. A decade ago no one had radios going in the surgery or working areas of a clinic. Now, everyone seems to have "music" going. All I hear is a thumping beat that makes an already uncomfortably loud working environment (think barking dogs, clanking metallic surgical instruments and busy vets and nurses communicating amplified by hard, shiny, cleanable surfaces), even louder as people need to shout over the top of each other to be heard.
Now that you mention it, I had a detached cornea operation a few years ago and I had Dire Straits going on in the background in the damn operating room! Once Upon A Time In The West never sounded so odd. Completely forgot about that till you just mentioned that 🤣
Could not agree more. Music in every store, restaurant, etc etc, usually bad and too loud. Unfortunately even when it’s live it’s often just as annoying and unnecessary. I just learned that the biggest complaint so far about a newly-remodeled luxury resort in Hawaii is that there’s music everywhere and it’s bad and loud (we have a reservation there, and now we have reservations...). Who decided we need to listen to all this?
I don't know the answer to your question. My husband and I were in Thailand in 1997 and there was a big tourist advertising campaign that had this song that was painful to listen to. We had the misfortune of spending one night in a multi story hotel in Hat Yai that was "fancy" and full of sleazy Malaysian sex tourist businessmen. They piped that song through all the hall ways VERY loudly 24 hours a day. I had to ring reception to tell them to turn it down. I can still send my husband into convulsions if I start singing it. :))
Wow, that's intense! My sister went to Thailand a few years ago and it was certainly a less culturally enriching experience than we had back in the day. Back in 1997 it was relatively easy to avoid the places ruined by tourism. Nowadays I believe that is much more rare.
Kulture in Thailand is now comodified. There is no place that is free from tourism. The hill tribes have been inundated with tourists who complain that their pockets have been picked by the lovely children who hang out around them. In the 10 yrs. that I've live here the quality of life has diminished as the cost has risen. It's a shame as it could be a wonderful country. My wife tells me stories about growing up here and they bare no relationship to the current culture.
That makes me sad. I think it's true of every culture on earth, but change has been particularly accelerated and devastating for places like Thailand. Even back in the day we travelled to lesser known parts, but you had to seek them out. We spent 2 weeks in Nan and that was wonderful. I learned to speak some Thai before we left so was able to carry on basic conversations. We stayed in a Hmong village with a family in the mountains near Nan. It was wonderful. It was about learning from them, not pandering to our "needs". The money went directly to the guide and family we stayed with. I am an embroiderer and I knew a lot about hill tribe crafts. I bought many wonderful pieces directly from the makers. Even then, I could see that none of it would exist within 10 years.
I don't like to travel anymore. I've always been a true traveller in that I prefer to stay in a place for some time and really absorb the local culture. When going to any country I would always try to learn at least a little of the language. People are so appreciative of the effort and it allows interaction on their terms. Now, I see places over run by tourists so that the local population cannot move or breathe. I just don't want to be a part of it anymore. I had a client from Dubrovnik (my parents are also Croats), and he said that the last time he went there in the summer it was completely overrun by tourists. He said that restaurants and cafes would hike their prices unbelievably over the summer such that the locals could no longer enjoy going out during the summer season. Really sad. As a child I spent a summer on the Adriatic coast, back in the days of "evil communism" and I remember families on the beach and open air cafes with bands playing into the evening. It was magical.
Millennials and Gen Z have been set up for the scenario the streaming services are hustling. They were pushed away from music and arts education and toward various computer skills classes in an attempt to create a pipeline of "college- and career-ready" students, which is yet another way MBAs disguised as educational administrators have conspired across levels to kill liberal arts education. But, I digress....
If you don't have a basic appreciation of melody and harmony and never actively listen to music (and it's all just background for multitasking), then bass and beats with a half-ass topline might be all that you want. The streaming services are counting on this for younger listeners and for their older subscribers to continue grazing on the music of their salad days. As Ted writes, this ain't gonna work for long. But...
Once the technology gets cheap enough and sophisticated enough, I envision that the tech titans will simply sell you a subscription-based, Pandora-like AI app that generates music on the fly based on your location, prior listening habits, age, Fitbit-detected heartrate, recently visited online marketplaces, etc. or sends you other users' previously generated AI tracks, which are uploaded to a cloud service when the user performs a specific action (clicks a "Like" button, nods head or taps the desk to the beat while the phone or laptop camera and mic watches and listens--with "permission" of course). This generated music will sound vaguely familiar because the models will train on thousands if not millions of song snippets and motifs, yet it will be different enough to avoid copyright infringement claims. </music dystopia>
Cantos' reference to Harrison Bergeron is on the money. The move to 'purist' music and the 'reinvention' of vinyl is music taking its rightful place again. Take a minute to select the vinyl pressing, take it slowly out of its protective sheath, place it tenderly on the turntable, lower the needle, and take the time to actually listen. It's like making coffee from scratch. It's the enjoyment of the moments that lead up to the thing itself. Love your writing. Thank you.
Your list of candidates for advancing this cause should include ASCAP and BMI, whose job it is to ensure artists get the royalties they're already owed. This probably has some ramifications for training data as well.
Quality, yes. But why would this not go the way of the drum machine? How's that worked for drummers? Rhythm boxes appeared in 1938 and now you can program a Vinnie Caliuta part and unfortunately it will sound pretty not bad. Years ago I did a track with some late 90's drum samples and live band over the top of a 5/4 shuffle. With what was unlimited budget, I brought Vinnie in to "improve" it. Had a great time. Studio filled with his kit and wit and feel...fun. Had to admit, after the bills were paid, didn't improve it enough to notice, but we felt better. These are early days. AI is in training. We're training it. Every voice message saying this call will be recorded is training the operator replacement. Question is: is this the hill to die on? I vote yes. It was 50 years ago. It's human intellectual and creative property, pay for it. It's time to get creative about how to do that. I tried the union route...failed. Important thread, Ted, as usual.
PS - they would show up 1st afternoon upon arrival in a town as you were setting up - with their usual demands & you wouldn't see a soul from there again
When the club in Houston was shuttered by the IRS and we had to petition to get our equipment out and make it back to L.A., we went to the union and told them what happened and that we'd like their help to get out money. Sorry, we can't help you, it's out of our juridiciton. On another occasion, we talked a bar owner into letting us play for tips and if he made more money because we were there on a Thurs. night, he could pay us 10% of the bar. After a few weeks business was picking up and this guy came in and hung out with us during the a break, asked our names and made small talk. The next week he showed up, said he was a union rep and since we were union members the bar would have to pay union wages or he'd take them to court. We ended the gig that night.
Thanks for this piece. It is an accurate assessment of AI’s talents and ability in music. The same goes for what AI will offer us in the area of written fiction. No doubt there will be all sorts of “tinkly generic improvisations” (your fine phrase for the “music” [note the quotation marks] that AI can produce.) It will be the same for novels and short stories. The finest in these genres have always come traditionally from the frayed, engaged, beating human heart and its difficulties…the emotions, in other words, expressed in great tragedy and fine comedy, always with gorgeous language. AI is not capable of such forms of expression. Especially when the language used is an AI amalgam intended to sound like a particular human writer’s style, it will be tinkly and poorly improvised, a bad imitation, laughable in the extreme, and worthy of lawsuits from the authors being imitated. What makes great fiction so individualistic is its very unique language, which can be made up and expressed only from a particular writer’s soul. A human writer, in other words. Machine learning’s efforts at Faulkner will result only in the reader’s laughter, at Melville in derision, at Wharton in wounded chuckles, at Sebastian Barry in the reader’s effort to throw the laptop on which he/she is reading at the wall. And original fiction? Get outta here! There will no doubt be plenty of such “writing.” But it will always be dunderheaded and lame. Those who read it will deserve what they get.
I agree with @SeanDennis: this is the inevitable result of removing arts education from the school system. The human heartbeat was once inspiration for the Bossa Nova....now it's just data in a global Fitbit bin.
I'm occasionally asked if I've heard any good new music, and I always say yes, but...it's not on the radio or through streaming (unless I get a referral; someone telling me to check out this artist). It's all local. I live in the Seattle metropolitan area and there's more good music than you can shake a stick at. That's where it's at. Whether there'll be a truly supportable monetary system for musicians I don't know, but I know where good music can be found.
I removed my small catalog from streaming services 10 years ago, and refuse to offer streaming on any of my songs (other than occasional videos). I'm just one little guy, but if everyone did the same, we'd starve the monster.
Plus, a lot of people don't realize that streaming services get their data from services like Luminate (formerly Nielsen, I believe). In the industry there is a practice to "drop the long tail" from stream reporting. That means, if an artist got less than ten streams in a day, they don't report it, which means... no royalty for the small guy, and more money for the already famous. The more Indies put their stuff on Spotify with under ten listens a day, the more the labels make from Spotify.
Not only that, streaming services like Spotify require the listener to spend at least 30 seconds listening to the track before they pay the royalty to the artist. So... in order to make money, many so-called "artists" (perhaps well intended) have started changing songs to start, for example, with the chorus rather than an intro or a verse. I've even read blogs where they tell you how to structure a song for online streaming in order to maximize your potential for royalties. Ah... now that wouldn't affect the quality of songwriting, would it? 😉
The streaming services dangle the impossibly elusive carrot of exposure and potential stardom, basically asking you to give your stuff away, given the royalty rate per stream is about four thousandths of cent. Congrats! Your hit album just got you a week long stay at the Holiday Inn in Springfield, Missouri, with a prepaid compact car rental (your choice of Fiat or certified pre-owned Pinto), a family dinner at Perkins, and two one-day passes to Silver Dollar City!
We don't need them.
I have a small, dedicated fan base, and my European friends pay up to $20 for shipping alone on CDs, which I make available at cost, and yet nearly always, they give me more.
Really, artists need to move away from the idea that Big Corp will make you a star. If they do, they can turn you into a fallen star overnight. If they don't, you're beholden to them. Your best bet is a lot of elbow grease, and some luck.
To quote Neil Peart, "Get out there and rock, and roll the bones... get busy!"
The premise, 'AI is bad for music,' might be more aptly phrased to 'AI is challenging to some music,' especially the loop-based products any 9th grader can cut and paste together before homeroom at 8:00 a.m.
What music is 'inferior' to some may be 'acceptable' to others. Judgment often reflects the judge more than that being judged.
As an artist who uses some AI tools, I find the prospect of surrendering to an 'organizing' power far more compromising to creative production than co-existing with bad taste in robots. Having a 'leader and organization' is creating another problem easily influenced by lobbies.
I'm not a participant or consumer of social media or Spotify but I do understand their value to some but would expect their AI standards satisfy popular culture's market. That's a different market than those who would attend a live performance of a Philip Glass work.
Ok, I'll state the obvious. The problem is not AI. The problem is the US has several generations who have not been exposed to the arts in their public education experience. It is far too late to re-educate them, but not their kids. We do not have a critically aware art/music consumer base. The evidence for this is so overwhelming it is difficult to see until we step back from the fear of AI and look what people are making and consuming.
If we're actually afraid of AI making crap better than people, then I'd say that fear is well founded. If we're afraid AI will dominate that market, great.
But, AI still needs a Taylor Swift to emulate her voice just as Epiphone needs A Gibson to make a Gibson-like guitar.
The problem is we in the US have a population which can't or won't differentiate between the original and the copy.
The challenge for artists and musicians is to make work authentically yours and copyright it. Use the technology we have rather than scare us into some union organization abyss which only guarantees dues, not income and critical reviews.
Today, the marketplace is fair insomuch as a demand-based market of entertainment can be saturated while still making a profit. Not everyone gets the big deals, but Steve Reich has never had a Top 40 hit. 'Value' has many faces.
Some would like to apply a Marxist commodity ideology to the AI music market in that the sound does not reflect or identify its creator so its value must be less. A lot of experimental musicians have toyed with that concept for some time.
For myself, fear and cynicism aren't helpful to musicians and artists who, for a variety of reasons, aren't making a living soley off their work. Open minds open more doors to opportunities.
Stop listening to Spotify or Apple Music or any other streaming source. Respect music and musicians and songwriters enough to listen to their source recordings. God I can't wait for these platforms to go belly up!
"God I can't wait for these platforms to go belly up!"
You seriously expect that to happen? [lol]
Really. Constant hand wringing & complaining about all this, so WHY are you listening to, participating in & furthering their objectives by continuous mention of these platforms ?
Because problems are talked about so new solutions can be found?
Just a guess.
After resisting (although I use Apple computers, I deep down hate the damn company), I signed up with Apple Music.
I am two months in and underwhelmed. Lousy search function. When you find an artist's niche, it's attenuated for no discernable reason. The algorithm is deeply convinced I want to listen to nothing but HipHop and Rap (won't touch the crap). Pushes weird new musicians and buries anything remotely interesting--and they have a complete record of everything I've bought from their store so they know my tastes...except they don't.
It's weird, mind-melding junk andtypically Apple-arrogant.
Yes, I've discovered some great music but not with any help from Music's front end.
And if I drop, the music goes poof, disappears.
Orwellian.
I like to use Apple music to listen to artists I know that come out with new music and there is a huge catalogue of musicians and artists I like. I use it, as I use most technology to pull what I want out of it, not for it to push things to me. I never use Apple Music to find new music. And that’s fine for me. I find new music elsewhere and through other methods that I control. Not an algorithm.
Excellent points and subtleties made here by you Richard Cheverton, the previous comments and certainly the well thought-through essay here by our resident aesthetician on Cyberian premises, Ted Gioia.
You end with the "Orwellian" punctuation point and that is the weakest link amid your otherwise well-founded chain of thought. Might I suggest "Bernays-ian"?
Rhymes with 'mayonaise-ean.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Big High Tech has ushered feudalism back into government surrender style as Matt Stoller's BIG and now his first hire Yosef Weitzman's SubStack coverage from the anti-trust trial that is otherwise barely news-worthy on United States of Amnesia (kudos to Gore Vidal) multi-media platforms. Or Anand Giradharadas's longer form booklength essay and study on our self-appointed Lords of Neo-Feudalism titled Winners Take All: The Charade of A Changing World.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/the-new-feudalism
Or that now paperback brick of a book by too long silo'd in academia Shoshana Zuboff's Cyberia Scriptures on the neo-liberal\neo-conservative E-CON grifting graft known as the undermining of Civics via the Public\Private Partnership.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/01/watch-naomi-klein-and-shoshana-zuboff-discuss-mounting-dangers-surveillance
The roots of our domestic national political fitness litmus test (passed by Trump and often policed by Lawrence Summers) so central to the Political Economy of our late 20th Century and hopefully only early 21st Century of the existentially-challenged MUNICIPALITY can be tracked back and studied through such books, talks, dialogues even dialectics (like Town Hall gym rat Noam Chomsky even well into his presence of mind 90's!).
For more particular analysis easy to grasp conceptually, search up every talk in any language that other silo'd academic superstars are trapped in like Saskia Sassen, Anat Admati, Aaron Glantz, Claire McConnell, John Quiggin, Amartya Sen, David Dayen, Vandana Shiva rarely if ever invited into the U.S. of Amnesia living room or more commonly normalized now our "SHELTER IN PLACE" homeless tent etc
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\LookseeInnerEarsHearHere
Yeah, I’m a pretty hardcore Apple ecosystem resident but no Apple Music, no sir. The only streaming I can tolerate is Pandora, and that’s because I’ve been curating my account for over 20 years.
I'm not sure that the majority of people really care whether their "music" is AI generated or not. It seems to me that most people regard music as something to have on in the background. They don't care what it is as long as they do not have to endure "dreaded silence". For me, AI generated pap, or even musician generated pap, elicits a visceral reaction that sets my teeth on edge. I want real, quality music on in the background even less, because then my attention is drawn to the music and I can't do the thinking that is required for the task at hand.
I recently retired from being a veterinarian because I am tired of having the fight that I cannot work or think with music going in the background. A decade ago no one had radios going in the surgery or working areas of a clinic. Now, everyone seems to have "music" going. All I hear is a thumping beat that makes an already uncomfortably loud working environment (think barking dogs, clanking metallic surgical instruments and busy vets and nurses communicating amplified by hard, shiny, cleanable surfaces), even louder as people need to shout over the top of each other to be heard.
Now that you mention it, I had a detached cornea operation a few years ago and I had Dire Straits going on in the background in the damn operating room! Once Upon A Time In The West never sounded so odd. Completely forgot about that till you just mentioned that 🤣
Could not agree more. Music in every store, restaurant, etc etc, usually bad and too loud. Unfortunately even when it’s live it’s often just as annoying and unnecessary. I just learned that the biggest complaint so far about a newly-remodeled luxury resort in Hawaii is that there’s music everywhere and it’s bad and loud (we have a reservation there, and now we have reservations...). Who decided we need to listen to all this?
I don't know the answer to your question. My husband and I were in Thailand in 1997 and there was a big tourist advertising campaign that had this song that was painful to listen to. We had the misfortune of spending one night in a multi story hotel in Hat Yai that was "fancy" and full of sleazy Malaysian sex tourist businessmen. They piped that song through all the hall ways VERY loudly 24 hours a day. I had to ring reception to tell them to turn it down. I can still send my husband into convulsions if I start singing it. :))
You'll be dismayed to know that now, in Thailand, piped music is everywhere and radios blare in Taxis.
Boom Smack, Boom Boom Smack,
an endless sounstrack
for lookers and shoppers
who become stoppers
for the bottleneck
in sunglasses,watches, make-up
and women's wear,
creating wear and tear
on the displays of future vantity,
to hide the insanity
that is disquised
in messages received and sent
on mobile phones. tablets
and scents of cologne,
descending upon the orange, red, pink and yellow hair
of the sightless looking at displays
overseen by clerks in black,
who do not hear the Boom Boom Smack
of the bass and drum attack,
nor the muffled sounds of the foreign rap,
telling them its time for your nap,
the long, long nap of the brain dead.
Wow, that's intense! My sister went to Thailand a few years ago and it was certainly a less culturally enriching experience than we had back in the day. Back in 1997 it was relatively easy to avoid the places ruined by tourism. Nowadays I believe that is much more rare.
Kulture in Thailand is now comodified. There is no place that is free from tourism. The hill tribes have been inundated with tourists who complain that their pockets have been picked by the lovely children who hang out around them. In the 10 yrs. that I've live here the quality of life has diminished as the cost has risen. It's a shame as it could be a wonderful country. My wife tells me stories about growing up here and they bare no relationship to the current culture.
That makes me sad. I think it's true of every culture on earth, but change has been particularly accelerated and devastating for places like Thailand. Even back in the day we travelled to lesser known parts, but you had to seek them out. We spent 2 weeks in Nan and that was wonderful. I learned to speak some Thai before we left so was able to carry on basic conversations. We stayed in a Hmong village with a family in the mountains near Nan. It was wonderful. It was about learning from them, not pandering to our "needs". The money went directly to the guide and family we stayed with. I am an embroiderer and I knew a lot about hill tribe crafts. I bought many wonderful pieces directly from the makers. Even then, I could see that none of it would exist within 10 years.
I don't like to travel anymore. I've always been a true traveller in that I prefer to stay in a place for some time and really absorb the local culture. When going to any country I would always try to learn at least a little of the language. People are so appreciative of the effort and it allows interaction on their terms. Now, I see places over run by tourists so that the local population cannot move or breathe. I just don't want to be a part of it anymore. I had a client from Dubrovnik (my parents are also Croats), and he said that the last time he went there in the summer it was completely overrun by tourists. He said that restaurants and cafes would hike their prices unbelievably over the summer such that the locals could no longer enjoy going out during the summer season. Really sad. As a child I spent a summer on the Adriatic coast, back in the days of "evil communism" and I remember families on the beach and open air cafes with bands playing into the evening. It was magical.
I had enough when I walked up to a Gas pump years back & it blasted alive with video & "musical ?" garbage. That Really disgust me.
Millennials and Gen Z have been set up for the scenario the streaming services are hustling. They were pushed away from music and arts education and toward various computer skills classes in an attempt to create a pipeline of "college- and career-ready" students, which is yet another way MBAs disguised as educational administrators have conspired across levels to kill liberal arts education. But, I digress....
If you don't have a basic appreciation of melody and harmony and never actively listen to music (and it's all just background for multitasking), then bass and beats with a half-ass topline might be all that you want. The streaming services are counting on this for younger listeners and for their older subscribers to continue grazing on the music of their salad days. As Ted writes, this ain't gonna work for long. But...
Once the technology gets cheap enough and sophisticated enough, I envision that the tech titans will simply sell you a subscription-based, Pandora-like AI app that generates music on the fly based on your location, prior listening habits, age, Fitbit-detected heartrate, recently visited online marketplaces, etc. or sends you other users' previously generated AI tracks, which are uploaded to a cloud service when the user performs a specific action (clicks a "Like" button, nods head or taps the desk to the beat while the phone or laptop camera and mic watches and listens--with "permission" of course). This generated music will sound vaguely familiar because the models will train on thousands if not millions of song snippets and motifs, yet it will be different enough to avoid copyright infringement claims. </music dystopia>
A mass music plagiarism app! I want to invest!
But OpenAI claims it’s Fair Use! Which is a kindergartener legal argument
The use of AI in any medium needs to be fully disclosed ... so people can choose the artisanal, local, human musicians with clarity.
Cantos' reference to Harrison Bergeron is on the money. The move to 'purist' music and the 'reinvention' of vinyl is music taking its rightful place again. Take a minute to select the vinyl pressing, take it slowly out of its protective sheath, place it tenderly on the turntable, lower the needle, and take the time to actually listen. It's like making coffee from scratch. It's the enjoyment of the moments that lead up to the thing itself. Love your writing. Thank you.
Your list of candidates for advancing this cause should include ASCAP and BMI, whose job it is to ensure artists get the royalties they're already owed. This probably has some ramifications for training data as well.
Very good point. Add Harry Fox, Songfile, CD Baby, and all the European PRS companies like GEMA to the list as well.
Quality, yes. But why would this not go the way of the drum machine? How's that worked for drummers? Rhythm boxes appeared in 1938 and now you can program a Vinnie Caliuta part and unfortunately it will sound pretty not bad. Years ago I did a track with some late 90's drum samples and live band over the top of a 5/4 shuffle. With what was unlimited budget, I brought Vinnie in to "improve" it. Had a great time. Studio filled with his kit and wit and feel...fun. Had to admit, after the bills were paid, didn't improve it enough to notice, but we felt better. These are early days. AI is in training. We're training it. Every voice message saying this call will be recorded is training the operator replacement. Question is: is this the hill to die on? I vote yes. It was 50 years ago. It's human intellectual and creative property, pay for it. It's time to get creative about how to do that. I tried the union route...failed. Important thread, Ted, as usual.
As a former member of the musician's union, I realized that if you paid your dues, they protected you from them.
Not sure what Music Union you were in, but the one I was in protected us from NOTHING. On sevral occasions.
PS - they would show up 1st afternoon upon arrival in a town as you were setting up - with their usual demands & you wouldn't see a soul from there again
When the club in Houston was shuttered by the IRS and we had to petition to get our equipment out and make it back to L.A., we went to the union and told them what happened and that we'd like their help to get out money. Sorry, we can't help you, it's out of our juridiciton. On another occasion, we talked a bar owner into letting us play for tips and if he made more money because we were there on a Thurs. night, he could pay us 10% of the bar. After a few weeks business was picking up and this guy came in and hung out with us during the a break, asked our names and made small talk. The next week he showed up, said he was a union rep and since we were union members the bar would have to pay union wages or he'd take them to court. We ended the gig that night.
Sigh ... & they were SO dense, they probably never did figure out why they lost the spoons to their private Gravy Moats
L.A, Local 47. Yes, I have some horror stories too.
Hello Ted:
Thanks for this piece. It is an accurate assessment of AI’s talents and ability in music. The same goes for what AI will offer us in the area of written fiction. No doubt there will be all sorts of “tinkly generic improvisations” (your fine phrase for the “music” [note the quotation marks] that AI can produce.) It will be the same for novels and short stories. The finest in these genres have always come traditionally from the frayed, engaged, beating human heart and its difficulties…the emotions, in other words, expressed in great tragedy and fine comedy, always with gorgeous language. AI is not capable of such forms of expression. Especially when the language used is an AI amalgam intended to sound like a particular human writer’s style, it will be tinkly and poorly improvised, a bad imitation, laughable in the extreme, and worthy of lawsuits from the authors being imitated. What makes great fiction so individualistic is its very unique language, which can be made up and expressed only from a particular writer’s soul. A human writer, in other words. Machine learning’s efforts at Faulkner will result only in the reader’s laughter, at Melville in derision, at Wharton in wounded chuckles, at Sebastian Barry in the reader’s effort to throw the laptop on which he/she is reading at the wall. And original fiction? Get outta here! There will no doubt be plenty of such “writing.” But it will always be dunderheaded and lame. Those who read it will deserve what they get.
Terence Clarke
terenceclarke.substack.com
TLDR: digital player piano
Note: I've heard the recordings of the player piano rolls George Gershwin produced. Still just player piano rolls.
I agree with @SeanDennis: this is the inevitable result of removing arts education from the school system. The human heartbeat was once inspiration for the Bossa Nova....now it's just data in a global Fitbit bin.
I'm occasionally asked if I've heard any good new music, and I always say yes, but...it's not on the radio or through streaming (unless I get a referral; someone telling me to check out this artist). It's all local. I live in the Seattle metropolitan area and there's more good music than you can shake a stick at. That's where it's at. Whether there'll be a truly supportable monetary system for musicians I don't know, but I know where good music can be found.
Another urgent + perceptive call to action. Musicians – you all listening out there?
I removed my small catalog from streaming services 10 years ago, and refuse to offer streaming on any of my songs (other than occasional videos). I'm just one little guy, but if everyone did the same, we'd starve the monster.
Plus, a lot of people don't realize that streaming services get their data from services like Luminate (formerly Nielsen, I believe). In the industry there is a practice to "drop the long tail" from stream reporting. That means, if an artist got less than ten streams in a day, they don't report it, which means... no royalty for the small guy, and more money for the already famous. The more Indies put their stuff on Spotify with under ten listens a day, the more the labels make from Spotify.
Not only that, streaming services like Spotify require the listener to spend at least 30 seconds listening to the track before they pay the royalty to the artist. So... in order to make money, many so-called "artists" (perhaps well intended) have started changing songs to start, for example, with the chorus rather than an intro or a verse. I've even read blogs where they tell you how to structure a song for online streaming in order to maximize your potential for royalties. Ah... now that wouldn't affect the quality of songwriting, would it? 😉
The streaming services dangle the impossibly elusive carrot of exposure and potential stardom, basically asking you to give your stuff away, given the royalty rate per stream is about four thousandths of cent. Congrats! Your hit album just got you a week long stay at the Holiday Inn in Springfield, Missouri, with a prepaid compact car rental (your choice of Fiat or certified pre-owned Pinto), a family dinner at Perkins, and two one-day passes to Silver Dollar City!
We don't need them.
I have a small, dedicated fan base, and my European friends pay up to $20 for shipping alone on CDs, which I make available at cost, and yet nearly always, they give me more.
Really, artists need to move away from the idea that Big Corp will make you a star. If they do, they can turn you into a fallen star overnight. If they don't, you're beholden to them. Your best bet is a lot of elbow grease, and some luck.
To quote Neil Peart, "Get out there and rock, and roll the bones... get busy!"
Too true. Gawd, Taylor Swift is going to be busy spearheading all your ideas.
The premise, 'AI is bad for music,' might be more aptly phrased to 'AI is challenging to some music,' especially the loop-based products any 9th grader can cut and paste together before homeroom at 8:00 a.m.
What music is 'inferior' to some may be 'acceptable' to others. Judgment often reflects the judge more than that being judged.
As an artist who uses some AI tools, I find the prospect of surrendering to an 'organizing' power far more compromising to creative production than co-existing with bad taste in robots. Having a 'leader and organization' is creating another problem easily influenced by lobbies.
I'm not a participant or consumer of social media or Spotify but I do understand their value to some but would expect their AI standards satisfy popular culture's market. That's a different market than those who would attend a live performance of a Philip Glass work.
Ok, I'll state the obvious. The problem is not AI. The problem is the US has several generations who have not been exposed to the arts in their public education experience. It is far too late to re-educate them, but not their kids. We do not have a critically aware art/music consumer base. The evidence for this is so overwhelming it is difficult to see until we step back from the fear of AI and look what people are making and consuming.
If we're actually afraid of AI making crap better than people, then I'd say that fear is well founded. If we're afraid AI will dominate that market, great.
But, AI still needs a Taylor Swift to emulate her voice just as Epiphone needs A Gibson to make a Gibson-like guitar.
The problem is we in the US have a population which can't or won't differentiate between the original and the copy.
The challenge for artists and musicians is to make work authentically yours and copyright it. Use the technology we have rather than scare us into some union organization abyss which only guarantees dues, not income and critical reviews.
Today, the marketplace is fair insomuch as a demand-based market of entertainment can be saturated while still making a profit. Not everyone gets the big deals, but Steve Reich has never had a Top 40 hit. 'Value' has many faces.
Some would like to apply a Marxist commodity ideology to the AI music market in that the sound does not reflect or identify its creator so its value must be less. A lot of experimental musicians have toyed with that concept for some time.
For myself, fear and cynicism aren't helpful to musicians and artists who, for a variety of reasons, aren't making a living soley off their work. Open minds open more doors to opportunities.
ted if one day you go missing we will know it’s because spotify took you out
Apple Music now (iOS17) gives full credits for each song. Musicians, producers, songwriter etc