alt Hacker Newsthat must be a good message:
- you all like music enough to go to a four year program and spend lots of money to study it.
- you all probably have been creating music since you were a child and really love it.
- well....
- people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
- we now have a magic button that can make content by ripping off every previous artist we've trained our models on.
- now that everyone has access to this magic button, music has become even more worthless and the only people that'll make money from it are the people running the streaming services like spotify.
- if you do happen to create some original content, we'll just suck it into our giant copy machine and use it to out you you.
- good luck, have fun, and make sure to pay those student loans back.
Replies
Music was already worthless. Here's Deadmau5 giving advice to aspiring producers in 2012:
> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.
Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.
A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.
We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.
"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"
When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).
Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-con...
> - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.
They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.
I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.
Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.
[0] https://youtu.be/ZVia46yAoMU