I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form).
None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
I’ve been involved in one music project or another (bands, albums, solo projects, etc) for the past 25 years.
During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to make a record together. We labored over it for almost two years and finally “released it” on bandcamp to very little fanfare.
A few friends and family had nice things to say, and one random stranger reached out with positive feedback.
I get a monthly stream report from bandcamp, and it almost always says zero.
I am so pleased with this project and have such great memories of making the album that I had two lathe cut vinyl copies made (one for me, and one for my friend).
I put a big part of myself into the project and was able to convey ideas and feelings that I couldn’t express effectively via other methods.
I listen to the recording about once a year. It’s a part of me now, and I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it.
To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
If someone else feels something as a result of your work, that’s a nice bonus, but not something I focus on at all.
If you didn’t sink a career’s worth of time doing creative work professionally, then that’s a nice relationship to have with creative output. For a lot of people, AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission. Mortgages not paid, cancer not treated, birthday presents not purchased for your kids, dreams dashed… and then people telling you the real purpose of creative work ends when you expect it to be anything more than a hobby.
I completely agree. It makes something that was already very hard that much harder. I have a friend who played guitar in a "famous band". They made it. Meaning, they played on David Letterman and went on extensive tours, had a huge fanbase, etc. Some years back, he reached out to see if I had any leads on IT jobs. I was surprised to say the least, but his response was simple, "there's no money in it." That conversation really hammered it home that you can "make it" and still live without financial security. Fast forward to today, and the situation is even more dire given what is happening with AI.
I don't think highly of AI made stuff uploaded without clear labelling as such.
But it's almost certainly not AI's fault if your mortgage is not paid, your cancer not treated or you can't pay birthday presents for your kids. Music was already extremely "cheap", and success has very little with how much or little work you put into it (extremely unlikely either way).
Let's fund art, but this business model you want to do it by is hardly worth saving.
It’s not just music that is getting ripped off and what is this funding model you’re proposing? How will that help some who designs and sells a few T-shirts etc?
It goes for all other art as well. I wasn't proposing a specific alternative funding model right now, but I think just about anything (even nothing) is better than extending intellectual property laws.
A) Nobody goes into the music business from the ground up planning to support themselves selling albums, like a small business. Everybody has known for decades that doing so requires laying a ton of groundwork and for the first several years, at least, you’d be lucky to have low streaming compensation be a problem for you. Planning on any other path— persistent notoriety after going viral, being irresistibly appealing to large enough audiences to sell at least dozens of albums per week right off the bat, etc.— is like planning on winning the lottery. That’s literally the least representative market for commercial art. Even for audio!
B) There’s a universe of creative workers AI fucked over that have nothing to do with retail music sales. Concept artists, stock photographers, session musicians, copywriters, video game foley artists, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those were all reliable career paths until very recently. Disney chopped their concept art team to replace them with models Disney trained on their work… probably posturing to look pro-AI enough after their pathetic sora debacle. As an aside, they can go fuck themselves.
> AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission.
I want to be clear. I am 100% on-board with AI being absolutely shit.
Buuuut, this has always been the case. Before it was scammers taking images from the web and undercutting you with prints, now it's scammers stealing your artistic style.
It sucks, but it's not a brand new problem. What makes it particularly bad now is that there's a much larger flood of it.
As a hobbyist musician and songwriter of decades i was excited about AI music in October. I could finally take my rough demos of me singing along to my guitar and make better demos then just using garageband as Im not much of a singer. I enjoyed using Suno for a month or less then realize this is shit .... my own songs are AI slop just like everyone else - all sounds the same and my songwriting talents are meaningless now with anyone can now do this. I didnt listen to my slop for months then the band I play in asked to hear some slop of mine and then / there my AI slop had some redeeming quaility. As with my band (church band) and I listening and then playing along to my slop. Just slop writers can now play their slop like real musicians can........
At least not yet Im sure robots will and also an AI microphone with AI built in will be created so everyone sings amazingly.....
Overall AI is stealing humanity from us all, we are allowing it and it is only to the benefit of a few rich pie holes.
But just think… soon we’ll be able to pay some SV company to exercise all of the creative and intellectual effort we would have had to do manually with our squishy meat thought boxes… yuck! Disgustingly inefficient. With the convenience of simulated romance, brilliance, excitement, art, music, relationships, faith, a sense of wonder, sex, human connection, joy, exploration, and everything else that manifested itself in the real world with real obstacles and pushback and negative feelings, we’ll have plenty of time to do all of the menial jobs that are left. What a win!
The legal situation is also completely different. It seems like models IP-wash, so there is nothing legally wrong with what current people are doing with ai. In contrast, the scammer selling your photo was clearly violating IP law, and you could (at least theoretically) pursue legal remedies.
Scale makes it a completely different problem. AI has wiped out the compensation market for entire fields— like copywriting, stock photography, and concept art— practically overnight, and it happened because tech companies have conjured up a very selfish definition of “fair” in the context of fair use. (Isn’t it hilarious to see them get their knickers twisted over distillation? They can blow it straight out their assess.)
It’s comforting to think this is just an incremental change in the battle for capital-focused hyper-efficiency, but it’s absolutely not. This isn’t even the steady decline manufacturing saw over decades… it’s is like what happened to paste-up men or telephone operators but over an incomparably large swath of the creative world.
I'll be honest, I think that this line of "everyone creative is going to be out of work" is parroting exactly the same lies that VC are selling about genAI. At the end of the day, that's what VCs want people to think. There is, to date, basically no reason to use a generative AI system other than if you buy what the VCs are selling. And they reallllly want to sell genAI systems.
I certainly don't buy it, and IIRC only 15% of the broader workforce use genAI for their jobs. Offices are having to force people to use it, and even then people don't like it. Programming is an outlier in this regard because, it turns out, most of what we've been doing is solving the same tasks over and over again in different domains (which is what A Pattern Language was designed to solve). Most other work is not like this.
For the arts, and for most media, what humans have been craving for about a decade now is authenticity. They want a real person they can connect to, an artist whose work makes them feel seen. The artists who have recognized this with a good command of media have been growing sustainably and there's a big industry in this now. There is a certain proportion of people who like the slop, sure. But the actual fact of the matter is that the younger generations, 20 - 30yros, can smell slop from a mile away, and adding slop to advertising, to your media, to your art, actually makes it sell worse. Exactly because it is inauthentic. Talk to literally anyone in advertising whose company tried AI ads. You see an uptick among 50-60 year olds, and a massive, massive downturn among 16 - 30 yros.
From a media executive standpoint, most of the media properties that are inauthentic have been failing massively, with a handful of them able to turn a quick buck before they fail. Execs are verrrry slowly learning the fact that media produced for a very quick ROI and for the branding and marketing potential tend to fizzle out quickly, whereas passion projects are sustainable income, a well you can keep going back to. Whether or not they value that well as much as independent creatives do... ehhhh.
For programming, there's not much to stop people from using the stuff because barely any higher-up supports "building bridges safely". What executives want from programming is a quick ROI, they don't even care if customers complain. So what I forsee for programmers is that the field is going to be gradually flooded with people using genAI. This will drive the cost of our labour downwards, while people are expected to give 10x or 20x the output that they did 5 years ago "because AI makes them fast". This turns every job into a rush job which makes the software system as a whole much less stable. I forsee a number of Horizon IT level problems in the next 10 years. But by then, programming will be much more on the level of a truck job where you have to piss in a bottle and keep driving, or a sales call job where your manager will pull you up if you're 5% under par. Just remember, everyone jumping on the AI train did this to our field.
But, it's not inevitable. It's only inevitable if we all keep shouting that the AI bros have won, from the rooftops. That's the hype keeping this bubble alive. The entire AI bubble currently rests on marketing, and the first step in bursting that bubble is to simply not believe the lies that you are being sold.
I'm a little off being thirty years old. I've played musical instruments of my own accord since I was 3 years old learning violin in an orchestra. I did folk music through my teens. I know about 5+ instruments and I've gigged at pubs, fields, parks, events, and a wedding. I have never touched genAI for music, and I really do not need to. I've listened to the output of genAI for music. It's samey, repetitive, and bland. "Slop" is a very good descriptor. Frankly I can't see a single reason why I would want to destroy my entire creative process and have it output by a black box. Why would I contract someone else to play my own music, let alone a machine?! Baffling. Most of the people around my own age are getting super into vinyl and cassettes and records because they like the fact that you can hold something in your hands. Because they like connecting to an artist. AI slop does not give them that, cannot give them that, and artists who think that the AI slop is better than them are a) obviously not very good in the first place, b) foregoing their own personal development as an artist in service of chasing trends. Trend chasers have never lasted long in creative work, and honestly, they're selecting themselves out of the pool. They're selecting for an audience who no more likes their work than the work of any other sloptist. You can't see me but I'm giving a biiiiig fucking shrug right now, like the jurassic park guy. Nobody cares about sloptists, sloppers, soupies. They don't care about the art, they only care about the profit, and people can smell that a mile off.
"You need to learn that the product of your writing is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you, it will make your better at expressing yourself. You'll have a wonderful time, but you'll also grow as a person, you'll become more empathetic. The product of your writing is you. You are the artwork."
- Brandon Sanderton
One part of being an artist is that you are a clown who entertains people. You cannot just make music you have to be out there being outrageous and weird.
This is exactly what all the successful ones do. No AI can go on television and sing songs about how great Hitler was.
Becoming successful enough to be on TV (or get a ton of views on media sites) is so uncommon that it’s pointless to use as a comparison for any common career path in the creative world.
And I’m speaking more broadly than music— it’s much worse in other fields. Most commercial art does not involve being an entertainer.
> To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
That's EXACTLY how I used to feel about creativity. I was an art major who didn't make it, and I found that expressing myself via my hobbies was good for the soul.
Then I almost died and completely lost interest in making art!
Facing my own mortality, I realized that the time I invest into my wife, kids and family will have a larger positive contribution on the world, I think.
I know that sounds like a Hallmark Card.
At the same time, I've often wondered what my life would look like if I appreciated my family MORE and my hobbies LESS when I was younger.
I can relate here. I have son, who is now 3.5 years old. I haven't had the time or energy to produce any "finished work" since he's been born, and that marks a lull after 25 years of steady output. I don't feel sad or disappointed about this in the slightest. As my wife likes to say, "it's the season we're in." That said, I do really enjoy chaotic jam sessions with my son, as he's very interested in banging on his little drum set, so in some ways, it's just a new beginning. There's no better investment than time with our children.
I feel a part of this is that in any creative endeavor, you can never exactly capture what you want and thus have to leave something out. There are those that try to get it perfect, they never finish.
Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
> Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
That's basically where I landed. The idea being that making art is something I should do if I'm just trying to relax. Once the hobby starts looking like a second job, I know it's too much.
Not a near death experience but similarish. Im trans and from a conservative religious family, so I planned to cut them off and eventually did..
Throughout my teens and young adulthood I immersed myself really deep into drawing and writing. But as my own life has started to form around me, I got a partner who I might have kids with, friends I care about. Ive slowly come to your pov too, and Im wishing I spent less time doing art in the past
I've been asking myself this question in the last year:
> Why do I want to make music?
I picked a basic DJ controller and a midi controller bundled with Ableton. I'm a novice, but I love listening to music and dissecting what makes a good performance. I crave that feeling of getting chills when I find something new that moves me in new ways. This set was a pretty recent example:
That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
I resolved early on that I was never going to make a money doing this, which simplified things greatly. There's a primal part of our brain that craves adoration. I do wish for others to adore my music. Even if it's a handful of people. I do wish to perform publicly one day, even if it's at a park for passersby.
Mostly I just want something to move my brain in different ways. I want to create something beautiful.
>> That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
As I enter my mid-50s this is how I feel about the music I listen to. I have decades and decades of music I love for a variety of reasons. I don’t have time for “discovery” anymore. If I get introduced to a new band by someone I know or algorithmically, that’s great but I’m not going to spend hours trying to find the next great thing when I have so much I enjoy already.
I think it's great stuff. If you haven't already, build a website for the band or album and leave it up as a static tribute. If it's not something that brings riches, maybe it's a contribution to the world.
And do what you can to do what AI music makers wouldn't think to do - differentiate with photos of yourselves, the process, the wilds, etc. You've done all the hard work writing and recording the music, so you might as well embellish its place in the world, and the places it's about.
Marketing your album is a different kind of work. Thats why labels and whole distribution industry exist in a first place. Bandcamp is not a streaming platform, so you naturally wont get organic listeners here.
I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).
I'm happy they shared it on a further request, but I feel not having it in GP or profile is consistent with and further strengthens what they wrote in the post.
The reality is, essentially nobody makes money by creating music. Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. A Taylor Swift impersonator would make no money singing the same songs. A cover band wouldn't do any better.
It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them. It's so paltry I don't really understand why authors are so concerned about copyright infringement.
People steal my copyrighted stuff all the time. I long ago stopped caring about it. But I do very much like Github as it protects me from others accusing me of stealing their code.
If you want to make money, you'll need a plan that does not require copyright protection.
> Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live.
People want to see her performing...her music. She would not make nearly as much money by going up on stage and sitting quietly for a few hours.
It's also worth nothing that she literally re-recorded several of her albums due to someone else getting the rights to them instead of selling them to her, and the proportion of streams and sales they got compared to the original versions was so high that it effectively forced the person who had bought them from the previous owner to sell them to her in the end anyways.
I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point you're trying to make, but saying that she doesn't make her money from selling her music doesn't really seem accurate.
I'm sure she makes some money selling the music, but the big bucks are from filling a stadium with people paying insane prices to hear/watch her perform.
There have been many stories on HN over the years on rock bands making a pittance from record sales and having to tour to make any decent money.
You're not wasting your time, my friend. But you've got to be very certain and honest as to why you want to learn that.
If your goal is being heard and appreciated, well, you better reconsider.
If you're doing it for your own pleasure and pure love of art, absolutely do go on, without any expectations. It may or may not take off, but the samurai must not care.
Agree 100% with this and I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
In the past learning a skill and do something was mostly for pleasure, and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
Now internet gave us the opportunity to reach the whole world and that changed the expectations.
>I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
Artists wanted to "be heard and appreciated" since they started banging rocks together for rhythm and painting on cave walls...
Yeah. People act like it's a sin to want some notice or respect when you've worked and achieved something, like you should be some zen-like creature that is purely intrinsically motivated. It is not wrong to want some notice or respect from your peers once in a while.
Of course it's not a sin to want some notice and respect from people. It's a totally understood and natural, human thing.
By proposing to part with those expectations, I don't mean getting rid of human nature in a transhumanist way.
I'm just trying to warn people who are in the very beginning of their creative ways. There are so many ways to descend into misery and depression exactly because of the mismatch between expectations and our current reality.
Because I've been there.
In my early (1999-2001) music "career", so to say, my music somewhat blew the local scene, it was big in clubs, it played on the local radio, people would repeat catchphrases from my tracks when greeting me, I watched them dance to it. I made so many friends around it.
There was an immense motivation to write a track in the morning and listen to it in the evening on a 10 kW sound system among dancing people, under stroboscopes, black light and lasers cutting through fog.
Then our local club movement died out and its remnants were squeezed into small disco-bars with shitty sound, where people came to booze some and pick up dates, not for music.
And the music itself moved to the Internet. I tried to adapt. But oh boy was that a stark contrast!
I played a live gig in a disco-bar and some drunk morons came and asked me to play "something happier".
I watched my tracks never reach more than a hundred listens on the Internet (with a single random exception).
Ok, you might say it's just my music that is not of due quality or novelty, and you might be right. But I saw so many brilliant artists' profiles with such pitiful numbers of listens over such long periods of time that it totally shatters all illusions of getting heard on the Internet.
You either drown in the ocean of low to zero effort content, or you have to market yourself and again drown in the choir of yelling voices trying to shout everyone over, or you bombard labels with your demos to never get any answer, or an answer you get, but it basically states that you're someone's business asset from now on.
Sure, you can still expect your family or friends to listen and appreciate, but you know what? They don't care either, or care in underwhelming ways. And this alone can break your heart beyond all repair.
Still, I was able to glue mine back and go on with my music. And musically and sound engineering-wise, it's now a cut better than my "popular" and "appreciated" music from my club era. But only me and literally 3 friends of mine know that.
That's what made me a zen(ish) creature and write my original comment above.
Thanks for expanding on your story, it means a lot to hear from people with experience.
I've received a lot of thoughtful responses and am a little embarrassed because I'm probably looking in all the wrong places in my search for identity or joy or meaning. My life kind of fell apart in the last few years, first the career, then the relationship, then my sense of self as I realized all I've ever done were coping mechanisms. At this point, I'm essentially looking for a reason to live, and that places a heavier burden on anything I try than is reasonable.
Just don't give up, Gecko. The night is darkest before the dawn..
Sometimes one needs to let go (sounds beaten and banal, I know). In my case, I had to let go of my image as a musician. I didn't touch music at all for a few years. Then I started writing it again, as I please, without following any dogmas, never aiming to release it. And I grew fond of it, while before I mostly cared for how others would estimate it.
Just live aimlessly for some time. Find solace in nature, biking, hiking, watching the clouds, whatever keeps you afloat! The purpose will find you.
P.S. And by all means learn a DAW or a physical instrument!
Thanks for writing this. For the record, I wasn't responding to your original comment, which I agreed with. And I agree with and empathize with what you're saying here too - it sounds like you've had an interesting relationship with creating and have a lot of perspective on it, good and bad. Although if you were advocating to get rid of human nature in a transhumanist way, I would understand that to some extent - it's at least a solution. :)
I probably should have provided more context, but it's all rather off topic.
However, I guess my life is strange enough so that people made assumptions around my original statements that don't reflect my meaning.
Quite frankly, I'm friendless and have very low self esteem and have felt "not good enough" for most of my life.
I remember building Lego starships with a friend a long time ago, and I felt that on a fundamental level, nothing I could ever make would match what he could build. It was like a law of nature that I'm flawed in that way.
Any new interest that came into life also came from friends. Nothing ever originated with me, I didn't have the confidence for that. Having others to collaborate with automatically validates what I do, in a way.
It's possible I simply never learned how to self validate activities.
My need for validation is a very childlike one, it's rooted in emotional neglect. I remember my mom praising other people but never finding praise within our family. One of many things that planted seeds of this sense of fundamental inferiority. Then life solidified that in various ways.
I resonate with a bunch of this. The idea that what I make is somehow not as good as the “real” version of whatever it is (where “real” is hard to define, but roughly just, always better than what I made).
You mention the emotional neglect and the connection to childhood, and I get the sense you’re interested in figuring it out. It made me think you might like Joe Hudson’s work on YouTube.
Can't agree with this more. I also started learning guitar and producing music very recently. I have no interest in getting heard and appreciated (on most days atleast).
It has been a tremendously rewarding journey to create new music and see myself improve. 10/10 would do again.
Some people just never found what that thing is for them. And usually you find those things doing them the hard way while you suck. And then the reward is people will see what you do and recognize the work you put in. But if suddenly every person with a prompt does the exact same thing with zero effort, it does take away from the joy of doing it. At least if the joy of doing it is related to the feeling of liking to do "hard things" or liking to think of oneself as one that "does hard things". And I'd say that includes a lot of people and a lot of activities.
I bet a lot of accountants in the old days were really good at basic math, and proud of being fast and accurate and now there's calculators and the amount of people that work on mental math just for the love of the game is probably super small in comparison to when it was a core skill of many more people's jobs.
> For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous,
To clarify, when I speak of "approval", I'm not imagining a successful career or financial success. It's much more basic, i.e. having a few people tell me they genuinely like something I created would do that.
> it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
It's unfortunately not simple for me (again, context of long term burnout / depression etc). If I only go by enjoyment, I will watch TV and maybe read and go on bike rides until the end of my days. But that is not fulfilling in the long term. I have a creative drive, but it's rather intermittent and not enough to consistently want to do the work involved. I'm trying to nurture it.
If you're after that, try performing for (campfire guitar? Christmas carols?) or with (entry level jams, especially electronic ones) other people. Much easier to start out that one would think, but it requires a lot of self-confidence. With performing, you can scratch that creative itch by adapting/embellishing source material. A small lick here and there or a handful of alternative voicings are enough!
have you told the people around you that you are looking for that support and that its motivating?
I think you will find that creative works are no more fulfilling than bike rides when you actually get into it. There's no separate magic to it, and a good chance you wont remember doing either of them after some time
You can scratch the same music-exploration itch with a much lower time commitment and get the same thrill of accomplishment as you improve. There is also a built-in crowd of other players at any skill level that you can share your achievements with.
It's not the same glassy-eyed state as you'd get with normal video games, TV, or doom scrolling at all. You will need to focus and clear the mind.
OP said they're trying to nurture their creative drive, which is not the same itch. It's like someone saying they want to learn how to cook, and you recommend they microwave a TV dinner.
I'm a fan of rhythm games, as well as making music. Both are skills, but the game is a pale shade when by comparison IMHO. Monochrome vs the rainbow. OP said they're looking for long-term fulfillment and creative growth. I don't think rhythm games satisfy either, but well, you know, that's just like uh, my opinion man.
But actually creating music or playing an instrument is much more rewarding. The time commitment is part of it, the journey is the destination and all that.
Walk into any library, book store, second hand shop or wherever they sell media. Look at the hundreds of thousands of book, albums, DVD and I wonder how many of those folks were doing it trying to make it big, grab attention or turn it into a career?
And that is a very VERY tiny slice of the entire pie. For everyone successful artist you find, there are hundreds or thousands that never got lucky or had the skills to make it. I put luck first deliberately.
A good example, based on the IBSN listings there are currently 158 million unique books. That is one unique book for every 53 people on the world, how many can you think of?
I love going to old book stores and pulling out something random, usually some paper back from the mid 60's/70's on a topic you probably never even thought of. How much time and effort went into writing that, editing, producing, marketing it? I look up the authors to if they ever made much of it all, about 99% of the time, their name doesn't turn anything up. Despite their published works, they could still be alive, they are already forgotten under the sheer volume of works out there.
There are TV shows I remember, they had whole crews working on it, actors, writers and producers. The only proof they exist online is about a paragraph or two, didn't even get a wiki page. To be appreciated by those close to you, that should be more than enough, but for some it has to be broader, I do not know why.
I think a part of it is that many people come into this world thinking it is a race. I say, IF and that is a very big if; if life is a race, it is a 100meter race and it doesn't matter what position you come in. Saunter your way, take the long way. And yet when you get to the finish line there are loads of people racing past mocking you and desperately trying to convince that "You think that is the finish line? Nah, this is marathon and the real goodies are there!". And so they keep running as fast as possible, wearing themselves out and getting exhausted to no end. The joke being that there is no other finish line.
You can be content in you, content in now. Just be chill... damn it!
I’ve asked an artist if they should be worried about the newest generative AI capabilities. This is his (translated) response:
> Artists? Pencil laborers, more like.. I am in favor of using AI in visuals. It will eliminate a lot of mere decorators, and won’t even slightly affect the artists. I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers. Impressionism was born shortly after that. See, I believe many cursed photography, but Monet never saw it as a problem.
> I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers
I like this analogy. Maybe this time around is different, but I like to hope it's not.
The anti-AI discourse is almost identical to anti-photography diatribes from more than a century ago.
Artists will also learn to use AI to make art. I don’t mean slop, which is low effort stuff and I tend to use that term regardless of whether AI was involved. I mean real art where the AI is used with painstaking care the way a photographer uses their camera.
What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it. It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply. A healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.
Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.
Claim: What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it.
Why: It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
Claim: That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply.
Why: (because) a healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.
As for the last claim:
Claim: Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.
Here's the why behind that (since I didn't elaborate as I find it self-evident):
because he says he's fine with AI, because AI will sweep the art scene from lesser artists and lives the Monets and real artists. Either he claims that he is one of the lesser artists that's OK for AI to sweep away, or he implies that he's one of the good ones that would be fine. The latter sounds far more plausible.
The "phrased slightly differently" is the why. It's not circular, it's one step further, e.g. "why would it spoil it for small time artists" "because it will drawn the audience with slop".
You just keep questioning at the next level, like a small kid asking "any why would it do X", "because Y", "and why would it do Y". Ultimately you'll reach asking why the Big Bang happened or something.
What you're ask for seems to be "ultimate causual mechanism". That's not how arguments work, this isn't Physics. The reader needs to apply their thinking to the implications of extra slop production, for example.
If they don't believe that AI will produce extra slop, I don't know what to tell them.
> Why: It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
why do you think this is the case though? vs people being more excited to get art made by small artists because they arent ai slop.
tbe small artist opening their stufio to sell prints has always been about the experience of visiting and talking to the artist, not the piece of slop that you end up buying
He would certainly reply that his paintings weren't valued so highly for their functional purpose before.
If AI art doesn't impinge on your friend's business, it's because he was selling art for art's sake rather than (as the majority of artists do to make a living) creating art to fill a functional need. The latter is what photography and AI impact.
A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital. Or heck, even learning an instrument when MIDI was first introduced.
Even before generative AI, there is a long-going debate in audio circles around simulated guitar amplifiers. The truth is, the simulations of them have gotten so insanely good that now one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes.
My rule-of-thumb is this: "does this tool I'm using in particular take away from the authenticity of my performance or songwriting?" Example: I am very keen on performing vocals and guitar at the same time, and I don't have an expensive studio setup, and my office has background noise. I use these tools, and yes even some open source AI ones, 1) remove background noise of the individual tracks and 2) do a final master against a recording I want to target (using something like Matchering or similar [0]). It still sounds like me, my voice isn't perfect, my beat isn't consistent, but it sounds like I rented some studio space. So for me it was a cost-saving measure.
>> one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes
And this is actually a problem. Great art usually comes from constraints, real or artificial. These things are a lot of fun to tinker with (a really fun hobby) but one amp, one guitar, and a small number of effects pedals will probably lead to you actually make more and better stuff.
I have an all-in-one amp / pedalboard and it's just more practical, even though all I do is just pick an amp, plug in my guitar and play. They take up less space and cost less money in the long run if you actually do want to use many pedals.
I get what you're saying but in general this specific case I think the all-in-ones win for most people.
This was definitely true for me, which is why I write everything acoustically and ensure the song is "good" before going in my later age. If I want a specific effect, I then google what pedals were used in a particular song or artist, then I try to recreate the chain, and then tinker with that on top.
Ultimately I spent so much of my time worrying about "what crazy expensive equipment should I buy" when I was younger and more into this stuff, and I should have simply just played my shitty instruments and recorded on my shitty equipment. That's on me, but I also find it empowering as an artist that I can clean up my recording in the way that replaces my need for expensive equipment while maintaining (in my humble opinion) a sense of authenticity of my performance. I agree there may be too many knobs, but finding the knobs that I want has never been easier and I would rather live in the now than in the past.
> A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital.
A lot of people were right. Music gear lead heavily back into analog after the initial analog to digital transition. I started out using computers exclusively. When I purchased my first analog synth, I couldn't believe how much better it sounded than my VST's. It's hard to quantify exactly why, but my ears lit up the second I started using it.
In terms of amp modeling software, some of it is indeed very impressive. But, tends to fall apart when you need to tweak parameters. I assume this has to do with the capture process. But, if you are happy to use stock patches, it's basically an amp replacement.
I love making music, and got into it as a venue to be away from the computer. I still do post-production in Ableton, but everything else happens with gear not even connected to a computer. I've tried to make music with a DAW, but it feels so sterile and boring, compared to actually using hardware to make it.
Maybe get a second-hand Novation Circuit to start with, or some similar "groovebox" that lets you make songs on one device, and see if you actually still do enjoy making music, yet haven't found the right process for you yet.
I don't think you're wasting your time, as long as you're having fun, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world. Sure, AI could probably make "better" (by some definition of "better") music than me, but AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
> AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
Can I ask how you share music with friends? I guess this is part of my problem, I don't really have anyone I could share with or collaborate with. The few people in my life don't listen to the type of music I like.
I ask them to come over, then I ask them "Hey, mind if I play this for you and you tell me what you think?" basically. Alternatively, send it as a .mp3 via Whatsapp/Telegram and ask for feedback, but that's almost never as fun or useful.
Best way to meet like-minded people is to go to music events where those people are, always a ton of music makers around those, usually also by themselves, sometimes in the back or on the side to the speakers. Most people in such events are OK with being approached by strangers :)
+1 for hardware groovebox. DAW workflow isn't the only workflow. Hardware can be a pain, but if you embrace the limitations it can be really fun and rewarding as well. Korg Electribe originals are my favorite.
Maybe you could see if there's someone who finds the "not fun" part fun and you could collaborate with them. That would solve two problems at the same time.
Either way, I strongly encourage you to keep using a DAW if that brings you joy. Using AI to create art is a different skill set, just like using acoustic instruments is a different skill set from using either. Each option appeals a different amount to different people, and you should just do what brings you the most joy.
You have the answer to the "why do it" in the first part of "why you are doing it". Just because something may be created at the click of the button doesn't mean it fulfills the goals you are looking for. People knit even though there are machines that do that for you. You are doing it for you.
1. All that AI really does is a (partially) randomized exploration of the space that has been spanned by existing music. AI creativity, as far as it can be said to exist, is limited by this. You, on the other hand, are human and not bound by any of these limitations. You are free to explore wild things that no AI can do. Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments. Bang on random stuff that has a nice ring to it. Record background hums, apply filters and envelopes to them etc. And there are so many other ways to produce unique creations.
2. Most importantly, music is a form of human expression. It is able to capture the human condition in a unique way. As a human, you can express these things genuinely through your own emotions, experiences, memories etc. AI systems can only produce hollow facsimiles of this. Regardless of whether you are conscious about it, every piece of music that you create is a reflection of you: your thoughts, your emotions, your process. And that imparts the true value on your creations.
> Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments.
I'm not sure if you already knew this, but this is actually a thing already - it's been called "Botanica" and there are a bunch of cool tracks floating around.
I just recently setup a very simple home recording studio after picking up drums again at 40. I had the same thoughts, but I'm going it for me and it is extremely therapeutic. Plus, given the genre (extreme metal), I've gotten into much better shape. (Also picked up an 8 string guitar. I never grew out of my edgelordiness. No real point to mentioning this but just wanted to tell someone :)
AI music may eventually satisfy the masses and you can't stop that speeding train, but the process of creating something yourself will always have value if it's something you're interested in creating.
don't sell your work short. it has value because it comes from you, and struggling to finish is unbelievably common in the creation process - not to mention frustration and a lack of joy.
if you're creating because you feel a drive to create, you are making art and that has intrinsic value to yourself and others. if however you are performing the act of musical creation as a means to an end, what you are doing may be better considered work and not art. the work of others can also be appreciated but it is different.
keep at it though. you are asking good questions and unlike many you are also personally engaging with them.
I recently wrote more or less this exact comment on another platform recently (although I've been making music for a while).
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.
Maybe I should have been more precise – I'm trying to learn how to physically manifest things in head. Woodwork is part of that, but I'm just generally manufacturing skills from CAD design, electronics & PCB design, metal work, 3d printing, etc.
You should 100% buy a cardboard table from Ikea if you just need a table that sorta does the job for 5 years, but if you want something made of solid wood that's a certain shape and style, you might be better off building your own depending on your product & price requirements.
Similarly there are just little things that I know can be built but there's no real demand for the product because my specific requirements are niche. For example, I have chickens and sometimes we get foxes snooping around their coop at night. I have an alerting system for this, but I'd quite like to be able to trigger gun shot noises and my sprinkler if there's indeed a fox in my garden to try to deter them from coming back.
No one's going to sell stuff like this, but I can make it. I'm also an AI doomer, so feel I need to learn basic skills like this which might help if things start getting bad and I'm somehow still around.
Few things are as satisfying to me as seeing a musical idea realized and executed well.
It is immensely fun to write, play, and record with friends. In a good session there's usually a moment where something falls into place and suddenly the record feels awesome and the path forward is clear. The whole room will jump up and say "That's it! Do that again!" and shout and high-five and get a second wind to keep going. It is invigorating and it never gets old.
Even if the records aren't any good, it's so. much. fun. to make dumb shit. Whether by yourself or with a friend. Don't underestimate the fact that music is pure play. It is one of the most plastic mediums available to us and you can sculpt it endlessly and continue to surprise yourself with the things that you can make. Have fun and do it for it's own sake.
This is all to say, the reward of making music (for me) is doing the work and being creative. Even if that's all you achieve it's valuable and priceless. You've already won. Great work. All secondary rewards (adoration, financial success, etc) are a cherry on top of that thing you've created. You did that.
Art is a form of communication. You turn to the arts when the other methods to communicate something either do not feel as if they fit, or feel that they will not encompass the idea you wish to convey. Art is a dialogue with other people, not a commodity. The point is to help yourself understand what you want to say, not to say something that is valuable in way that can be exchanged for goods.
So do not become discouraged by the machine generated sounds. They are only sounds, not a message.
I have done this with music, writing, and many other things. AI doesn’t make any of these things less enjoyable for me because the process of creation itself is the part that I enjoy.
I have a very low bar for what I consider to be a successful creation: it just needs to be enjoyable for myself in the future. Anyone else who happens to enjoy the content I make is a bonus. I have several songs on SoundCloud that I have produced in the past and I still enjoy listening to them.
There are still several avenues for this, and I imagine they'll continue to exist even in a mostly-AI-enhanced world. You'll need to dedicate time to finding them.
For example, Battle of the Bits [0] is a community all about chiptune music. I'm sure you _could_ use AI to help you learn and produce some things, but the community is mostly about sharing ideas about what works at the electronic level, so even if AI became super capable, it wouldn't help you engage with the community in any meaningful way. There are several such communities across different domains and I imagine they aren't going anywhere anytime soon, regardless of how much improvement happens w.r.t. AI, since the focus is on "what you learned" and not so much "what you did".
Similarly, I have seen communities focused entirely on Silicon Graphics workstations, or pc-98 internals. Human passion-based communities aren't going anywhere, Google just makes it incredibly hard to find them outside of word-of-mouth.
I agree, the question of “why should I bother to do x/y/z when AI can do it so much better/faster/easier?” will become more prevalent and urgent as time goes on, resulting in a sort of creative and intellectual nihilism that will be harder on bright, intelligent people.
It was already difficult in the pre-AI age to engage with some activity in a meaningful way for the love of the process. AI now serves as the ultimate temptation away from doing the process yourself, getting the reward with much less of the effort. At work this may be appropriate, but life is not your work. We must be wary of using AI for activities that reduce the texture of our lives, making it less rich experientially. Bold claims to AI changing the world is reducing human activity to that which is readily generated on computing devices, and with it collapsing our sense of self to those few activities.
> Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
This is the reason why a lot of us make music. Writing orchestral pieces is my own meditation. I don't share most of them, and replacing them with AI would defeat the purpose.
Please keep learning it! The world needs more musicians, even if we never hear them.
Learn an instrument (guitar,keys,drums...) if you haven't already and go jam with friends and do concerts instead. That's the best part of making music.
The age of music production is almost over, the age of the music industry already is.
I wouldn't want to be in the DAW/VST business today though, because a lot of potential customers are thinking exactly as you do...
> I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
If you enjoy the process and its outcomes, then it's not a waste of time. If you are forcing yourself to do it or have another motivation for it that is not rooted in genuine interest, then yes, you are wasting your time.
> I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent
This is a spiritual question, so you will have as many answers as there are askers. I found my answer and am happy to share it with you. Why do it? Because I want to. What is worth doing? What I want to do or what gets me to the things I want. Wanting is a very important process, that is often damaged by conditioning. We are told that some things we want are bad and that some things we don't want are good. Or that ego is evil. So many ways this process can go wrong. I think fixing this in oneself is part of becoming an actual adult. Once you know what you want and what you don't want, you no longer are dependent on others telling you what to do or forcing you to do things you shouldn't be doing. Ego is not evil, it's there for a reason. Some people have an overgrown one while others have an underdeveloped one. What is needed is balance. I don't think the pattern recognition machine has anything to do with it. I suspect, that a lot of people who use music as a band aid for personal problems, i.e. people who build their identity around being special due to music making, are the ones who are afraid of AI, but if you just enjoy making music, then what does it matter if music itself is patterned and if a machine can exploit that? It doesn't take anything away from the joy of making music, if you experience it in the first place.
I need to force myself to do almost everything. Simply saying it's a waste of time because of that isn't practical unless I give up on life entirely.
In practice, it's not binary. I'm interested because I want to make music similar to that which I like listening to.
Sometimes I get enjoyment out of it, but sometimes I lose interest maybe because I'm facing a frustration.
My question of wasting time is connected to "can I even create something worth listening to". If nothing I could make is worth listening to, then I guess I would feel the process of creation is pointless.
I've heard others write about how what they produce is worth listening to, to them. I think that is enough, but I also think I lack confidence in my own judgement. Almost like I need someone else to confirm my validity. I have recognized that as a result of emotional neglect, but I haven't figured out how to fix it.
I understand how you feel, because I have been there.
Worthiness is an illusion created by the mind. In reality, there is no worthiness. "can I even create something worth listening to" is an absurd question. You either like what you are hearing or you don't.
Sounds like you are not in a good place right now. The only thing I can say, that I hope won't sound patronizing, is that it is just a stage in the process of life. When I felt that way, it was both terrifying (why do I feel that way) and not terrifying (I don't feel anything). Some call it depression. Maybe they are right. For me, it's the quiet before the storm - the old has to die for the new to be born. I can now see, that the reason for that was the life I lived up to that point was not the life I wanted to live. I wasn't authentic to myself. I was weighed down by coping mechanisms, misguided beliefs, fear, and trauma. There was so much I had to reject and heal. Took me a few years, but now life has a new taste to it.
You said you are facing frustration. Good. Face it. Whatever it is that you feel, don't try to run from it or cover it with something else. The only way is through. Good luck
I used to make a lot of music in FL, mostly beats. I would make beats similar to whatever I was listening to at the time, try to get a little weirder with it every time. Like making Memphis style beats with crushed drums and warped samples running through PS1 reverb until it's drowning. It was never for anyone, I would send my songs to my group chat with my buddies for feedback. Kind of fell off just because I got into other hobbies. It doesn't need to be for anyone else. A re-mix of a song I did got 2M on YouTube though, the real catharsis was beating the botted 300k views the shitty rapper from my grad class had though. That video is copyright struck so I don't make any money from it, but that was never the goal, I just uploaded so I could send my songs to the boys/listen on my phone to do the 'ol car test.
I find the process itself a balm for the soul. It’s the one part of my life where only my vision matters, and I am free to completely disregard what others want. That includes some kind of imaginary audience.
I have a bunch of friends who also make music for fun and we share demos and build each other up. Sometimes we make stuff together, send each other inspo, discuss how to improve something in a song, etc.
But I have to say, the end result is completely irrelevant here. We’re all doing it for the fun of making, not for the finished product.
Given that you said you get the energy from the social element and approval, you could build a social network that will be a source of that approval for your creations. Otherwise you could find a hobby that gives you what you’re looking for without the less enjoyable parts.
I'm having fun building elaborate software that meets my needs precisely and nobody else's. I mean, maybe it would meet other's needs but that production would take away from the fun and learning I have building it, and would also reduce its utility for me personally.
If you do it for money it is maybe a waste of time, because the chance to win the race were already low and now you have to compete with a tsunami of AI generated music. If you do it for your enjoyment, nothing changed and nothing will change
I know this is kind of at odds with this thread in general but
> but I know it requires work (...) to finish it
If you're like me and, when you get to this stage, you tend to burn out and abandon the thing, have you tried using gen AI to get you over that hump?
I love coding and still do but I often reached a point where all the fun, easy things were done and I'd be stuck at 90% with only difficult and boring tasks. I've been using Claude recently to just get me over that hump and finish my projects. It can still be fulfilling if you do it right.
Hey friend, if it helps, every “song” you make will eventually become a symbol and memory of a time in your life. It doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes these sounds have even more fidelity than text when it comes to capturing your emotional state and thoughts at the time. I didn’t realize that for a while but in retrospect all of the “it sounds bad” and “I didn’t finish it” didn’t matter
But you will end up with something where you can say „this is mine, I did that“ for the rest of your life. Even if no one ever cares. I come back to some of the things I did in the past through hard labour (coding projects, skateboarding videos) and even if it is nice if others appreciate this, they are still always there for myself as sign of what I achieved.
I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.
Just pick up your instrument and make some noise. DAWs are time sinks.
Music is about the “feel” first and foremost. Playing music on a physical instrument or singing is a feel thing.
DAWs are tools for polishing what was created with feeling into something “produced”. If that’s what you want to end up with, that’s ok. Just be clear with yourself on which you’re trying to do.
I had this exact realization. Taking chords from a chord progression generator, putting it into FL studio, adding a random melody that stays in the key from a cool synth preset, some random drum loop, and end result? I guess it could be called music. Its a combination of sounds that doesnt sound actively bad.
I noticed the problem when I realized I couldn't make music in a specific mood or genre. Sometimes I'd finish my song and think "oh wow, a happy rock song" or "a sad edm song" or whatever but it was always just random chance where I ended up. With music theory knowledge I could always add more instruments or notes that could exist in that place but with 0 direction, whatever I made was always listenable but never more than that.
Mhm... it sounds like the main problem is that you like the result more than the actual process.
If you start a new hobby, you should enjoy the time you spend doing it. Of course, every hobby has its chores or tedious parts, but doing it just for the end product or for the validation you get from others will never work in the long run.
I'd wager most people who make music are making it for the sheer joy of expression. Like .001% of people who make music get any kind of meaningful monetary return on it, and I think anyone who goes into it looking for monetary return is doing it for the wrong reasons. In my view, AI changes nothing where it matters it music.
1. None of this should matter if you do it because it’s therapeutic.
2. If it turns out it’s not therapeutic for you, try something different. Play piano. Learn chess. Learn MMA. Go for a run. Heck, vibecode something silly. Music production is not the only way, if you have it a good try and it just frustrates you, try something else.
For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand, most instruments cost a significant amount of money. Learning it properly is even more important and expensive - fixing something in a DAW is easy, unlearning muscle memory is much harder.
Keeping up said muscle memory also isn't easy. Sure, if you got a free-standing house, no one will care much about a drum set, trumpet or whatever. But most people don't have that luxury in urban sets any more, and typical residential building quality makes even some electronic instruments (e.g. kicks still cause some amount of noise passing through floors) a challenge. Building noise ordnances / HOA rules are a bitch on top of that - most allow only a limited time window in the afternoon, useless for working-class people.
Local community groups... if your community has one, and they have some studio space where noise doesn't matter, great! Most, unfortunately, don't - space in urban environments is already rare and at a hefty premium, space that accepts noise and has adequate resources (in practice: a usable toilet is the most important) is even rarer.
> For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand
Depends on the instrument. You can get a completely new Harley Benton electric guitar for sub-$200.
> Sure, if you got a free-standing house
Sure, trumpets and classical instruments are a challenge, but all the guitars and all the keys can be practiced on headphones with near-zero noise. It's not an excuse.
Lmao compared to the past things are easier than ever. Can you imagine telling a farmer from 100 years ago that life is too hard? Society has made people accustomed to free stuff and cushy living. Life IS hard for the majority of us without significant wealth.
You can find really affordable used guitars or keyboards which are completely suitable for beginners. Beginner's electric drum kits are cheaper than real ones and hook up to headphones - there goes your sound problems.
I definitely agree it is much harder to learn a instrument than it is to learn a DAW. Believe me, I've done both.
There are lots of reasons to forego picking up an instrument, but living in an apartment or a modest budget are certainly not good reasons.
>> For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand, most instruments cost a significant amount of money.
This isn't true at all. You can get a brand new Squier Strat for < $200 and a second hand one for less than half that. You can pick up used acoustic guitars for next to nothing if you look hard enough. You can get a used digital piano for < $200 too.
Go check out a drum circle, all you need is a bucket. Learn to sing, join a choir. It’s not that hard if you quit making excuses. I’ve lived in small towns in rural areas for most of my life and there have been multiple community music groups in all of them.
instruments have never been cheaper, and for as dense as US cities can be now, they're still not that dense and people have learned to play instruments in denser settings
What? I never said that. A DAW is not a musical instrument, it does not produce sound. You output an audio file, then it’s played through a speaker. It kills the joy of performing in my opinion. That doesn’t make it not music.
What about finding game creators or similar who could make use of a musical collaborator. Your music gains an extra purpose, you mix with other creatives and those others get their soundtrack sorted before they head to Suno as the easy option.
If you're learning for your own enjoyment then you should keep learning. But regardless of AI, the music industry has always been notoriously difficult to get into
I have little interest in doing a DJ set in public but I'll spend hours crate digging for new music and mixing circular black slabs of vinyl for nothing more than the love of the craft.
It's not a waste of time. Every time some new thing comes out and becomes popular, everyone everywhere says everything must be that thing because it's the future. In America, everyone wanted pure white sliced bread. People wanted frozen TV dinners. People wanted chain fast food restaurants. People wanted no effort reality TV. People wanted endless superhero movies.
Now people want actual food and they want stuff made with human hands and they want to know what's in it. People want TV shows with a proper story. People are beyond done with cookie cutter superhero movies.
The slop wave is going to pass. AI can make stuff that sounds super polished and perfect, but people will want the rough and crude touch of something hand made. They'll want to see videos of musicians showing behind the scenes of how they made something. They'll want to go and see a musician perform. Interest in 100% AI generated music will fade into the background and it'll be relegated to soulless Muzak used for ambiance in soulless chain restaurants too cheap to pay for actual music and too afraid to play any songs that might offend or annoy someone.
The not-fun work isn’t on the song, it’s on you. Improving the song is a byproduct. This only really becomes apparent over time but you’ll realise you were working on yourself all along.
Fear not, a few of us are building in the direction you're hoping. Leveraging AI to make it easier to stay in a creative headspace with music rather than getting caught in a spreadsheet with endless settings
Sharing is definitely a core part of "why do it", but that can be sharing with friends/family or a living room performance
I have ~40 demoes from a music career that never took off. Now I am feeding little Suno with this demoes, turning them into afrobeat with oboe, deep house with harmonica, etc, and reliving the creative joy.
You can make a decent demo in a DAW and run it through AI for a nice production. The art of writing songs is still equally hard IMO. And a good song is still good, no matter what costume it wears.
It's worth doing. Those "no AI" mixes on youtube are doing great, though the vast majority of people is clueless and will happily digest any slop.
Create for yourself, and for those that seek the human effort and passion. There's an increasing number of us.
I'm the biggest doomer on this site, yet I'm certain human art will become even more valuable, and appreciated, than it has ever been before in history. Just don't expect to make billions out of it, or to reach out to the masses that are quite content with industrial-scale mediocrity.
You are clearly just at the beginning of your musical journey. I am happy for you. Yes, music for me too makes no sense without other people. This means, I suggest, that you must go out and find other people to collaborate with. The more you do it the more you realize just how many people out there are in the same boat as you. And once you find that right person or group, it’s like nothing else. And let’s be clear, this will take you far far outside your normal social circle. The type of people who like the same music as you may be completely different in every other way. It is important to actively seek out the right people and along that journey, define exactly what that person is, as well as who you are. This is the thing I care most about and yes I hope that more tools, AI or not come out to reduce that work that you have to do to make something polished, so everyone can focus on being creative.
>I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
That's true of 99% of very polished finished work too. Amazing bands and artists in Spotify with sub 1000 streams/month.
>None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
Absolutely. One big concern is that even if you do it and you're proud of it, many will think it's AI anyway.
Plus the over-inflation of AI generated shit. It could all die in a fire.
> I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way
Well... play in band/orchestra ? You get to meet people, interact with them, build with them, etc.
I've been making music solo using various machines and computers all my life and I love it, but it's probably not for everyone. Yes, you're alone. Yes, (almost) nobody cares, so if you can't enjoy the process there is no point really.
() from time to time someone will show some interest but let's face it: there's just too much good music released everyday, competing with other distractions for the attention of the people.
For people like me, AI doesn't change much, it's another tool. We've been abusing technology in music for decades.
It depends what you want to get out of it, and what you think art itself really is.
If it's nothing but an end product, that needs to fit a specific aesthetic, with a specific sound, then I probably agree. AI is making that "pointless" in a way.
Almost everyone I know who's been an artist for years though, has come to a similar realization: What you set out to create, and what it turns into through the process of creating it are different things. The meaning, truly is found along the way.
You can always be better, there's always more to learn. Nothing is ever truly perfect, or "complete"
If you write harmony, there's always a different way it could be written, that might fit better, or be more interesting. If you do sound design, whether that's with getting different guitar tones, synth programming, unique recording techniques, there's always more to learn, or a different way to approach it.
If the only point is an end result, then AI can deliver a simulacra of that.
For everyone I know that loves music, or working with DAWs, the end result is an ever shifting target as you learn more, and understand music in a different way.
Ultimately, there are no shortcuts to making something new, because the practice of trying to make things is what results in what your art becomes. Tools and technology can shape what that thing ends up being, but they (traditionally) don't replace the process of creating it, and the feedback loop between who you are and the decisions you make along the way.
Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
Some people seem to compare this to sampling, but anyone who's ever actually worked with sampling in a creative way will realize how hollow that comparison is. Almost all good sampling still requires a good deal of active feedback, between the person working with it and the way THEY hear what's going on.
Remove the person from that loop, replace the decisions with a general vague notion, and you end up with something that sounds "like" music, but that feedback loop is broken.
I see the same thing with all the AI UI design that's coming out. It's all generally quite competent, and exactly the same. Great for a business tool, where maybe the velocity and an acceptable MVP is the only point, but terrible for actual design and novel thought.
TL;dr: Why do it? Because you want to, and you think that with enough time engaging with something you'll change, just as it does, and the result isn't something you could have ever predicted when you started. It changes you, and that's the point. Just like learning an instrument, or learning to code. It's not purely about the produced result, and that very result fundamentally is changed by you actively engaging with whatever the medium is.
> Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
This hits very close to the philosophical core of the AI debacle.
All hardcore fans of AI just want things done. The process is of no interest to them.
This is truly an eschatologic problem of desire. Consider:
Some people want to grab their result, attain satiation, have orgasm, and die, right now.
Others would much rather enjoy the process, the meal itself, indulge in gentle act of love in tune with the partner, and just keep on living their lives, continuously.
Thanks, I like this answer. I think part of my problem is more general, a struggle to enjoy something when I can tell I'm not good at it. It's kind of a circular problem, I will need to spend more time on it to get better and I need to conjure confidence that I could do so out of the ether.
I have experienced the process you're talking about, although to some degree I feel it's symptomatic of a lack of skill. I start out with some kind of inspiration in mind, but end up with a compromise between what I can do and what sounds good when I fiddle around with things. Part of me feels dissatisfaction that I don't know which knobs to turn to get what I want, but I suppose that's just the normal learning process (albeit less structured than those I have gone through in the past, which is its own obstacle sometimes).
I’ve also struggled with the “not enjoying something because I suck at it” problem, and it’s a tough one. The answer is to remove expectations, but much easier said than done.
That said, I wonder if doing it with other people who suck would help. I started playing ice hockey as an adult, and the thing that got me over the initial hump of being completely useless was doing lessons with other newbies in my exact shoes (or skates) rather than trying to go right to full speed games.
> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company
This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.
Exactly, and that's the problem. The reasoning for creating the music is the problem, not that an artist wanted to use AI to generate something or experiment.
It's not even muzak at this point, at least that honest about what it is and why it exists. It's the music version of the automated AI videos on YouTube, which takes a Reddit posts, have an AI do a voice over and then run Subway Surfer in the background (Though I haven't seen one of them in months).
The way revenue works on these platforms is fundamentally broken. Revenue should be considered per user to artists they listened to per month. This is actually how YouTube Premium works.
Right now the way that revenue split works is you pool together all the cash from humans and hand it to whoever has the most bots.
Yep, that (majority!) amount of load on the infrastructure exists to try to win the rat race for whatever percentage of revenue comes from songs that are streamed regardless of their origin.
These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.
Do not try to solve an unsolvable problem, you'll end up hurting real users quite a bit more than you might imagine. Imagine new enthusiastic users trying your platform getting hit with an AI label because of inevitable false positives.
'Detecting AI' is not a problem that has real solutions, the only avenue is something supply side like synthid. But that harms users too, by introducing further barriers for indie users.
I train music generation models. They are very trivial to detect. In fact, detecting them then training them to evade detection by the detection model is a big part of training them! But the detectors win instantly without some hardcore regularization. Simply turn that off and you've instantly got a perfect classifier.
This isn't like text classification, the signal many orders of magnitude higher bitrate and so many more corners need to be cut. It's likely going to be nearly impossible or at least not remotely worth it to generate an audio signal that is truly undetectable in the foreseeable future.
You are right, the output of a model that generates music directly is, for now, easy to categorize as AI.
What this big flux of AI generated music online isn't really that. It'a a tiny bit autogenerated stuff and a whole lot of automatically remixed stuff. The reason it can not be easily classified as AI is because quite a bit of human produced music is also that, and you'd just shut out real users.
Today. Trying to detect AI is like extracting water from puddles in a lake that is quickly drying up. What is the point in the short term if it's impractical in the long term? It will catch some low-hanging fruit in the best case, and will find false positives in the worst.
My point is you should consider creating truly undetectable audio end to end with AI to be effectively impossible for the foreseeable future (i.e., I would bet money it is still trivially detectable five years from now). It won't be detectable to humans, though, only models.
in the broad strokes of ai generated, i wouldnt be so sure.
if the ai picked a bunch of samples and combined them together and mastered using an mcp to a DAW, how is that particularly distinguishable vs a person doing the same thing badly?
i can see how the llm generation pictures of spectrograms is essy to spot, but much less so with tool following.
even worse of you using a vla to have it actually play the guitar and use the recording as a sample.
theres some time and setup to make it happen sure, but somebody put that all in a studio and expose an mcp
This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.
"AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.
I've had my digital art flagged a few times for various reasons (automatic copyright infringement and NSFW filters) -- so this is nothing new (in particular the artwork blocked the upload for some artist songs). The only thing is to have a reasonable appeal process. In all cases we got an automated approval after appeal, but it can put an untimely delay.
Honestly I hope that the AI filter would be much better in terms of false positive than the aforementioned one, if only because it should be easier via statistical methods.
The only reason you're saying that is because you haven't tried to build such a detector yourself. It's not like text where it's impossible to tell reliably if something's AI generated or not, from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt.
Nobody open sourced their detection algorithm as that would just trigger a cat-and-mouse game between Suno/Udio and a detection platform (and Suno/Udio have way more VC money than you do), but plenty are being sold as a service and work very reliably.
> …from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt.
It's trivial to vibe-code something that detects watermarked output and accidental model fingerprints. But next week the watermarks will be defeated, and the accidental fingerprints will change and ultimately disappear. It's not possible to generally solve the "To what degree is this audio AI generated?" problem, any more than it has been to solve the same problem for text and images. https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
You're discussing pure hypotheticals, I'm discussing what you can do today with very little effort. If that changes, it changes, but so far it's trivially easy.
The question I'm more interested in is why other music streaming services are not interested in doing this trivially easy work to get rid of spam, even if it's just for the short run as you assume it will be.
Has this happened to you? Or anyone you know? Or do you know of a lawsuit by a label against an artist for making AI music, and a lawsuit by the same artist against an AI detector for flagging a false positive. This story seems extremely unplausible.
Aside, your analogy doesn’t make sense. Horoscopes are generally not in the business of signal detection, and are usually enjoyed by the reader of the horoscope, like any other art. If you had used a sudoku solver your analogy would make a bit more sense.
do you have any idea on what percentage of musicians use AI to create the song and then also create the sheet music so they can play it themselves? That seems like a decent workflow, use AI to get the song right, and then record yourself playing it with you're own creative tweaks. That's kind of how I do AI assisted coding.
I assume you're not a musician, because that sounds insane. If you're good enough to play at full speed from brand new sheet music, then you don't need the AI. Playing from sheet music isn't like typing.
There are some composers who use a workflow like this - Suno is a scratchpad which can be used to quickly trial ideas, clarify concepts with collaborators, etc. don't think it's common, either among composers, or Suno users at large
I'm curious how your platform might avoid false positives with intentionally repetitive music, in particular techno (either produced via a DAW or hardware).
Our relationship to slop is a bit more complicated than that, no?
Whether it's terrible music or not is somewhat irrelevant. Plagiarized music doesn't sound worse than the original.
What seems to matter more is the story behind the work. Basically, if the author is a grifter trying to make a quick buck, then it's slop. You can make an argument that Taylor Swift qualifies as slop, but most people will disagree. The public will be the final arbiter. All I really want is a big red lever to cast my vote.
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data.
It will also miss music performed by a stack of cartoon raccoons in a trench coat and music performed by God, so I don't get what point there is in mentioning other fictional characters.
I dunno; there has always been shit videos on YouTube, obviously, but there used to be a sort of natural filter of videos that had nice transitions and decent narration and dialog that was more or less grammatically correct that made it so that I would mostly watch videos I enjoyed.
Now that AI has cargo-culted these traits I'm getting a lot of recommendations of videos that will initially seem "ok", and then I realize after about a minute that the narration will have some weirdness, and the script will have a lot of the typical ChatGPT "tells", and of course the video comes off as pretty low effort after that.
My YouTube recommendations have become increasingly useless, which honestly might be a good thing because it's made it so that I have less desire to use YouTube.
The weirdness is creeping in to regular Youtube content too. For example, I like to watch Ryan Hall's stream during extreme weather (tornado season in the US). In his forecast videos he has to start with something weird to prove to the audience they're not watching a fake AI generated channel, like eat a banana or apple while talking and wave the fruit around. It was very strange until i realized what he was doing. He also started wearing a suit which is very out of character for him, that must also confuse AI trained on his previous videos.
The first is AI-generated content. This can start with nothing more than an idea. Some of it is uniquely-presented stuff that's actually kind of interesting: I got sucked into a nice Ken Burns-style narrated documentary about the rise and fall of Baldwin Piano a few weeks ago. It was a little wordy, but it worked. It took awhile before a very glaring error in diction made me rewind for a double-take, note that no human would ever make that mistake while narrating, and then burn the channel from my feed.
The second problem is very different: Cloning individual people and channels. When a person (or nearly as likely, a bot) elects to use a bot to clone someone else's style, persona, and everything else then that's... that's very unsettling.
---
The first problem? It's whatever. I don't like it, but there may come a time when I accept it. At this point it's mostly harmless and really guilty of nothing more than wasting some of my time now and then.
The second problem? It can be reprehensible.
And it's particularly bad with a channel like Ryan Hall. I don't have any idea of how he is as a person (never meet your heroes), but I like to presume that he's generally a swell guy. And moreover: He's important.
When the weather turns iffy, I put his stream on and it's mostly just background noise. I usually give it very little attention.
But when he mentions the name of the small city I live in then that means that shit is just about to get very real here -- very soon. That's astoundingly useful to me, and the safety of the people I care about.
I also find a lot of value in obvious parody. It's can be fun, and it can make people think. The music of Weird Al or There I Ruined It, the crazy stories in The Onion, the memes. That's all good. But this Ryan Hall business? It's bad.
So, there's definitely a line.
And I don't know where the line should be drawn. But using bots to deceive and thereby dilute the value of the content of Ryan Hall's channel is definitely on the wrong side of that line.
People who create AI music are largely not sharing it with others for any reason other than to create a revenue stream. They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas. The system builds brick walls where there was once osmosis.
I agree that people who refuse to listen to AI music or create AI music will still continue on the same path as before in terms of the evolution of music.
But AI music can make it even harder for people to eke out a living as musicians, since they are competing with something that costs far less to make. And some people who would otherwise learn how to create music themselves will instead choose not to learn this skill because it is easier to use AI.
>They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas.
If not they most definitely are listening to other music that influences them. If you have proof that such a producer listens to 0 music feel free to share it.
They're describing the "music" that's churned out almost entirely hands off to siphon royalties. Even the creator isn't listening to 100% of what they're uploading, it's spam that can be produced in massive quantities and can overwhelm a platform if left unchecked (as the article describes, AI music is 1-3% of actual listens by users but 44% of uploads).
Actual artists who need years to create a few hours of handcrafted content don't have a chance in an environment where hundreds of hours of slop can be generated in less than a day for a few hundred bucks. Platforms like Deezer recognize they need to address that imbalance somehow or they'll eventually lose their high quality contributors in a vicious cycle if it becomes impossible to compete.
Because some crafts are more sacred than others. Making a painting is more sacred than smearing my shit in the Barns and Nobel bathroom stall, although arguably less fun.
Who decides that? We do, collectively. Why do we have that power? Because we define art. Why do only humans have this power? Because art is an innately human thing, so we get to decide.
I find one of the most unsettling things about 2025-2026 is how little people seem to agree with this point you're making.
It's like this hyper-reductive thinking where it's all just "if the the outcome is the same, so what!?" has just metastasized and everyone is false-equivalence-ing their way into hell
It makes me want to scream. like, beauty is not arbitrary, not everything can be homogenized into content paté, that does not make the world better. I'm sure really smart people will argue i'm wrong for some reason but it just makes me feel so sad
I don't agree, because I think the zeitgeist should be as concerned with my lowly output being automated away (as a IT worker drone) just as much. I'm sorry if you view that as a false-equivalence
a lot of gen ai is essentially a pollution machine creating digital single use plastics. Whoever can identity and sift it for value will be the after ai heroes.
That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want.
Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so.
I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.
Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable.
Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.
Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.
The difference between this and what we are seeing in this article is you aren't sitting down, grinding out dozens/hundreds of these, then spamming them with little to no regard for anyone else for profit. You do it at small scale, for yourself/friends, and clearly care about the results. You are trying to make something intentionally.
I think a lot of people make an assumption that problems like this are fixed-sized; that by making getting a song easier, that that's the end of the the line.
In my mind the better mindset is to think that the problems are not fixed size, and instead these tools can allow for bigger and cooler projects, and/or projects that wouldn't be possible (or at least would be infeasible) without some kind of technological assistance.
AI tools can be used to create slop that is either "bad" or extremely bland at an effectively-infinite speed. It could also be used to make some really cool and interesting stuff if a person is really willing to spend time and effort to make it cool. Usually this requires more than just "prompting" though.
Not in my book, I know a lot of low/no effort attempts to spam "content creation" channels, no curation, etc that I'd call slop before this. I'm trying to use AI to generate something that did not/would not exist otherwise. It's admittedly probably better because it's using human-written lyrics for the covers (and memories?), but to be honest, 80s new wave lyrics can be pretty hokey. "Any AI = slop" is probably more a belief system than an objective measure.
I don't think what you're doing, or at least what you described, is inherently slop. If you're actively putting in effort to make something you think is cool and to make something you're actively proud of (or at least something that you genuinely want people to enjoy), I don't think that's "slop", or at least I don't think it's bad.
It's certainly different than those low-effort channels that mass upload hundreds of videos a day because they're able to automate the entire video-making process; those are completely soulless, again almost by definition. Those exist to just try and effectively skim revenue from adsense (or subscriber revenue in the case of Deezer), and making something that people will actually "enjoy" isn't the purpose.
Of course, this isn't a new problem; I remember a few years ago (before generative AI became viable for this stuff), there were "tutorials" on the best way to upload hours and hours of noise or silent music to Spotify to extract revenue, and of course let's not forget the infamous "Elsagate" stuff that plagued YouTube. AI has maybe accelerated the problem but it certainly wasn't the first thing to create "slop".
I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but AI is a tool. Tools can be good or bad; if AI is a tool that you can use to actively help you be more creative then I don't think that's bad. If you're just generating something to pad a resume or extract ad revenue, that's slop.
It is a combination of publisher lock in and folks attempting wild new stuff that breaks out of what AI stuff typically produces.
Earlier this year with a lot of luck, the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine suddenly got discovered because they are doing stuff that falls outside of conventional music styles.
They aren't unique in the experimental nature they are exploring but it has highlighted an hunger from audiences to find stuff outside of the median. Folks like Frank Zappa had to relentlessly advocate for themselves as they figured there was a middle ground between these two thing.
On a similar note I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! This won't work for all projects, but for my indie games it's a good idea.
> I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good!
??
You say you deleted the tests, because you "should test it"? The logic seems inconsistent.
Sanity checking LLM-generated code with LLM-generated automated tests is low-cost and high-yield because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
I think LLMs are really bad at writing tests. In the good old days you invested in your test code to be structured and understandable. Now we all just say "test this thing you just generated".
I shipped a really embarrassing off-by-one error recently because some polygon representations repeat their last vertex as a sentinel (WKT, KML do this). When I checked the "tests", there was a generated test that asserted that a square has 5 vertices.
But LLMs let you skip all the boring parts - setting up harness, writing some initial inputs, adding asserts for every output. And then _you_ get to do actually important stuff, like ensuring square has 4 vertices.
I suppose that my generalization was too broad and that LLMs can be either good or bad at writing tests depending on your workflow and expectations.
I'm closely supervising the LLM, giving it fine-grained instructions — I generally understand the full interface design and most times the whole implementation (though sometimes I skim). When I have the LLM write unit tests for me, it writes essentially what I would have written a couple years ago, except that it tends to be more thorough and add a few more tests I wouldn't have had the patience to write. That saves me quite a bit of time, and the LLM-generated unit tests are probably somewhat better than what I would have written myself.
I won't say that I never see brain-dead mistakes of the "5-vertex square" variety (haha) — by their nature, LLMs tend towards consistency rather than understanding after all. But I've been using Claude Opus exclusively for while and it doesn't tend to make those mistakes nearly as often as I used to see with lower-powered LLMs.
I think DJs with even a light catalog of their own original music will become some of the most important artists instead. Nobody has any interest in going back to the old system.
As an user I wouldn't mind as long as it's attributed and I can skip it.
Pisses me off on YouTube - it's really hard to find something genuine in the sea of the AI written, AI subbed, AI generated and AI published - it's a scourge not because it's there, but because the channels are lying about it AND because 99.99999% of what I encountered it's not worth the waste heat processing a "publish 100 catchy videos about current affairs".
Oh yes, for sure, but it's not more training that is gonna make it sound like Mozart. There is no soul behind, it can only be bland and robotic, even if it sounds polished and well-produced, if you can call it like that.
It's mostly the extremely high levels of fraud associated with such submissions than the content in itself. In Deezer's case:
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
If they were more commonly consumed by real revenue generating users then these companies likely wouldn't care as much. As it stands, it saves them a lot of money at very little real user downside to try to catch the fraud at both ends (the fake listeners + the fake uploads) rather than just one end.
No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
> Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music.
Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.
Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs.
Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.
People who have been listening to music their entire lives isn’t the target audience. It’s mostly getting the young generations used to it, and accept it as a norm. Something about most people’s music taste formalize around high school/university times.
It’s close to how young people have never experienced pre-Fortnite/Roblox times, so they are fine with shelling out money for microtransactions.
How do you discover human-made songs in an ocean of slop? One of the reasons I subscribed to a music platform back in the day was the ability to discover new artists, and I found my fair share!
This is close to impossible nowadays, though I'm now giving Deezer a try since they're the only one doing something about it. Glad I cancelled Spotify 3y ago.
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments:
Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy.
Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits).
Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.
Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing?
Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference.
To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing and dance over their perfectly manufactured hit single. Songs made by people like Max Martin, who aren't trying to express anything beyond their knowledge of which combination of notes has the highest ROI. No disrespect to Max, he's incredibly talented at what he does. But now the execs have the data, and they don't need the Max Martins, Diane Warrens, or Carole Kings anymore. They can plug in the numbers and out comes a perfect song for their next artist.
So let's embrace the new AI pop. Let it dethrone the kings who've shaped the sound of pop culture for too long.
Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. Yet. When a model writes a song that lingers the way "Linger" does, maybe it will. But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
> Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that.
That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists.
If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller.
> But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop.
I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.
I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music?
The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.
> use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
That’s kind of how the music industry produces music these days. There are a few song writers that write for most artists, music producers who sample other music to string together songs for most artists etc. That’s why most music sounds the same and why AI generated music can be indistinguishable from mainstream music.
They do use diffusion models, but I don't think they would make a detour via images. They can just generate audio directly with audio diffusion rather than image diffusion.
There technically was one experiment early on to trick Stable Diffusion into generating spectrograms that could be converted into audio. And, it worked surprisingly well.
From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions.
For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.
I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process.
Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".
That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening.
In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?).
Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.
These days YouTube has so much AI generated music, very hard to differentiate from originals. For examples look at these YT channels uploading AI generated music:
Sorry, but that music is really boring. I certainly would not have bought it in 1983. But, you're right that the average person on the street probably can't tell the difference.
Music out there in the real world runs in clusters and communities that form around real world places where people go to be together and make and share things. Its so much more colorful and interesting than you can imagine. But, it is admittedly just a small slice of the weirdest and most creative and crazy people who participate in those communities. For everyone else music is just a recording that appears out of thin air in their car stereo without context and the glossiest product is the one they pick.
It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.
I love AI generated music, I think people aren't objectively interested in ranking it and appreciating it enough probably because of the attach to artists behind songs, but in reality, practically speaking, it's getting SOLID.
This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms.
I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's actually more of a young person thing to want to get rid of all AI. I've only ever seen older people wearing a shirt with an AI generated image on it.
I would absolutely push that button a thousand times as well.
I mean, there are some positive uses for the technology, some will likely save lives and advance the frontier in medicine and science. The ways it's able to automate research tasks is a pretty big deal. And, even though I know that, I think with the harm it's doing to our humanity with all this slop overwhelming everything (the web is now more slop than human, YouTube and every music streaming app soon will be), it's maybe not worth it. I don't know how to balance those two things. And, I don't know how you'd regulate it to make it safe, even if we had politicians anywhere who wanted to.
How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.
That might be true, but if you watch some of the youtube videos from solo game devs where they spend 5 years making a game, and come out with 28k in sales. Anything that brings a game concept to market faster I think is a win for everyone.
Not really. We don't need more games. We need better quality games made with passion. More than a thousand new games are added to Steam every week. It's all just noise.
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
Good news: the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined the appeal) have upheld the Copyright Office's assertion that their album is public domain and ineligible for copyright protection. Prompts are insufficient human authorship, which is a requirement for copyright to apply.
Arguably, this makes sending such an album to a distributor a contractual violation as well, since you must assert that you own the rights to license it to them and are empowering them to collect royalties on your behalf.
the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman
It seems like "personalised recommendations" are heading in that direction, but don't forget there's also the social aspect --- listeners will want to share what they liked the most, so even if they end up automatically prompting the AI to generate exactly the music they want, they'll find others who also like very similar music.
> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop.
The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.
Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.
however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers.
I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
Follow musicians and bands that perform live would be my choice. If they write their music with AI and I still like it then that's ok by me. Obviously this doesn't scale if you are a platform operator but that's not my situation.
music can be performed live and in person. many musicians work with other musicians, labels, studios etc. a web of trust can be built and verification via performance is a compelling option. not complete but it's certainly an option.
would you as a label sign an artist you'd never seen perform? maybe there is value in a platform working under similar constraints.
With the internet and modern platforms, we democratized music so that you can make music in your bedroom and publish it without collaborating with a record label, produces, etc. So you'd have to put some of that cat back into the bag, but for what?
I guess there could exist a Spotify that is limited to music performed live for people who like that. Or simpler: a checkbox you can click to filter it to music known to have been performed live.
But that doesn't sound like something I'd want imposed on all music on a platform. Scrolling through my SoundCloud favorites right now, less than half of them perform live at all, and a lot of it is remixes that are never performed live. And most of them are pseudonymous. I'd lose more than half of my music if the platform required music to have been performed live. A lot of music isn't even performable live.
>But that doesn't sound like something I'd want imposed on all music on a platform.
that's fine. there's room for multiple platforms. personally I would pay for the thing I describe, sounds like you wouldn't. but the question is not whether you or i would, but whether enough people would to make it a viable business - whether it's the platform, or the method, or a label that licenses its music in a certain way, or what.
I'm in Canada and have been a Deezer subscriber for almost 2 decades now. Their premium subscription is well worth the money - I pay less than $90 for the year. They also have one of the highest track counts available compared to other streaming services (according to google).
I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.
Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.
So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.
44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).
If that were true, then I agree that, "it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally unless the creators spent a ton of money promoting them" would be true. But if you're on MusicTok or using any other popular music discovery channels today, you are encountering at least some AI-created music naturally even if you don't realize it.
I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.
I agree with you, but I hope they prevent people uploading thousands of AI generated albums. If people start doing that, it can become difficult for non-AI artists to gain visibility in the recommendation systems etc.
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks
Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.
The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist?
And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record?
And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
> The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
This may be more of an economic problem. There is a stark difference between a music track with 1% human work/effort, and 0%. You can make many musical tracks if you have to do only 1% of the work, but you can't make >100x what you made without AI (Amdahl's law). While the latter can scale infinitely; you could upload a billion tracks if you wished, you're limited basically by bandwidth and automation. So a classifier or policy which permitted the 99% AI but banned the 100% AI may be adequate.
There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
I wouldn't say that porn is not allowed on every platform. basically every mainstream "content posting" platform (fb, ig, tw, tiktok, etc) allows softcore porn, and in fact pushes it on users, both on content an on advertising. if the same was true with AI music I wouldn't bother with the platform
Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.
It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case.
If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.
Of course ~nobody wants low-effort "I pasted a one-line prompt into Suno and got this out" in their feed. If they did they'd be listening on Suno and not Spotify. The problem is there's no objective, let alone automated, way to tell the difference between that and the corner cases. Artistic quality is an inherently subjective metric, not something that can be enforced via rules.
The same people who read AI-generated stories about AI. Which is, roughly, most of us. There are AI-generated blog posts on the front page of HN multiple times a day. Right now, I see "I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs", which is AI slop. I'm sure there's more.
Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.
But this can be easily fixed by turning the autoplay, the slop's best friend, off.
Me personally, I sniff AI on Spotify by empty "about" sections. Which is sad as I always held dear that it's the music that must speak for the author, not the vice versa.
The solution is easy, don’t use Spotify.
They are money grubbing vampires leeching off musicians anyway and using your subscription money to fund shady arms companies.
Lots of people are listening to it. There’s an AI brand named “Eddie Dalton” on Spotify right now with 589k monthly listeners and a couple of million streams on its top track. This is one of many.
Lots of people don’t care about whether the music they listen to is human created or not - just as lots of people don’t care about lots of other AI slop so long as they are entertained by it.
The biggest issue for new musicians is getting people’s attention. AI music that people are happy to over human music listen to is absolutely part of the problem.
I agree that this is the biggest problem, but the existing backlog of hits is far that have been recorded since way before I was born is far “worse” in that regard than AI slop.
It’s easy (at least for now) to compete with slop - it’s way harder to compete with e.g. Queen, Eminem and the Beatles.
It’s like saying cancer is a problem when you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound to your chest.
The engagement mechanisms and audiences for heritage artists vs new artists are very different. New artists are not in competition with heritage artists like the ones you mention: those artists are a constant passive consumption baseline against which new active “lean in” consumption needs to fit. A lot of music listening is passive consumption. Start an algorithmically generated “radio” style playlist from one of those big name heritage artists and Spotify will then serve up payola content (baked in in the major label deals, “Spotify Discovery Mode” for indies) that positions new music within that playlist for algorithmically receptive listeners. If AI created music is going head to head in that algorithmic market for listening slots, that has a significant disadvantage for new human-created music.
Big name heritage artists aren’t the problem - they are the thing that underpins a lot of consumption and keeps people coming back to platform.
I can assure you it’s not a corner case: this is one of the things that a lot of creators are concerned about. If a major streaming platform decides your music is not acceptable because you used some AI as part of your production process and blocks your song as a result that has pretty big consequences.
Spotify, for example, already said that any track that gets under 1000 streams will not get any money. What if it says “any track that uses more than a proportion of AI will not make any money” - but refuses to say how it makes those decisions so that people can’t game the system.
This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.
If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop.
Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad.
Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder.
Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast.
On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly.
And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.
I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.
Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%!
Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.
I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.
I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.
I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form).
None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
I’ve been involved in one music project or another (bands, albums, solo projects, etc) for the past 25 years.
During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to make a record together. We labored over it for almost two years and finally “released it” on bandcamp to very little fanfare.
A few friends and family had nice things to say, and one random stranger reached out with positive feedback.
I get a monthly stream report from bandcamp, and it almost always says zero.
I am so pleased with this project and have such great memories of making the album that I had two lathe cut vinyl copies made (one for me, and one for my friend).
I put a big part of myself into the project and was able to convey ideas and feelings that I couldn’t express effectively via other methods.
I listen to the recording about once a year. It’s a part of me now, and I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it.
To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
If someone else feels something as a result of your work, that’s a nice bonus, but not something I focus on at all.
If you didn’t sink a career’s worth of time doing creative work professionally, then that’s a nice relationship to have with creative output. For a lot of people, AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission. Mortgages not paid, cancer not treated, birthday presents not purchased for your kids, dreams dashed… and then people telling you the real purpose of creative work ends when you expect it to be anything more than a hobby.
I completely agree. It makes something that was already very hard that much harder. I have a friend who played guitar in a "famous band". They made it. Meaning, they played on David Letterman and went on extensive tours, had a huge fanbase, etc. Some years back, he reached out to see if I had any leads on IT jobs. I was surprised to say the least, but his response was simple, "there's no money in it." That conversation really hammered it home that you can "make it" and still live without financial security. Fast forward to today, and the situation is even more dire given what is happening with AI.
I don't think highly of AI made stuff uploaded without clear labelling as such.
But it's almost certainly not AI's fault if your mortgage is not paid, your cancer not treated or you can't pay birthday presents for your kids. Music was already extremely "cheap", and success has very little with how much or little work you put into it (extremely unlikely either way).
Let's fund art, but this business model you want to do it by is hardly worth saving.
It’s not just music that is getting ripped off and what is this funding model you’re proposing? How will that help some who designs and sells a few T-shirts etc?
It goes for all other art as well. I wasn't proposing a specific alternative funding model right now, but I think just about anything (even nothing) is better than extending intellectual property laws.
A) Nobody goes into the music business from the ground up planning to support themselves selling albums, like a small business. Everybody has known for decades that doing so requires laying a ton of groundwork and for the first several years, at least, you’d be lucky to have low streaming compensation be a problem for you. Planning on any other path— persistent notoriety after going viral, being irresistibly appealing to large enough audiences to sell at least dozens of albums per week right off the bat, etc.— is like planning on winning the lottery. That’s literally the least representative market for commercial art. Even for audio!
B) There’s a universe of creative workers AI fucked over that have nothing to do with retail music sales. Concept artists, stock photographers, session musicians, copywriters, video game foley artists, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those were all reliable career paths until very recently. Disney chopped their concept art team to replace them with models Disney trained on their work… probably posturing to look pro-AI enough after their pathetic sora debacle. As an aside, they can go fuck themselves.
> AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission.
I want to be clear. I am 100% on-board with AI being absolutely shit.
Buuuut, this has always been the case. Before it was scammers taking images from the web and undercutting you with prints, now it's scammers stealing your artistic style.
It sucks, but it's not a brand new problem. What makes it particularly bad now is that there's a much larger flood of it.
As a hobbyist musician and songwriter of decades i was excited about AI music in October. I could finally take my rough demos of me singing along to my guitar and make better demos then just using garageband as Im not much of a singer. I enjoyed using Suno for a month or less then realize this is shit .... my own songs are AI slop just like everyone else - all sounds the same and my songwriting talents are meaningless now with anyone can now do this. I didnt listen to my slop for months then the band I play in asked to hear some slop of mine and then / there my AI slop had some redeeming quaility. As with my band (church band) and I listening and then playing along to my slop. Just slop writers can now play their slop like real musicians can........
At least not yet Im sure robots will and also an AI microphone with AI built in will be created so everyone sings amazingly.....
Overall AI is stealing humanity from us all, we are allowing it and it is only to the benefit of a few rich pie holes.
But just think… soon we’ll be able to pay some SV company to exercise all of the creative and intellectual effort we would have had to do manually with our squishy meat thought boxes… yuck! Disgustingly inefficient. With the convenience of simulated romance, brilliance, excitement, art, music, relationships, faith, a sense of wonder, sex, human connection, joy, exploration, and everything else that manifested itself in the real world with real obstacles and pushback and negative feelings, we’ll have plenty of time to do all of the menial jobs that are left. What a win!
The legal situation is also completely different. It seems like models IP-wash, so there is nothing legally wrong with what current people are doing with ai. In contrast, the scammer selling your photo was clearly violating IP law, and you could (at least theoretically) pursue legal remedies.
Scale makes it a completely different problem. AI has wiped out the compensation market for entire fields— like copywriting, stock photography, and concept art— practically overnight, and it happened because tech companies have conjured up a very selfish definition of “fair” in the context of fair use. (Isn’t it hilarious to see them get their knickers twisted over distillation? They can blow it straight out their assess.)
It’s comforting to think this is just an incremental change in the battle for capital-focused hyper-efficiency, but it’s absolutely not. This isn’t even the steady decline manufacturing saw over decades… it’s is like what happened to paste-up men or telephone operators but over an incomparably large swath of the creative world.
I'll be honest, I think that this line of "everyone creative is going to be out of work" is parroting exactly the same lies that VC are selling about genAI. At the end of the day, that's what VCs want people to think. There is, to date, basically no reason to use a generative AI system other than if you buy what the VCs are selling. And they reallllly want to sell genAI systems.
I certainly don't buy it, and IIRC only 15% of the broader workforce use genAI for their jobs. Offices are having to force people to use it, and even then people don't like it. Programming is an outlier in this regard because, it turns out, most of what we've been doing is solving the same tasks over and over again in different domains (which is what A Pattern Language was designed to solve). Most other work is not like this.
For the arts, and for most media, what humans have been craving for about a decade now is authenticity. They want a real person they can connect to, an artist whose work makes them feel seen. The artists who have recognized this with a good command of media have been growing sustainably and there's a big industry in this now. There is a certain proportion of people who like the slop, sure. But the actual fact of the matter is that the younger generations, 20 - 30yros, can smell slop from a mile away, and adding slop to advertising, to your media, to your art, actually makes it sell worse. Exactly because it is inauthentic. Talk to literally anyone in advertising whose company tried AI ads. You see an uptick among 50-60 year olds, and a massive, massive downturn among 16 - 30 yros.
From a media executive standpoint, most of the media properties that are inauthentic have been failing massively, with a handful of them able to turn a quick buck before they fail. Execs are verrrry slowly learning the fact that media produced for a very quick ROI and for the branding and marketing potential tend to fizzle out quickly, whereas passion projects are sustainable income, a well you can keep going back to. Whether or not they value that well as much as independent creatives do... ehhhh.
For programming, there's not much to stop people from using the stuff because barely any higher-up supports "building bridges safely". What executives want from programming is a quick ROI, they don't even care if customers complain. So what I forsee for programmers is that the field is going to be gradually flooded with people using genAI. This will drive the cost of our labour downwards, while people are expected to give 10x or 20x the output that they did 5 years ago "because AI makes them fast". This turns every job into a rush job which makes the software system as a whole much less stable. I forsee a number of Horizon IT level problems in the next 10 years. But by then, programming will be much more on the level of a truck job where you have to piss in a bottle and keep driving, or a sales call job where your manager will pull you up if you're 5% under par. Just remember, everyone jumping on the AI train did this to our field.
But, it's not inevitable. It's only inevitable if we all keep shouting that the AI bros have won, from the rooftops. That's the hype keeping this bubble alive. The entire AI bubble currently rests on marketing, and the first step in bursting that bubble is to simply not believe the lies that you are being sold.
I'm a little off being thirty years old. I've played musical instruments of my own accord since I was 3 years old learning violin in an orchestra. I did folk music through my teens. I know about 5+ instruments and I've gigged at pubs, fields, parks, events, and a wedding. I have never touched genAI for music, and I really do not need to. I've listened to the output of genAI for music. It's samey, repetitive, and bland. "Slop" is a very good descriptor. Frankly I can't see a single reason why I would want to destroy my entire creative process and have it output by a black box. Why would I contract someone else to play my own music, let alone a machine?! Baffling. Most of the people around my own age are getting super into vinyl and cassettes and records because they like the fact that you can hold something in your hands. Because they like connecting to an artist. AI slop does not give them that, cannot give them that, and artists who think that the AI slop is better than them are a) obviously not very good in the first place, b) foregoing their own personal development as an artist in service of chasing trends. Trend chasers have never lasted long in creative work, and honestly, they're selecting themselves out of the pool. They're selecting for an audience who no more likes their work than the work of any other sloptist. You can't see me but I'm giving a biiiiig fucking shrug right now, like the jurassic park guy. Nobody cares about sloptists, sloppers, soupies. They don't care about the art, they only care about the profit, and people can smell that a mile off.
"You need to learn that the product of your writing is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you, it will make your better at expressing yourself. You'll have a wonderful time, but you'll also grow as a person, you'll become more empathetic. The product of your writing is you. You are the artwork." - Brandon Sanderton
https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9ldrFvp0RO1HNyPg8Xafh0NYlC2...
One part of being an artist is that you are a clown who entertains people. You cannot just make music you have to be out there being outrageous and weird.
This is exactly what all the successful ones do. No AI can go on television and sing songs about how great Hitler was.
Becoming successful enough to be on TV (or get a ton of views on media sites) is so uncommon that it’s pointless to use as a comparison for any common career path in the creative world.
And I’m speaking more broadly than music— it’s much worse in other fields. Most commercial art does not involve being an entertainer.
> To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
That's EXACTLY how I used to feel about creativity. I was an art major who didn't make it, and I found that expressing myself via my hobbies was good for the soul.
Then I almost died and completely lost interest in making art!
Facing my own mortality, I realized that the time I invest into my wife, kids and family will have a larger positive contribution on the world, I think.
I know that sounds like a Hallmark Card.
At the same time, I've often wondered what my life would look like if I appreciated my family MORE and my hobbies LESS when I was younger.
I can relate here. I have son, who is now 3.5 years old. I haven't had the time or energy to produce any "finished work" since he's been born, and that marks a lull after 25 years of steady output. I don't feel sad or disappointed about this in the slightest. As my wife likes to say, "it's the season we're in." That said, I do really enjoy chaotic jam sessions with my son, as he's very interested in banging on his little drum set, so in some ways, it's just a new beginning. There's no better investment than time with our children.
I feel a part of this is that in any creative endeavor, you can never exactly capture what you want and thus have to leave something out. There are those that try to get it perfect, they never finish.
Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
> Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
That's basically where I landed. The idea being that making art is something I should do if I'm just trying to relax. Once the hobby starts looking like a second job, I know it's too much.
Not a near death experience but similarish. Im trans and from a conservative religious family, so I planned to cut them off and eventually did..
Throughout my teens and young adulthood I immersed myself really deep into drawing and writing. But as my own life has started to form around me, I got a partner who I might have kids with, friends I care about. Ive slowly come to your pov too, and Im wishing I spent less time doing art in the past
I've been asking myself this question in the last year:
> Why do I want to make music?
I picked a basic DJ controller and a midi controller bundled with Ableton. I'm a novice, but I love listening to music and dissecting what makes a good performance. I crave that feeling of getting chills when I find something new that moves me in new ways. This set was a pretty recent example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfF8jzBVWvM
That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
I resolved early on that I was never going to make a money doing this, which simplified things greatly. There's a primal part of our brain that craves adoration. I do wish for others to adore my music. Even if it's a handful of people. I do wish to perform publicly one day, even if it's at a park for passersby.
Mostly I just want something to move my brain in different ways. I want to create something beautiful.
>> That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
As I enter my mid-50s this is how I feel about the music I listen to. I have decades and decades of music I love for a variety of reasons. I don’t have time for “discovery” anymore. If I get introduced to a new band by someone I know or algorithmically, that’s great but I’m not going to spend hours trying to find the next great thing when I have so much I enjoy already.
Please share your bandcamp page!
https://huggyboy.bandcamp.com/album/into-the-wilds
I think it's great stuff. If you haven't already, build a website for the band or album and leave it up as a static tribute. If it's not something that brings riches, maybe it's a contribution to the world.
And do what you can to do what AI music makers wouldn't think to do - differentiate with photos of yourselves, the process, the wilds, etc. You've done all the hard work writing and recording the music, so you might as well embellish its place in the world, and the places it's about.
I'm only halfway through listening but this is a rad album! Thank you for sharing.
Thanks to all of you for the positive feeedback! I'm happy to hear that the project landed with you.
This isn't the kind of music I'd normally listen to, but I'm enjoying your album! Very well produced. I bought a copy. Thanks for sharing!
Personally I feel this would qualify for a showHN, if the spirit leads! No pressure, but this is really cool and I’d love to more things like this
I like it! Loved hearing about your journey.
It sounds great man! Thanks for sharing both the story and the album.
It's really good!
Thanks for sharing.
Epic
I'm curious too now
Marketing your album is a different kind of work. Thats why labels and whole distribution industry exist in a first place. Bandcamp is not a streaming platform, so you naturally wont get organic listeners here.
Good album, by the way.
I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).
Care to share the link? I'd like to take a look.
It isn't in your profile. Why not post it there or here?
I'm happy they shared it on a further request, but I feel not having it in GP or profile is consistent with and further strengthens what they wrote in the post.
Mind sharing where you went for your lathe cuts (assuming you are happy with how they turned out/sound)?
The reality is, essentially nobody makes money by creating music. Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. A Taylor Swift impersonator would make no money singing the same songs. A cover band wouldn't do any better.
It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them. It's so paltry I don't really understand why authors are so concerned about copyright infringement.
People steal my copyrighted stuff all the time. I long ago stopped caring about it. But I do very much like Github as it protects me from others accusing me of stealing their code.
If you want to make money, you'll need a plan that does not require copyright protection.
I care more about attribution than copyright infringement.
So do I. At least Sid Meyer did that!
> Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live.
People want to see her performing...her music. She would not make nearly as much money by going up on stage and sitting quietly for a few hours.
It's also worth nothing that she literally re-recorded several of her albums due to someone else getting the rights to them instead of selling them to her, and the proportion of streams and sales they got compared to the original versions was so high that it effectively forced the person who had bought them from the previous owner to sell them to her in the end anyways.
I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point you're trying to make, but saying that she doesn't make her money from selling her music doesn't really seem accurate.
I'm sure she makes some money selling the music, but the big bucks are from filling a stadium with people paying insane prices to hear/watch her perform.
There have been many stories on HN over the years on rock bands making a pittance from record sales and having to tour to make any decent money.
Taylor Swift is an interesting personality.
So many people can probably reach her level of music but have the charisma of a door nail.
You're not wasting your time, my friend. But you've got to be very certain and honest as to why you want to learn that.
If your goal is being heard and appreciated, well, you better reconsider.
If you're doing it for your own pleasure and pure love of art, absolutely do go on, without any expectations. It may or may not take off, but the samurai must not care.
Agree 100% with this and I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
In the past learning a skill and do something was mostly for pleasure, and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
Now internet gave us the opportunity to reach the whole world and that changed the expectations.
>I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
Artists wanted to "be heard and appreciated" since they started banging rocks together for rhythm and painting on cave walls...
> "being heard and appreciated" ... is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
I think that in the past it was just a lot more difficult to *not* be heard or appreciated at all
> make some money out of this
The OP never said this. You and a few other commenters seem to think being heard == being an influencer that’s in it for the money.
> and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
That’s what being heard and appreciated is.
Yeah. People act like it's a sin to want some notice or respect when you've worked and achieved something, like you should be some zen-like creature that is purely intrinsically motivated. It is not wrong to want some notice or respect from your peers once in a while.
I'd like to clarify my comment 4 levels up.
Of course it's not a sin to want some notice and respect from people. It's a totally understood and natural, human thing.
By proposing to part with those expectations, I don't mean getting rid of human nature in a transhumanist way.
I'm just trying to warn people who are in the very beginning of their creative ways. There are so many ways to descend into misery and depression exactly because of the mismatch between expectations and our current reality.
Because I've been there.
In my early (1999-2001) music "career", so to say, my music somewhat blew the local scene, it was big in clubs, it played on the local radio, people would repeat catchphrases from my tracks when greeting me, I watched them dance to it. I made so many friends around it.
There was an immense motivation to write a track in the morning and listen to it in the evening on a 10 kW sound system among dancing people, under stroboscopes, black light and lasers cutting through fog.
Then our local club movement died out and its remnants were squeezed into small disco-bars with shitty sound, where people came to booze some and pick up dates, not for music.
And the music itself moved to the Internet. I tried to adapt. But oh boy was that a stark contrast!
I played a live gig in a disco-bar and some drunk morons came and asked me to play "something happier".
I watched my tracks never reach more than a hundred listens on the Internet (with a single random exception).
Ok, you might say it's just my music that is not of due quality or novelty, and you might be right. But I saw so many brilliant artists' profiles with such pitiful numbers of listens over such long periods of time that it totally shatters all illusions of getting heard on the Internet.
You either drown in the ocean of low to zero effort content, or you have to market yourself and again drown in the choir of yelling voices trying to shout everyone over, or you bombard labels with your demos to never get any answer, or an answer you get, but it basically states that you're someone's business asset from now on.
Sure, you can still expect your family or friends to listen and appreciate, but you know what? They don't care either, or care in underwhelming ways. And this alone can break your heart beyond all repair.
Still, I was able to glue mine back and go on with my music. And musically and sound engineering-wise, it's now a cut better than my "popular" and "appreciated" music from my club era. But only me and literally 3 friends of mine know that.
That's what made me a zen(ish) creature and write my original comment above.
Thanks for expanding on your story, it means a lot to hear from people with experience.
I've received a lot of thoughtful responses and am a little embarrassed because I'm probably looking in all the wrong places in my search for identity or joy or meaning. My life kind of fell apart in the last few years, first the career, then the relationship, then my sense of self as I realized all I've ever done were coping mechanisms. At this point, I'm essentially looking for a reason to live, and that places a heavier burden on anything I try than is reasonable.
Just don't give up, Gecko. The night is darkest before the dawn..
Sometimes one needs to let go (sounds beaten and banal, I know). In my case, I had to let go of my image as a musician. I didn't touch music at all for a few years. Then I started writing it again, as I please, without following any dogmas, never aiming to release it. And I grew fond of it, while before I mostly cared for how others would estimate it.
Just live aimlessly for some time. Find solace in nature, biking, hiking, watching the clouds, whatever keeps you afloat! The purpose will find you.
P.S. And by all means learn a DAW or a physical instrument!
Thanks for writing this. For the record, I wasn't responding to your original comment, which I agreed with. And I agree with and empathize with what you're saying here too - it sounds like you've had an interesting relationship with creating and have a lot of perspective on it, good and bad. Although if you were advocating to get rid of human nature in a transhumanist way, I would understand that to some extent - it's at least a solution. :)
Thank you for giving a read to my story! I appreciate!)
I probably should have provided more context, but it's all rather off topic.
However, I guess my life is strange enough so that people made assumptions around my original statements that don't reflect my meaning.
Quite frankly, I'm friendless and have very low self esteem and have felt "not good enough" for most of my life.
I remember building Lego starships with a friend a long time ago, and I felt that on a fundamental level, nothing I could ever make would match what he could build. It was like a law of nature that I'm flawed in that way.
Any new interest that came into life also came from friends. Nothing ever originated with me, I didn't have the confidence for that. Having others to collaborate with automatically validates what I do, in a way.
It's possible I simply never learned how to self validate activities.
My need for validation is a very childlike one, it's rooted in emotional neglect. I remember my mom praising other people but never finding praise within our family. One of many things that planted seeds of this sense of fundamental inferiority. Then life solidified that in various ways.
I resonate with a bunch of this. The idea that what I make is somehow not as good as the “real” version of whatever it is (where “real” is hard to define, but roughly just, always better than what I made).
You mention the emotional neglect and the connection to childhood, and I get the sense you’re interested in figuring it out. It made me think you might like Joe Hudson’s work on YouTube.
Can't agree with this more. I also started learning guitar and producing music very recently. I have no interest in getting heard and appreciated (on most days atleast).
It has been a tremendously rewarding journey to create new music and see myself improve. 10/10 would do again.
Some people just never found what that thing is for them. And usually you find those things doing them the hard way while you suck. And then the reward is people will see what you do and recognize the work you put in. But if suddenly every person with a prompt does the exact same thing with zero effort, it does take away from the joy of doing it. At least if the joy of doing it is related to the feeling of liking to do "hard things" or liking to think of oneself as one that "does hard things". And I'd say that includes a lot of people and a lot of activities.
I bet a lot of accountants in the old days were really good at basic math, and proud of being fast and accurate and now there's calculators and the amount of people that work on mental math just for the love of the game is probably super small in comparison to when it was a core skill of many more people's jobs.
> the samurai must not care
Definitely recommend to OP to explore the modern warrior philosophy drawing from bushido.
I 100% agree with this and have found it to entirely be my own drive for learning and creating.
For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous, it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
> For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous,
To clarify, when I speak of "approval", I'm not imagining a successful career or financial success. It's much more basic, i.e. having a few people tell me they genuinely like something I created would do that.
> it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
It's unfortunately not simple for me (again, context of long term burnout / depression etc). If I only go by enjoyment, I will watch TV and maybe read and go on bike rides until the end of my days. But that is not fulfilling in the long term. I have a creative drive, but it's rather intermittent and not enough to consistently want to do the work involved. I'm trying to nurture it.
If you're after that, try performing for (campfire guitar? Christmas carols?) or with (entry level jams, especially electronic ones) other people. Much easier to start out that one would think, but it requires a lot of self-confidence. With performing, you can scratch that creative itch by adapting/embellishing source material. A small lick here and there or a handful of alternative voicings are enough!
have you told the people around you that you are looking for that support and that its motivating?
I think you will find that creative works are no more fulfilling than bike rides when you actually get into it. There's no separate magic to it, and a good chance you wont remember doing either of them after some time
Uh, have you tried rhythm games?
You can scratch the same music-exploration itch with a much lower time commitment and get the same thrill of accomplishment as you improve. There is also a built-in crowd of other players at any skill level that you can share your achievements with.
It's not the same glassy-eyed state as you'd get with normal video games, TV, or doom scrolling at all. You will need to focus and clear the mind.
OP said they're trying to nurture their creative drive, which is not the same itch. It's like someone saying they want to learn how to cook, and you recommend they microwave a TV dinner.
you need technical skill to apply it creatively. a rhythm game will help develop rhythm skill, which can then be used to make new rythms creatively
I'm a fan of rhythm games, as well as making music. Both are skills, but the game is a pale shade when by comparison IMHO. Monochrome vs the rainbow. OP said they're looking for long-term fulfillment and creative growth. I don't think rhythm games satisfy either, but well, you know, that's just like uh, my opinion man.
Nothing against rhythm games.
But actually creating music or playing an instrument is much more rewarding. The time commitment is part of it, the journey is the destination and all that.
Different strokes for different folks. There are certainly high skill-ceiling rhythm games that require more time and practice than Guitar Hero.
It makes you wonder.
Walk into any library, book store, second hand shop or wherever they sell media. Look at the hundreds of thousands of book, albums, DVD and I wonder how many of those folks were doing it trying to make it big, grab attention or turn it into a career?
And that is a very VERY tiny slice of the entire pie. For everyone successful artist you find, there are hundreds or thousands that never got lucky or had the skills to make it. I put luck first deliberately.
A good example, based on the IBSN listings there are currently 158 million unique books. That is one unique book for every 53 people on the world, how many can you think of?
I love going to old book stores and pulling out something random, usually some paper back from the mid 60's/70's on a topic you probably never even thought of. How much time and effort went into writing that, editing, producing, marketing it? I look up the authors to if they ever made much of it all, about 99% of the time, their name doesn't turn anything up. Despite their published works, they could still be alive, they are already forgotten under the sheer volume of works out there.
There are TV shows I remember, they had whole crews working on it, actors, writers and producers. The only proof they exist online is about a paragraph or two, didn't even get a wiki page. To be appreciated by those close to you, that should be more than enough, but for some it has to be broader, I do not know why.
I think a part of it is that many people come into this world thinking it is a race. I say, IF and that is a very big if; if life is a race, it is a 100meter race and it doesn't matter what position you come in. Saunter your way, take the long way. And yet when you get to the finish line there are loads of people racing past mocking you and desperately trying to convince that "You think that is the finish line? Nah, this is marathon and the real goodies are there!". And so they keep running as fast as possible, wearing themselves out and getting exhausted to no end. The joke being that there is no other finish line.
You can be content in you, content in now. Just be chill... damn it!
Also, find other people to produce/create music with. Then at least a few others are going to listen. It is way more fun that way.
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I’ve asked an artist if they should be worried about the newest generative AI capabilities. This is his (translated) response:
> Artists? Pencil laborers, more like.. I am in favor of using AI in visuals. It will eliminate a lot of mere decorators, and won’t even slightly affect the artists. I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers. Impressionism was born shortly after that. See, I believe many cursed photography, but Monet never saw it as a problem.
> I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers
I like this analogy. Maybe this time around is different, but I like to hope it's not.
The anti-AI discourse is almost identical to anti-photography diatribes from more than a century ago.
Artists will also learn to use AI to make art. I don’t mean slop, which is low effort stuff and I tend to use that term regardless of whether AI was involved. I mean real art where the AI is used with painstaking care the way a photographer uses their camera.
Wishful thinking.
What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it. It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply. A healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.
Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.
Why?
I gave my why's already in the previous comment:
Claim: What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it.
Why: It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
Claim: That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply.
Why: (because) a healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.
As for the last claim:
Claim: Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.
Here's the why behind that (since I didn't elaborate as I find it self-evident): because he says he's fine with AI, because AI will sweep the art scene from lesser artists and lives the Monets and real artists. Either he claims that he is one of the lesser artists that's OK for AI to sweep away, or he implies that he's one of the good ones that would be fine. The latter sounds far more plausible.
this is all circular, with the why being the claim. I still see no why, just phrased slightly differently
The "phrased slightly differently" is the why. It's not circular, it's one step further, e.g. "why would it spoil it for small time artists" "because it will drawn the audience with slop".
You just keep questioning at the next level, like a small kid asking "any why would it do X", "because Y", "and why would it do Y". Ultimately you'll reach asking why the Big Bang happened or something.
What you're ask for seems to be "ultimate causual mechanism". That's not how arguments work, this isn't Physics. The reader needs to apply their thinking to the implications of extra slop production, for example.
If they don't believe that AI will produce extra slop, I don't know what to tell them.
> Why: It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
why do you think this is the case though? vs people being more excited to get art made by small artists because they arent ai slop.
tbe small artist opening their stufio to sell prints has always been about the experience of visiting and talking to the artist, not the piece of slop that you end up buying
>why do you think this is the case though? vs people being more excited to get art made by small artists because they arent ai slop.
Because the fatigue with art in general, including human produced, due to the overproduction AI added, is already visible.
Well now they can do something economically useful, like Walmart greeter.
> it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers.
Hey now, HN would have you believe these guys are the pinnacle of art.
If AI cuts the time it takes to get an acceptable result for him by half, will he also cut his rates by half?
Ask Monet if photography made his paintings less valuable.
He would certainly reply that his paintings weren't valued so highly for their functional purpose before.
If AI art doesn't impinge on your friend's business, it's because he was selling art for art's sake rather than (as the majority of artists do to make a living) creating art to fill a functional need. The latter is what photography and AI impact.
A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital. Or heck, even learning an instrument when MIDI was first introduced.
Even before generative AI, there is a long-going debate in audio circles around simulated guitar amplifiers. The truth is, the simulations of them have gotten so insanely good that now one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes.
My rule-of-thumb is this: "does this tool I'm using in particular take away from the authenticity of my performance or songwriting?" Example: I am very keen on performing vocals and guitar at the same time, and I don't have an expensive studio setup, and my office has background noise. I use these tools, and yes even some open source AI ones, 1) remove background noise of the individual tracks and 2) do a final master against a recording I want to target (using something like Matchering or similar [0]). It still sounds like me, my voice isn't perfect, my beat isn't consistent, but it sounds like I rented some studio space. So for me it was a cost-saving measure.
[0] https://github.com/sergree/matchering
>> one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes
And this is actually a problem. Great art usually comes from constraints, real or artificial. These things are a lot of fun to tinker with (a really fun hobby) but one amp, one guitar, and a small number of effects pedals will probably lead to you actually make more and better stuff.
I have an all-in-one amp / pedalboard and it's just more practical, even though all I do is just pick an amp, plug in my guitar and play. They take up less space and cost less money in the long run if you actually do want to use many pedals.
I get what you're saying but in general this specific case I think the all-in-ones win for most people.
engineering learning from a senior sde maybe 5 years ago - set your constraints with purpose, and apply them without breaking your system.
just because you have infinite effects doesn't mean you have to use them all. yypu can set whatever constraints you want
This was definitely true for me, which is why I write everything acoustically and ensure the song is "good" before going in my later age. If I want a specific effect, I then google what pedals were used in a particular song or artist, then I try to recreate the chain, and then tinker with that on top.
Ultimately I spent so much of my time worrying about "what crazy expensive equipment should I buy" when I was younger and more into this stuff, and I should have simply just played my shitty instruments and recorded on my shitty equipment. That's on me, but I also find it empowering as an artist that I can clean up my recording in the way that replaces my need for expensive equipment while maintaining (in my humble opinion) a sense of authenticity of my performance. I agree there may be too many knobs, but finding the knobs that I want has never been easier and I would rather live in the now than in the past.
> A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital.
A lot of people were right. Music gear lead heavily back into analog after the initial analog to digital transition. I started out using computers exclusively. When I purchased my first analog synth, I couldn't believe how much better it sounded than my VST's. It's hard to quantify exactly why, but my ears lit up the second I started using it.
In terms of amp modeling software, some of it is indeed very impressive. But, tends to fall apart when you need to tweak parameters. I assume this has to do with the capture process. But, if you are happy to use stock patches, it's basically an amp replacement.
I love making music, and got into it as a venue to be away from the computer. I still do post-production in Ableton, but everything else happens with gear not even connected to a computer. I've tried to make music with a DAW, but it feels so sterile and boring, compared to actually using hardware to make it.
Maybe get a second-hand Novation Circuit to start with, or some similar "groovebox" that lets you make songs on one device, and see if you actually still do enjoy making music, yet haven't found the right process for you yet.
I don't think you're wasting your time, as long as you're having fun, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world. Sure, AI could probably make "better" (by some definition of "better") music than me, but AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
> AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
Can I ask how you share music with friends? I guess this is part of my problem, I don't really have anyone I could share with or collaborate with. The few people in my life don't listen to the type of music I like.
I ask them to come over, then I ask them "Hey, mind if I play this for you and you tell me what you think?" basically. Alternatively, send it as a .mp3 via Whatsapp/Telegram and ask for feedback, but that's almost never as fun or useful.
Best way to meet like-minded people is to go to music events where those people are, always a ton of music makers around those, usually also by themselves, sometimes in the back or on the side to the speakers. Most people in such events are OK with being approached by strangers :)
I have "friends" purely through common interest in music, and the same for bicycles too.
My oldest/life-long friends have very different musical tastes...and some can't even ride a bike :)
I'm working on a solution for this. Email in profile if you want an invite when it launches.
+1 for hardware groovebox. DAW workflow isn't the only workflow. Hardware can be a pain, but if you embrace the limitations it can be really fun and rewarding as well. Korg Electribe originals are my favorite.
Maybe you could see if there's someone who finds the "not fun" part fun and you could collaborate with them. That would solve two problems at the same time.
Either way, I strongly encourage you to keep using a DAW if that brings you joy. Using AI to create art is a different skill set, just like using acoustic instruments is a different skill set from using either. Each option appeals a different amount to different people, and you should just do what brings you the most joy.
You have the answer to the "why do it" in the first part of "why you are doing it". Just because something may be created at the click of the button doesn't mean it fulfills the goals you are looking for. People knit even though there are machines that do that for you. You are doing it for you.
I have two answers for you:
1. All that AI really does is a (partially) randomized exploration of the space that has been spanned by existing music. AI creativity, as far as it can be said to exist, is limited by this. You, on the other hand, are human and not bound by any of these limitations. You are free to explore wild things that no AI can do. Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments. Bang on random stuff that has a nice ring to it. Record background hums, apply filters and envelopes to them etc. And there are so many other ways to produce unique creations.
2. Most importantly, music is a form of human expression. It is able to capture the human condition in a unique way. As a human, you can express these things genuinely through your own emotions, experiences, memories etc. AI systems can only produce hollow facsimiles of this. Regardless of whether you are conscious about it, every piece of music that you create is a reflection of you: your thoughts, your emotions, your process. And that imparts the true value on your creations.
> Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments.
I'm not sure if you already knew this, but this is actually a thing already - it's been called "Botanica" and there are a bunch of cool tracks floating around.
Sample track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0QCBPnJz5w
Obligatory Ben Levin video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-mK82gLkWE
I just recently setup a very simple home recording studio after picking up drums again at 40. I had the same thoughts, but I'm going it for me and it is extremely therapeutic. Plus, given the genre (extreme metal), I've gotten into much better shape. (Also picked up an 8 string guitar. I never grew out of my edgelordiness. No real point to mentioning this but just wanted to tell someone :)
AI music may eventually satisfy the masses and you can't stop that speeding train, but the process of creating something yourself will always have value if it's something you're interested in creating.
don't sell your work short. it has value because it comes from you, and struggling to finish is unbelievably common in the creation process - not to mention frustration and a lack of joy.
if you're creating because you feel a drive to create, you are making art and that has intrinsic value to yourself and others. if however you are performing the act of musical creation as a means to an end, what you are doing may be better considered work and not art. the work of others can also be appreciated but it is different.
keep at it though. you are asking good questions and unlike many you are also personally engaging with them.
I recently wrote more or less this exact comment on another platform recently (although I've been making music for a while).
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.
why are you learning to do woodwork when working wood was already automated away decades or centuries ago?
Maybe I should have been more precise – I'm trying to learn how to physically manifest things in head. Woodwork is part of that, but I'm just generally manufacturing skills from CAD design, electronics & PCB design, metal work, 3d printing, etc.
You should 100% buy a cardboard table from Ikea if you just need a table that sorta does the job for 5 years, but if you want something made of solid wood that's a certain shape and style, you might be better off building your own depending on your product & price requirements.
Similarly there are just little things that I know can be built but there's no real demand for the product because my specific requirements are niche. For example, I have chickens and sometimes we get foxes snooping around their coop at night. I have an alerting system for this, but I'd quite like to be able to trigger gun shot noises and my sprinkler if there's indeed a fox in my garden to try to deter them from coming back.
No one's going to sell stuff like this, but I can make it. I'm also an AI doomer, so feel I need to learn basic skills like this which might help if things start getting bad and I'm somehow still around.
Few things are as satisfying to me as seeing a musical idea realized and executed well.
It is immensely fun to write, play, and record with friends. In a good session there's usually a moment where something falls into place and suddenly the record feels awesome and the path forward is clear. The whole room will jump up and say "That's it! Do that again!" and shout and high-five and get a second wind to keep going. It is invigorating and it never gets old.
Even if the records aren't any good, it's so. much. fun. to make dumb shit. Whether by yourself or with a friend. Don't underestimate the fact that music is pure play. It is one of the most plastic mediums available to us and you can sculpt it endlessly and continue to surprise yourself with the things that you can make. Have fun and do it for it's own sake.
This is all to say, the reward of making music (for me) is doing the work and being creative. Even if that's all you achieve it's valuable and priceless. You've already won. Great work. All secondary rewards (adoration, financial success, etc) are a cherry on top of that thing you've created. You did that.
Art is a form of communication. You turn to the arts when the other methods to communicate something either do not feel as if they fit, or feel that they will not encompass the idea you wish to convey. Art is a dialogue with other people, not a commodity. The point is to help yourself understand what you want to say, not to say something that is valuable in way that can be exchanged for goods.
So do not become discouraged by the machine generated sounds. They are only sounds, not a message.
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” ― Aldous Huxley
I have done this with music, writing, and many other things. AI doesn’t make any of these things less enjoyable for me because the process of creation itself is the part that I enjoy.
I have a very low bar for what I consider to be a successful creation: it just needs to be enjoyable for myself in the future. Anyone else who happens to enjoy the content I make is a bonus. I have several songs on SoundCloud that I have produced in the past and I still enjoy listening to them.
There are still several avenues for this, and I imagine they'll continue to exist even in a mostly-AI-enhanced world. You'll need to dedicate time to finding them.
For example, Battle of the Bits [0] is a community all about chiptune music. I'm sure you _could_ use AI to help you learn and produce some things, but the community is mostly about sharing ideas about what works at the electronic level, so even if AI became super capable, it wouldn't help you engage with the community in any meaningful way. There are several such communities across different domains and I imagine they aren't going anywhere anytime soon, regardless of how much improvement happens w.r.t. AI, since the focus is on "what you learned" and not so much "what you did".
Similarly, I have seen communities focused entirely on Silicon Graphics workstations, or pc-98 internals. Human passion-based communities aren't going anywhere, Google just makes it incredibly hard to find them outside of word-of-mouth.
[0] https://battleofthebits.com
I agree, the question of “why should I bother to do x/y/z when AI can do it so much better/faster/easier?” will become more prevalent and urgent as time goes on, resulting in a sort of creative and intellectual nihilism that will be harder on bright, intelligent people.
It was already difficult in the pre-AI age to engage with some activity in a meaningful way for the love of the process. AI now serves as the ultimate temptation away from doing the process yourself, getting the reward with much less of the effort. At work this may be appropriate, but life is not your work. We must be wary of using AI for activities that reduce the texture of our lives, making it less rich experientially. Bold claims to AI changing the world is reducing human activity to that which is readily generated on computing devices, and with it collapsing our sense of self to those few activities.
> Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
This is the reason why a lot of us make music. Writing orchestral pieces is my own meditation. I don't share most of them, and replacing them with AI would defeat the purpose.
Please keep learning it! The world needs more musicians, even if we never hear them.
Learn an instrument (guitar,keys,drums...) if you haven't already and go jam with friends and do concerts instead. That's the best part of making music.
The age of music production is almost over, the age of the music industry already is.
I wouldn't want to be in the DAW/VST business today though, because a lot of potential customers are thinking exactly as you do...
> I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
If you enjoy the process and its outcomes, then it's not a waste of time. If you are forcing yourself to do it or have another motivation for it that is not rooted in genuine interest, then yes, you are wasting your time.
> I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent
This is a spiritual question, so you will have as many answers as there are askers. I found my answer and am happy to share it with you. Why do it? Because I want to. What is worth doing? What I want to do or what gets me to the things I want. Wanting is a very important process, that is often damaged by conditioning. We are told that some things we want are bad and that some things we don't want are good. Or that ego is evil. So many ways this process can go wrong. I think fixing this in oneself is part of becoming an actual adult. Once you know what you want and what you don't want, you no longer are dependent on others telling you what to do or forcing you to do things you shouldn't be doing. Ego is not evil, it's there for a reason. Some people have an overgrown one while others have an underdeveloped one. What is needed is balance. I don't think the pattern recognition machine has anything to do with it. I suspect, that a lot of people who use music as a band aid for personal problems, i.e. people who build their identity around being special due to music making, are the ones who are afraid of AI, but if you just enjoy making music, then what does it matter if music itself is patterned and if a machine can exploit that? It doesn't take anything away from the joy of making music, if you experience it in the first place.
I need to force myself to do almost everything. Simply saying it's a waste of time because of that isn't practical unless I give up on life entirely.
In practice, it's not binary. I'm interested because I want to make music similar to that which I like listening to.
Sometimes I get enjoyment out of it, but sometimes I lose interest maybe because I'm facing a frustration.
My question of wasting time is connected to "can I even create something worth listening to". If nothing I could make is worth listening to, then I guess I would feel the process of creation is pointless.
I've heard others write about how what they produce is worth listening to, to them. I think that is enough, but I also think I lack confidence in my own judgement. Almost like I need someone else to confirm my validity. I have recognized that as a result of emotional neglect, but I haven't figured out how to fix it.
I understand how you feel, because I have been there.
Worthiness is an illusion created by the mind. In reality, there is no worthiness. "can I even create something worth listening to" is an absurd question. You either like what you are hearing or you don't.
Sounds like you are not in a good place right now. The only thing I can say, that I hope won't sound patronizing, is that it is just a stage in the process of life. When I felt that way, it was both terrifying (why do I feel that way) and not terrifying (I don't feel anything). Some call it depression. Maybe they are right. For me, it's the quiet before the storm - the old has to die for the new to be born. I can now see, that the reason for that was the life I lived up to that point was not the life I wanted to live. I wasn't authentic to myself. I was weighed down by coping mechanisms, misguided beliefs, fear, and trauma. There was so much I had to reject and heal. Took me a few years, but now life has a new taste to it.
You said you are facing frustration. Good. Face it. Whatever it is that you feel, don't try to run from it or cover it with something else. The only way is through. Good luck
Can I please upvote this guy twice, HN?
I used to make a lot of music in FL, mostly beats. I would make beats similar to whatever I was listening to at the time, try to get a little weirder with it every time. Like making Memphis style beats with crushed drums and warped samples running through PS1 reverb until it's drowning. It was never for anyone, I would send my songs to my group chat with my buddies for feedback. Kind of fell off just because I got into other hobbies. It doesn't need to be for anyone else. A re-mix of a song I did got 2M on YouTube though, the real catharsis was beating the botted 300k views the shitty rapper from my grad class had though. That video is copyright struck so I don't make any money from it, but that was never the goal, I just uploaded so I could send my songs to the boys/listen on my phone to do the 'ol car test.
I find the process itself a balm for the soul. It’s the one part of my life where only my vision matters, and I am free to completely disregard what others want. That includes some kind of imaginary audience.
I have a bunch of friends who also make music for fun and we share demos and build each other up. Sometimes we make stuff together, send each other inspo, discuss how to improve something in a song, etc.
But I have to say, the end result is completely irrelevant here. We’re all doing it for the fun of making, not for the finished product.
Given that you said you get the energy from the social element and approval, you could build a social network that will be a source of that approval for your creations. Otherwise you could find a hobby that gives you what you’re looking for without the less enjoyable parts.
I'm having fun building elaborate software that meets my needs precisely and nobody else's. I mean, maybe it would meet other's needs but that production would take away from the fun and learning I have building it, and would also reduce its utility for me personally.
If you do it for money it is maybe a waste of time, because the chance to win the race were already low and now you have to compete with a tsunami of AI generated music. If you do it for your enjoyment, nothing changed and nothing will change
I know this is kind of at odds with this thread in general but
> but I know it requires work (...) to finish it
If you're like me and, when you get to this stage, you tend to burn out and abandon the thing, have you tried using gen AI to get you over that hump?
I love coding and still do but I often reached a point where all the fun, easy things were done and I'd be stuck at 90% with only difficult and boring tasks. I've been using Claude recently to just get me over that hump and finish my projects. It can still be fulfilling if you do it right.
Hey friend, if it helps, every “song” you make will eventually become a symbol and memory of a time in your life. It doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes these sounds have even more fidelity than text when it comes to capturing your emotional state and thoughts at the time. I didn’t realize that for a while but in retrospect all of the “it sounds bad” and “I didn’t finish it” didn’t matter
But you will end up with something where you can say „this is mine, I did that“ for the rest of your life. Even if no one ever cares. I come back to some of the things I did in the past through hard labour (coding projects, skateboarding videos) and even if it is nice if others appreciate this, they are still always there for myself as sign of what I achieved.
Same applies to any creative hobby. Do it for yourself. I guess you can still share to your social circle. Others can still appreciate it.
I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.
Just pick up your instrument and make some noise. DAWs are time sinks.
Music is about the “feel” first and foremost. Playing music on a physical instrument or singing is a feel thing.
DAWs are tools for polishing what was created with feeling into something “produced”. If that’s what you want to end up with, that’s ok. Just be clear with yourself on which you’re trying to do.
I had this exact realization. Taking chords from a chord progression generator, putting it into FL studio, adding a random melody that stays in the key from a cool synth preset, some random drum loop, and end result? I guess it could be called music. Its a combination of sounds that doesnt sound actively bad.
I noticed the problem when I realized I couldn't make music in a specific mood or genre. Sometimes I'd finish my song and think "oh wow, a happy rock song" or "a sad edm song" or whatever but it was always just random chance where I ended up. With music theory knowledge I could always add more instruments or notes that could exist in that place but with 0 direction, whatever I made was always listenable but never more than that.
Mhm... it sounds like the main problem is that you like the result more than the actual process.
If you start a new hobby, you should enjoy the time you spend doing it. Of course, every hobby has its chores or tedious parts, but doing it just for the end product or for the validation you get from others will never work in the long run.
I'd wager most people who make music are making it for the sheer joy of expression. Like .001% of people who make music get any kind of meaningful monetary return on it, and I think anyone who goes into it looking for monetary return is doing it for the wrong reasons. In my view, AI changes nothing where it matters it music.
1. None of this should matter if you do it because it’s therapeutic.
2. If it turns out it’s not therapeutic for you, try something different. Play piano. Learn chess. Learn MMA. Go for a run. Heck, vibecode something silly. Music production is not the only way, if you have it a good try and it just frustrates you, try something else.
Step 1: ditch the DAW and learn a real instrument
Step 2: find a local jam group or community band/orchestra
Step 3: have fun playing music with friends
Multiple problems with this one.
For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand, most instruments cost a significant amount of money. Learning it properly is even more important and expensive - fixing something in a DAW is easy, unlearning muscle memory is much harder.
Keeping up said muscle memory also isn't easy. Sure, if you got a free-standing house, no one will care much about a drum set, trumpet or whatever. But most people don't have that luxury in urban sets any more, and typical residential building quality makes even some electronic instruments (e.g. kicks still cause some amount of noise passing through floors) a challenge. Building noise ordnances / HOA rules are a bitch on top of that - most allow only a limited time window in the afternoon, useless for working-class people.
Local community groups... if your community has one, and they have some studio space where noise doesn't matter, great! Most, unfortunately, don't - space in urban environments is already rare and at a hefty premium, space that accepts noise and has adequate resources (in practice: a usable toilet is the most important) is even rarer.
> For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand
Depends on the instrument. You can get a completely new Harley Benton electric guitar for sub-$200.
> Sure, if you got a free-standing house
Sure, trumpets and classical instruments are a challenge, but all the guitars and all the keys can be practiced on headphones with near-zero noise. It's not an excuse.
> never leave your computer because everything might be hard
Our society has made many things too hard for the average person. Mostly for the sake of "efficiency".
Lmao compared to the past things are easier than ever. Can you imagine telling a farmer from 100 years ago that life is too hard? Society has made people accustomed to free stuff and cushy living. Life IS hard for the majority of us without significant wealth.
You can find really affordable used guitars or keyboards which are completely suitable for beginners. Beginner's electric drum kits are cheaper than real ones and hook up to headphones - there goes your sound problems.
I definitely agree it is much harder to learn a instrument than it is to learn a DAW. Believe me, I've done both.
There are lots of reasons to forego picking up an instrument, but living in an apartment or a modest budget are certainly not good reasons.
>> For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand, most instruments cost a significant amount of money.
This isn't true at all. You can get a brand new Squier Strat for < $200 and a second hand one for less than half that. You can pick up used acoustic guitars for next to nothing if you look hard enough. You can get a used digital piano for < $200 too.
Go check out a drum circle, all you need is a bucket. Learn to sing, join a choir. It’s not that hard if you quit making excuses. I’ve lived in small towns in rural areas for most of my life and there have been multiple community music groups in all of them.
instruments have never been cheaper, and for as dense as US cities can be now, they're still not that dense and people have learned to play instruments in denser settings
what makes electronic music created in a DAW not “real”?
What? I never said that. A DAW is not a musical instrument, it does not produce sound. You output an audio file, then it’s played through a speaker. It kills the joy of performing in my opinion. That doesn’t make it not music.
theres no tactile feedback. the music creation is asynchronous to the playing.
It's process vs end result.
If it's the end result important to you, use whatever tool brings you there fastest and makes you the most happy about the result.
But often it's the process that's important to people.
In both cases, it's very clear what the answer is.
I've been making music as a hobbyist for 18 years.
It's fun.
That's it's own reason. Even before AI you statistically will never ever ever make money.
Not only that, but legions of scam artists want to rip you off in some manner. 'Cool music , for 400$ I can get your listeners '
What about finding game creators or similar who could make use of a musical collaborator. Your music gains an extra purpose, you mix with other creatives and those others get their soundtrack sorted before they head to Suno as the easy option.
If you're learning for your own enjoyment then you should keep learning. But regardless of AI, the music industry has always been notoriously difficult to get into
I have little interest in doing a DJ set in public but I'll spend hours crate digging for new music and mixing circular black slabs of vinyl for nothing more than the love of the craft.
It's not a waste of time. Every time some new thing comes out and becomes popular, everyone everywhere says everything must be that thing because it's the future. In America, everyone wanted pure white sliced bread. People wanted frozen TV dinners. People wanted chain fast food restaurants. People wanted no effort reality TV. People wanted endless superhero movies.
Now people want actual food and they want stuff made with human hands and they want to know what's in it. People want TV shows with a proper story. People are beyond done with cookie cutter superhero movies.
The slop wave is going to pass. AI can make stuff that sounds super polished and perfect, but people will want the rough and crude touch of something hand made. They'll want to see videos of musicians showing behind the scenes of how they made something. They'll want to go and see a musician perform. Interest in 100% AI generated music will fade into the background and it'll be relegated to soulless Muzak used for ambiance in soulless chain restaurants too cheap to pay for actual music and too afraid to play any songs that might offend or annoy someone.
The not-fun work isn’t on the song, it’s on you. Improving the song is a byproduct. This only really becomes apparent over time but you’ll realise you were working on yourself all along.
AI makes or will make everyone question doing „any” creative work. The real question you should ask yourself is „Do I care?”
If you do it for yourself - do it.
If you learn that to make money - forget about it.
Fear not, a few of us are building in the direction you're hoping. Leveraging AI to make it easier to stay in a creative headspace with music rather than getting caught in a spreadsheet with endless settings
Sharing is definitely a core part of "why do it", but that can be sharing with friends/family or a living room performance
Some preliminary ideas here: https://songbird.studiocollective.xyz
Just remember that AI has lowered the skill ceiling to produce a lot of things. But it hasn't lowered the bar for taste :)
Making the art changes you. Don't do it with the goal of having produced 'content' in mind.
I have ~40 demoes from a music career that never took off. Now I am feeding little Suno with this demoes, turning them into afrobeat with oboe, deep house with harmonica, etc, and reliving the creative joy.
You can make a decent demo in a DAW and run it through AI for a nice production. The art of writing songs is still equally hard IMO. And a good song is still good, no matter what costume it wears.
It's worth doing. Those "no AI" mixes on youtube are doing great, though the vast majority of people is clueless and will happily digest any slop.
Create for yourself, and for those that seek the human effort and passion. There's an increasing number of us.
I'm the biggest doomer on this site, yet I'm certain human art will become even more valuable, and appreciated, than it has ever been before in history. Just don't expect to make billions out of it, or to reach out to the masses that are quite content with industrial-scale mediocrity.
Is it therapeutic if it relies on the approval of someone else?
You are clearly just at the beginning of your musical journey. I am happy for you. Yes, music for me too makes no sense without other people. This means, I suggest, that you must go out and find other people to collaborate with. The more you do it the more you realize just how many people out there are in the same boat as you. And once you find that right person or group, it’s like nothing else. And let’s be clear, this will take you far far outside your normal social circle. The type of people who like the same music as you may be completely different in every other way. It is important to actively seek out the right people and along that journey, define exactly what that person is, as well as who you are. This is the thing I care most about and yes I hope that more tools, AI or not come out to reduce that work that you have to do to make something polished, so everyone can focus on being creative.
If no one hears them, do they really exist?
>I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
That's true of 99% of very polished finished work too. Amazing bands and artists in Spotify with sub 1000 streams/month.
>None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
Absolutely. One big concern is that even if you do it and you're proud of it, many will think it's AI anyway.
Plus the over-inflation of AI generated shit. It could all die in a fire.
> I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way
Well... play in band/orchestra ? You get to meet people, interact with them, build with them, etc.
I've been making music solo using various machines and computers all my life and I love it, but it's probably not for everyone. Yes, you're alone. Yes, (almost) nobody cares, so if you can't enjoy the process there is no point really.
() from time to time someone will show some interest but let's face it: there's just too much good music released everyday, competing with other distractions for the attention of the people.
For people like me, AI doesn't change much, it's another tool. We've been abusing technology in music for decades.
> I wonder if I'm wasting my time
Art is strictly not about efficiency. Go do the thing instead of thinking about optimising everything.
> it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
So? Not everything you create needs fans or monetisation. It should still elevate your sense of accomplishment, like a kind of Type 2 fun.
It depends what you want to get out of it, and what you think art itself really is.
If it's nothing but an end product, that needs to fit a specific aesthetic, with a specific sound, then I probably agree. AI is making that "pointless" in a way.
Almost everyone I know who's been an artist for years though, has come to a similar realization: What you set out to create, and what it turns into through the process of creating it are different things. The meaning, truly is found along the way.
You can always be better, there's always more to learn. Nothing is ever truly perfect, or "complete"
If you write harmony, there's always a different way it could be written, that might fit better, or be more interesting. If you do sound design, whether that's with getting different guitar tones, synth programming, unique recording techniques, there's always more to learn, or a different way to approach it.
If the only point is an end result, then AI can deliver a simulacra of that.
For everyone I know that loves music, or working with DAWs, the end result is an ever shifting target as you learn more, and understand music in a different way.
Ultimately, there are no shortcuts to making something new, because the practice of trying to make things is what results in what your art becomes. Tools and technology can shape what that thing ends up being, but they (traditionally) don't replace the process of creating it, and the feedback loop between who you are and the decisions you make along the way.
Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
Some people seem to compare this to sampling, but anyone who's ever actually worked with sampling in a creative way will realize how hollow that comparison is. Almost all good sampling still requires a good deal of active feedback, between the person working with it and the way THEY hear what's going on.
Remove the person from that loop, replace the decisions with a general vague notion, and you end up with something that sounds "like" music, but that feedback loop is broken.
I see the same thing with all the AI UI design that's coming out. It's all generally quite competent, and exactly the same. Great for a business tool, where maybe the velocity and an acceptable MVP is the only point, but terrible for actual design and novel thought.
TL;dr: Why do it? Because you want to, and you think that with enough time engaging with something you'll change, just as it does, and the result isn't something you could have ever predicted when you started. It changes you, and that's the point. Just like learning an instrument, or learning to code. It's not purely about the produced result, and that very result fundamentally is changed by you actively engaging with whatever the medium is.
> Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
This hits very close to the philosophical core of the AI debacle.
All hardcore fans of AI just want things done. The process is of no interest to them.
This is truly an eschatologic problem of desire. Consider:
Some people want to grab their result, attain satiation, have orgasm, and die, right now.
Others would much rather enjoy the process, the meal itself, indulge in gentle act of love in tune with the partner, and just keep on living their lives, continuously.
Thanks, I like this answer. I think part of my problem is more general, a struggle to enjoy something when I can tell I'm not good at it. It's kind of a circular problem, I will need to spend more time on it to get better and I need to conjure confidence that I could do so out of the ether.
I have experienced the process you're talking about, although to some degree I feel it's symptomatic of a lack of skill. I start out with some kind of inspiration in mind, but end up with a compromise between what I can do and what sounds good when I fiddle around with things. Part of me feels dissatisfaction that I don't know which knobs to turn to get what I want, but I suppose that's just the normal learning process (albeit less structured than those I have gone through in the past, which is its own obstacle sometimes).
I’ve also struggled with the “not enjoying something because I suck at it” problem, and it’s a tough one. The answer is to remove expectations, but much easier said than done.
That said, I wonder if doing it with other people who suck would help. I started playing ice hockey as an adult, and the thing that got me over the initial hump of being completely useless was doing lessons with other newbies in my exact shoes (or skates) rather than trying to go right to full speed games.
"it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself."
AI is forcing art to return to having no meaning or purpose beyond itself and thats a good thing. It's how things used to be
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> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company
This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.
Exactly, and that's the problem. The reasoning for creating the music is the problem, not that an artist wanted to use AI to generate something or experiment.
It's not even muzak at this point, at least that honest about what it is and why it exists. It's the music version of the automated AI videos on YouTube, which takes a Reddit posts, have an AI do a voice over and then run Subway Surfer in the background (Though I haven't seen one of them in months).
That's the old meta, now it's Tumblr post voiceovers overlaid on Minecraft parkour runs!
The way revenue works on these platforms is fundamentally broken. Revenue should be considered per user to artists they listened to per month. This is actually how YouTube Premium works.
Right now the way that revenue split works is you pool together all the cash from humans and hand it to whoever has the most bots.
you described the spotify revenue model, AFAIK deezer does _user to artists_. based on an article I've read 2 years ago.
Yep, that (majority!) amount of load on the infrastructure exists to try to win the rat race for whatever percentage of revenue comes from songs that are streamed regardless of their origin.
I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker
These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.
Do not try to solve an unsolvable problem, you'll end up hurting real users quite a bit more than you might imagine. Imagine new enthusiastic users trying your platform getting hit with an AI label because of inevitable false positives.
'Detecting AI' is not a problem that has real solutions, the only avenue is something supply side like synthid. But that harms users too, by introducing further barriers for indie users.
I train music generation models. They are very trivial to detect. In fact, detecting them then training them to evade detection by the detection model is a big part of training them! But the detectors win instantly without some hardcore regularization. Simply turn that off and you've instantly got a perfect classifier.
This isn't like text classification, the signal many orders of magnitude higher bitrate and so many more corners need to be cut. It's likely going to be nearly impossible or at least not remotely worth it to generate an audio signal that is truly undetectable in the foreseeable future.
We are talking about entirely different things.
You are right, the output of a model that generates music directly is, for now, easy to categorize as AI.
What this big flux of AI generated music online isn't really that. It'a a tiny bit autogenerated stuff and a whole lot of automatically remixed stuff. The reason it can not be easily classified as AI is because quite a bit of human produced music is also that, and you'd just shut out real users.
> They are very trivial to detect.
Today. Trying to detect AI is like extracting water from puddles in a lake that is quickly drying up. What is the point in the short term if it's impractical in the long term? It will catch some low-hanging fruit in the best case, and will find false positives in the worst.
My point is you should consider creating truly undetectable audio end to end with AI to be effectively impossible for the foreseeable future (i.e., I would bet money it is still trivially detectable five years from now). It won't be detectable to humans, though, only models.
in the broad strokes of ai generated, i wouldnt be so sure.
if the ai picked a bunch of samples and combined them together and mastered using an mcp to a DAW, how is that particularly distinguishable vs a person doing the same thing badly?
i can see how the llm generation pictures of spectrograms is essy to spot, but much less so with tool following.
even worse of you using a vla to have it actually play the guitar and use the recording as a sample.
theres some time and setup to make it happen sure, but somebody put that all in a studio and expose an mcp
Agreed, that’s why I specified end to end (I.e., text to waveform)
why would you admit so openly to being part of the problem?
Why not? Even now it's still common to see people here openly admit to working at Meta. Making AI music less detectable is comparatively benign.
This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.
"AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.
I've had my digital art flagged a few times for various reasons (automatic copyright infringement and NSFW filters) -- so this is nothing new (in particular the artwork blocked the upload for some artist songs). The only thing is to have a reasonable appeal process. In all cases we got an automated approval after appeal, but it can put an untimely delay.
Honestly I hope that the AI filter would be much better in terms of false positive than the aforementioned one, if only because it should be easier via statistical methods.
The only reason you're saying that is because you haven't tried to build such a detector yourself. It's not like text where it's impossible to tell reliably if something's AI generated or not, from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt.
Nobody open sourced their detection algorithm as that would just trigger a cat-and-mouse game between Suno/Udio and a detection platform (and Suno/Udio have way more VC money than you do), but plenty are being sold as a service and work very reliably.
> …from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt.
It's trivial to vibe-code something that detects watermarked output and accidental model fingerprints. But next week the watermarks will be defeated, and the accidental fingerprints will change and ultimately disappear. It's not possible to generally solve the "To what degree is this audio AI generated?" problem, any more than it has been to solve the same problem for text and images. https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...
You're discussing pure hypotheticals, I'm discussing what you can do today with very little effort. If that changes, it changes, but so far it's trivially easy.
The question I'm more interested in is why other music streaming services are not interested in doing this trivially easy work to get rid of spam, even if it's just for the short run as you assume it will be.
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Has this happened to you? Or anyone you know? Or do you know of a lawsuit by a label against an artist for making AI music, and a lawsuit by the same artist against an AI detector for flagging a false positive. This story seems extremely unplausible.
Aside, your analogy doesn’t make sense. Horoscopes are generally not in the business of signal detection, and are usually enjoyed by the reader of the horoscope, like any other art. If you had used a sudoku solver your analogy would make a bit more sense.
do you have any idea on what percentage of musicians use AI to create the song and then also create the sheet music so they can play it themselves? That seems like a decent workflow, use AI to get the song right, and then record yourself playing it with you're own creative tweaks. That's kind of how I do AI assisted coding.
I assume you're not a musician, because that sounds insane. If you're good enough to play at full speed from brand new sheet music, then you don't need the AI. Playing from sheet music isn't like typing.
There are some composers who use a workflow like this - Suno is a scratchpad which can be used to quickly trial ideas, clarify concepts with collaborators, etc. don't think it's common, either among composers, or Suno users at large
I would guess it’s significantly below 1%
Sounds dystopian. If I was tasked with designing hell for musicians, I would be inspired.
I'm curious how your platform might avoid false positives with intentionally repetitive music, in particular techno (either produced via a DAW or hardware).
Ignore the naysayers, keep trying, even if some percentage of false-positives is inevitable. We need such tools.
Can you detect terrible music instead? In many ways that’s a more interesting problem and gets to the heart of why people dislike mediocre slop.
Our relationship to slop is a bit more complicated than that, no?
Whether it's terrible music or not is somewhat irrelevant. Plagiarized music doesn't sound worse than the original.
What seems to matter more is the story behind the work. Basically, if the author is a grifter trying to make a quick buck, then it's slop. You can make an argument that Taylor Swift qualifies as slop, but most people will disagree. The public will be the final arbiter. All I really want is a big red lever to cast my vote.
I’d say the quality is the most important metric.
I (and I think most poeple?) object to slop because it is objectively bad, not because it was generated.
And popularity is unrelated to quality.
This is a contradiction. If most people objected to bad music, that would make popularity directly related to quality.
Yes, most people was probably too hopeful.
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data.
https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg
This is apparently how Deezer is doing it.
it will still miss the ai authoring the music, and a human performing it
It will also miss music performed by a stack of cartoon raccoons in a trench coat and music performed by God, so I don't get what point there is in mentioning other fictional characters.
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Most of the videos uploaded to YouTube are worthless.
AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?
You can talk about ethics, IP, etc. but we're not even there yet.
I dunno; there has always been shit videos on YouTube, obviously, but there used to be a sort of natural filter of videos that had nice transitions and decent narration and dialog that was more or less grammatically correct that made it so that I would mostly watch videos I enjoyed.
Now that AI has cargo-culted these traits I'm getting a lot of recommendations of videos that will initially seem "ok", and then I realize after about a minute that the narration will have some weirdness, and the script will have a lot of the typical ChatGPT "tells", and of course the video comes off as pretty low effort after that.
My YouTube recommendations have become increasingly useless, which honestly might be a good thing because it's made it so that I have less desire to use YouTube.
The weirdness is creeping in to regular Youtube content too. For example, I like to watch Ryan Hall's stream during extreme weather (tornado season in the US). In his forecast videos he has to start with something weird to prove to the audience they're not watching a fake AI generated channel, like eat a banana or apple while talking and wave the fruit around. It was very strange until i realized what he was doing. He also started wearing a suit which is very out of character for him, that must also confuse AI trained on his previous videos.
I think there's a couple of things going on here.
The first is AI-generated content. This can start with nothing more than an idea. Some of it is uniquely-presented stuff that's actually kind of interesting: I got sucked into a nice Ken Burns-style narrated documentary about the rise and fall of Baldwin Piano a few weeks ago. It was a little wordy, but it worked. It took awhile before a very glaring error in diction made me rewind for a double-take, note that no human would ever make that mistake while narrating, and then burn the channel from my feed.
The second problem is very different: Cloning individual people and channels. When a person (or nearly as likely, a bot) elects to use a bot to clone someone else's style, persona, and everything else then that's... that's very unsettling.
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The first problem? It's whatever. I don't like it, but there may come a time when I accept it. At this point it's mostly harmless and really guilty of nothing more than wasting some of my time now and then.
The second problem? It can be reprehensible.
And it's particularly bad with a channel like Ryan Hall. I don't have any idea of how he is as a person (never meet your heroes), but I like to presume that he's generally a swell guy. And moreover: He's important.
When the weather turns iffy, I put his stream on and it's mostly just background noise. I usually give it very little attention.
But when he mentions the name of the small city I live in then that means that shit is just about to get very real here -- very soon. That's astoundingly useful to me, and the safety of the people I care about.
I also find a lot of value in obvious parody. It's can be fun, and it can make people think. The music of Weird Al or There I Ruined It, the crazy stories in The Onion, the memes. That's all good. But this Ryan Hall business? It's bad.
So, there's definitely a line.
And I don't know where the line should be drawn. But using bots to deceive and thereby dilute the value of the content of Ryan Hall's channel is definitely on the wrong side of that line.
I discovered a new band some weeks ago (Hexxenmind) through Spotify. Really liked them, then checked concert dates only to find out it’s AI generated.
Honestly couldn’t tell in the moment but now that I know it’s generated it somehow feels “cheaper” and I dislike listening to them.
I've been caught out a few times after learning a new artist I liked was AI.
The time spent listening to AI music _could_ instead been spent listening to something created by a human.
That is what pisses me off the most!
> it somehow feels “cheaper” and I dislike listening to them
As you should... Soon they'll start selling fake concert tickets, like a pig butchering scam but with music
AI creation kills cultural sharing.
People who create AI music are largely not sharing it with others for any reason other than to create a revenue stream. They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas. The system builds brick walls where there was once osmosis.
How can art evolve under these conditions?
I'm not sure either Linkin Park or my friend's garage band are in any way affected by AI generated music.
How do you imagine that happening?
I agree that people who refuse to listen to AI music or create AI music will still continue on the same path as before in terms of the evolution of music.
But AI music can make it even harder for people to eke out a living as musicians, since they are competing with something that costs far less to make. And some people who would otherwise learn how to create music themselves will instead choose not to learn this skill because it is easier to use AI.
The net effect is a diminished culture.
>They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas.
If not they most definitely are listening to other music that influences them. If you have proof that such a producer listens to 0 music feel free to share it.
They're describing the "music" that's churned out almost entirely hands off to siphon royalties. Even the creator isn't listening to 100% of what they're uploading, it's spam that can be produced in massive quantities and can overwhelm a platform if left unchecked (as the article describes, AI music is 1-3% of actual listens by users but 44% of uploads).
Actual artists who need years to create a few hours of handcrafted content don't have a chance in an environment where hundreds of hours of slop can be generated in less than a day for a few hundred bucks. Platforms like Deezer recognize they need to address that imbalance somehow or they'll eventually lose their high quality contributors in a vicious cycle if it becomes impossible to compete.
Why are some crafts more sacred than others?
Because some crafts are more sacred than others. Making a painting is more sacred than smearing my shit in the Barns and Nobel bathroom stall, although arguably less fun.
Who decides that? We do, collectively. Why do we have that power? Because we define art. Why do only humans have this power? Because art is an innately human thing, so we get to decide.
I find one of the most unsettling things about 2025-2026 is how little people seem to agree with this point you're making. It's like this hyper-reductive thinking where it's all just "if the the outcome is the same, so what!?" has just metastasized and everyone is false-equivalence-ing their way into hell It makes me want to scream. like, beauty is not arbitrary, not everything can be homogenized into content paté, that does not make the world better. I'm sure really smart people will argue i'm wrong for some reason but it just makes me feel so sad
I don't agree, because I think the zeitgeist should be as concerned with my lowly output being automated away (as a IT worker drone) just as much. I'm sorry if you view that as a false-equivalence
I don't know what you mean by this. The same effect can be felt in other forms of art.
a lot of gen ai is essentially a pollution machine creating digital single use plastics. Whoever can identity and sift it for value will be the after ai heroes.
> AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?
From this attitude you might as well get your entertainment from spam or ads.
I always found it hard to listen to the music while working, so I use Endel, which has AI generated soundscapes.
And I listen to a lot of different music when I'm not working.
That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want.
Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so.
I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.
Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable.
Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.
This is a much more concise and effective way of communicating my thoughts ha
Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.
The difference between this and what we are seeing in this article is you aren't sitting down, grinding out dozens/hundreds of these, then spamming them with little to no regard for anyone else for profit. You do it at small scale, for yourself/friends, and clearly care about the results. You are trying to make something intentionally.
Yes, exactly a good way to put it.
I think a lot of people make an assumption that problems like this are fixed-sized; that by making getting a song easier, that that's the end of the the line.
In my mind the better mindset is to think that the problems are not fixed size, and instead these tools can allow for bigger and cooler projects, and/or projects that wouldn't be possible (or at least would be infeasible) without some kind of technological assistance.
AI tools can be used to create slop that is either "bad" or extremely bland at an effectively-infinite speed. It could also be used to make some really cool and interesting stuff if a person is really willing to spend time and effort to make it cool. Usually this requires more than just "prompting" though.
You are describing AI slop.
Not in my book, I know a lot of low/no effort attempts to spam "content creation" channels, no curation, etc that I'd call slop before this. I'm trying to use AI to generate something that did not/would not exist otherwise. It's admittedly probably better because it's using human-written lyrics for the covers (and memories?), but to be honest, 80s new wave lyrics can be pretty hokey. "Any AI = slop" is probably more a belief system than an objective measure.
I don't think what you're doing, or at least what you described, is inherently slop. If you're actively putting in effort to make something you think is cool and to make something you're actively proud of (or at least something that you genuinely want people to enjoy), I don't think that's "slop", or at least I don't think it's bad.
It's certainly different than those low-effort channels that mass upload hundreds of videos a day because they're able to automate the entire video-making process; those are completely soulless, again almost by definition. Those exist to just try and effectively skim revenue from adsense (or subscriber revenue in the case of Deezer), and making something that people will actually "enjoy" isn't the purpose.
Of course, this isn't a new problem; I remember a few years ago (before generative AI became viable for this stuff), there were "tutorials" on the best way to upload hours and hours of noise or silent music to Spotify to extract revenue, and of course let's not forget the infamous "Elsagate" stuff that plagued YouTube. AI has maybe accelerated the problem but it certainly wasn't the first thing to create "slop".
I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but AI is a tool. Tools can be good or bad; if AI is a tool that you can use to actively help you be more creative then I don't think that's bad. If you're just generating something to pad a resume or extract ad revenue, that's slop.
But with music it's easy to find what you're looking for. Look for the band name.
If you want to discover new bands, there are multiple ways to do so: curators, KEXP, concerts and festivals, etc.
Say what you about the Anna’s Archive Spotify scrape: it made me realize how much music exists and how much music was never listened to.
If every track was 3 minutes long, it would be about 1450 years worth of music. You can never experience it all.
You could if you parallelized the operation. Probably tantamount to torture though.
So we'll be going back to publishers as curators. Good for the publishers, I guess.
It is a combination of publisher lock in and folks attempting wild new stuff that breaks out of what AI stuff typically produces.
Earlier this year with a lot of luck, the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine suddenly got discovered because they are doing stuff that falls outside of conventional music styles.
They aren't unique in the experimental nature they are exploring but it has highlighted an hunger from audiences to find stuff outside of the median. Folks like Frank Zappa had to relentlessly advocate for themselves as they figured there was a middle ground between these two thing.
this seems like a pattern seen across industries when it comes to AI
even more consolidation and lock in
On a similar note I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! This won't work for all projects, but for my indie games it's a good idea.
> I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good!
??
You say you deleted the tests, because you "should test it"? The logic seems inconsistent.
Sanity checking LLM-generated code with LLM-generated automated tests is low-cost and high-yield because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
I think LLMs are really bad at writing tests. In the good old days you invested in your test code to be structured and understandable. Now we all just say "test this thing you just generated".
I shipped a really embarrassing off-by-one error recently because some polygon representations repeat their last vertex as a sentinel (WKT, KML do this). When I checked the "tests", there was a generated test that asserted that a square has 5 vertices.
You still have to review LLM results.
But LLMs let you skip all the boring parts - setting up harness, writing some initial inputs, adding asserts for every output. And then _you_ get to do actually important stuff, like ensuring square has 4 vertices.
I suppose that my generalization was too broad and that LLMs can be either good or bad at writing tests depending on your workflow and expectations.
I'm closely supervising the LLM, giving it fine-grained instructions — I generally understand the full interface design and most times the whole implementation (though sometimes I skim). When I have the LLM write unit tests for me, it writes essentially what I would have written a couple years ago, except that it tends to be more thorough and add a few more tests I wouldn't have had the patience to write. That saves me quite a bit of time, and the LLM-generated unit tests are probably somewhat better than what I would have written myself.
I won't say that I never see brain-dead mistakes of the "5-vertex square" variety (haha) — by their nature, LLMs tend towards consistency rather than understanding after all. But I've been using Claude Opus exclusively for while and it doesn't tend to make those mistakes nearly as often as I used to see with lower-powered LLMs.
> ...because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
No, they're absolutely shit at writing tests. Writing tests is mostly about risk and threat analysis, which LLMs can't do.
(This is why LLMs write "tests" that check if inputs are equal to outputs or flip `==` to `!=`, etc.)
I think DJs with even a light catalog of their own original music will become some of the most important artists instead. Nobody has any interest in going back to the old system.
Good for users too; I much prefer a curated selection since I don't have time to drink from the firehose
As an user I wouldn't mind as long as it's attributed and I can skip it.
Pisses me off on YouTube - it's really hard to find something genuine in the sea of the AI written, AI subbed, AI generated and AI published - it's a scourge not because it's there, but because the channels are lying about it AND because 99.99999% of what I encountered it's not worth the waste heat processing a "publish 100 catchy videos about current affairs".
Why? HN isn’t “curating” the wave of AI-written tech article slop. Unclear if they should, readers here love it!
Hard to believe these models won’t get better and better at producing music that humans want to listen to.
The problem has never been that AI music doesn't sound good.
If you're already listening to bland generic pop country slop, then the AI version isn't much worse, but that's not a great thing to shoot for.
AI music I've heard universally sounds bland and robotic.
Oh yes, for sure, but it's not more training that is gonna make it sound like Mozart. There is no soul behind, it can only be bland and robotic, even if it sounds polished and well-produced, if you can call it like that.
To quote Fugazi, "It don't matter what they're sellin, it's what you're buying."
Who cares if people are mass uploading AI content? I care what the listen rates are.
It's mostly the extremely high levels of fraud associated with such submissions than the content in itself. In Deezer's case:
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
If they were more commonly consumed by real revenue generating users then these companies likely wouldn't care as much. As it stands, it saves them a lot of money at very little real user downside to try to catch the fraud at both ends (the fake listeners + the fake uploads) rather than just one end.
With songs like "A Million Amelias"... millions, apparently.
No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
> Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music.
Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.
Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs.
Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.
People who have been listening to music their entire lives isn’t the target audience. It’s mostly getting the young generations used to it, and accept it as a norm. Something about most people’s music taste formalize around high school/university times.
It’s close to how young people have never experienced pre-Fortnite/Roblox times, so they are fine with shelling out money for microtransactions.
How do you discover human-made songs in an ocean of slop? One of the reasons I subscribed to a music platform back in the day was the ability to discover new artists, and I found my fair share!
This is close to impossible nowadays, though I'm now giving Deezer a try since they're the only one doing something about it. Glad I cancelled Spotify 3y ago.
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments:
Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy.
Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits).
Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.
Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
I found Qobuz recommendations really bad too, unfortunately.
With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing?
Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference.
To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing and dance over their perfectly manufactured hit single. Songs made by people like Max Martin, who aren't trying to express anything beyond their knowledge of which combination of notes has the highest ROI. No disrespect to Max, he's incredibly talented at what he does. But now the execs have the data, and they don't need the Max Martins, Diane Warrens, or Carole Kings anymore. They can plug in the numbers and out comes a perfect song for their next artist.
So let's embrace the new AI pop. Let it dethrone the kings who've shaped the sound of pop culture for too long.
Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that. Yet. When a model writes a song that lingers the way "Linger" does, maybe it will. But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
> Real art always seems to find its fans eventually, and I don't think AI will stop that.
That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists.
If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller.
> But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop.
I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.
Tangent:
I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music?
The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.
> use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
That’s kind of how the music industry produces music these days. There are a few song writers that write for most artists, music producers who sample other music to string together songs for most artists etc. That’s why most music sounds the same and why AI generated music can be indistinguishable from mainstream music.
I mean, it was how Beethoven did it with dice, too. This is just much quicker and more comprehensive.
My understanding is music generation is more like stable diffusion. It generates a waveform as an image, then turns it into an audio file.
They do use diffusion models, but I don't think they would make a detour via images. They can just generate audio directly with audio diffusion rather than image diffusion.
There technically was one experiment early on to trick Stable Diffusion into generating spectrograms that could be converted into audio. And, it worked surprisingly well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230314190913/https://www.riffu...
https://huggingface.co/riffusion/riffusion-model-v1
But, I'd expect everything in the past 3 years to diffuse the audio waveform directly.
That's probably what I was thinking of. I haven't kept up as much on non-text generative AI.
From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions.
For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.
I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process.
Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".
That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening. In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?).
Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.
These days YouTube has so much AI generated music, very hard to differentiate from originals. For examples look at these YT channels uploading AI generated music:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw
https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixK...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5P...
so on..I think uncountable amount of AI gen stuff is uploaded to YT everyday
Yup, a lot of these AI songs are just plain good: https://youtu.be/nwBDmUdX8Io
If you heard these on the radio while working at a grocery store in 1983 you'd be begging your local music store to sell them to you.
To me this AI-generated "slop" is much more enjoyable than human-generated slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPAg7ODubB4
Where "slop" = "what can I put out that I don't love but that people will click on?"
Sorry, but that music is really boring. I certainly would not have bought it in 1983. But, you're right that the average person on the street probably can't tell the difference.
Music out there in the real world runs in clusters and communities that form around real world places where people go to be together and make and share things. Its so much more colorful and interesting than you can imagine. But, it is admittedly just a small slice of the weirdest and most creative and crazy people who participate in those communities. For everyone else music is just a recording that appears out of thin air in their car stereo without context and the glossiest product is the one they pick.
What do you think of this?
https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY
Or this? https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH
Or this?
https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl
It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.
Youtube got hit by massive downfall in quality by this as well. It's absurd.
Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
I love AI generated music, I think people aren't objectively interested in ranking it and appreciating it enough probably because of the attach to artists behind songs, but in reality, practically speaking, it's getting SOLID.
This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms.
I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.
Butlerian Jihad vibes are building.
"Probably"? I'd hit that a thousand times just to be sure.
Don't understand how one can experience anything but infinite dread when confronted with the effects of these models on the arts.
Maybe I am getting old. But I don't think so...
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's actually more of a young person thing to want to get rid of all AI. I've only ever seen older people wearing a shirt with an AI generated image on it.
I would absolutely push that button a thousand times as well.
I mean, there are some positive uses for the technology, some will likely save lives and advance the frontier in medicine and science. The ways it's able to automate research tasks is a pretty big deal. And, even though I know that, I think with the harm it's doing to our humanity with all this slop overwhelming everything (the web is now more slop than human, YouTube and every music streaming app soon will be), it's maybe not worth it. I don't know how to balance those two things. And, I don't know how you'd regulate it to make it safe, even if we had politicians anywhere who wanted to.
[dead]
A video by Le Monde (french newspaper) showing that you can have an ai song ready and distributed to several platforms in less than one hour : https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj
(The original video is in french but it has an autodubbed english track)
How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.
I can see this being useful for solo game devs
If the music isn't important enough to write it's not important enough to put in the game in the first place. Solo game devs can use csound.
Maybe useful for ensuring their reputation gets tarnished.
Ah yes, vibe coded games with AI slop soundtrack. The future of gaming couldn't look any brighter.
That might be true, but if you watch some of the youtube videos from solo game devs where they spend 5 years making a game, and come out with 28k in sales. Anything that brings a game concept to market faster I think is a win for everyone.
Not really. We don't need more games. We need better quality games made with passion. More than a thousand new games are added to Steam every week. It's all just noise.
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
Good news: the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined the appeal) have upheld the Copyright Office's assertion that their album is public domain and ineligible for copyright protection. Prompts are insufficient human authorship, which is a requirement for copyright to apply.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...
Arguably, this makes sending such an album to a distributor a contractual violation as well, since you must assert that you own the rights to license it to them and are empowering them to collect royalties on your behalf.
the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman
It seems like "personalised recommendations" are heading in that direction, but don't forget there's also the social aspect --- listeners will want to share what they liked the most, so even if they end up automatically prompting the AI to generate exactly the music they want, they'll find others who also like very similar music.
> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop.
I wrote about it here: https://tombedor.dev/creativity/
The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.
Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.
however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers.
I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
Is it free to upload these files? Maybe a 1¢ fee would be enough to kill a majority of the spam.
Effectively yes. There are plenty of music distributors that have “no fee” distribution where they simply take a percentage of any royalties.
I suspect we are going to see that model quickly go out of favour though.
really? there are ways of putting music on Spotify that don't involve paying a fee upfront at any time?
Yes, last I checked at least LANDR, Amuse and Tunecore all had plans where you release for free and they take a % of royalties.
Yes, lots.
What does human verification look like when you grant that it’s impossible to tell?
I don't grant it. if you mean it is impossible to tell from the music itself, perhaps. but there are other means of verification.
A human can still upload tons of AI generated music though?
I don’t see how verifying that the author is a human helps in any way.
I also don’t think it’s a big problem but that’s another discussion
sounds like you don't really care about this honestly, so i'll reflect your apathy
why even type all that then?
What are any reasonable examples of how you can verify a song wasn't AI-generated?
e.g. Game speedrunners film the whole process to prove they did it themselves.
Presumably you had some ideas when you envisioned "human-verified platforms".
Follow musicians and bands that perform live would be my choice. If they write their music with AI and I still like it then that's ok by me. Obviously this doesn't scale if you are a platform operator but that's not my situation.
music can be performed live and in person. many musicians work with other musicians, labels, studios etc. a web of trust can be built and verification via performance is a compelling option. not complete but it's certainly an option.
would you as a label sign an artist you'd never seen perform? maybe there is value in a platform working under similar constraints.
With the internet and modern platforms, we democratized music so that you can make music in your bedroom and publish it without collaborating with a record label, produces, etc. So you'd have to put some of that cat back into the bag, but for what?
I guess there could exist a Spotify that is limited to music performed live for people who like that. Or simpler: a checkbox you can click to filter it to music known to have been performed live.
But that doesn't sound like something I'd want imposed on all music on a platform. Scrolling through my SoundCloud favorites right now, less than half of them perform live at all, and a lot of it is remixes that are never performed live. And most of them are pseudonymous. I'd lose more than half of my music if the platform required music to have been performed live. A lot of music isn't even performable live.
>But that doesn't sound like something I'd want imposed on all music on a platform.
that's fine. there's room for multiple platforms. personally I would pay for the thing I describe, sounds like you wouldn't. but the question is not whether you or i would, but whether enough people would to make it a viable business - whether it's the platform, or the method, or a label that licenses its music in a certain way, or what.
maybe “platforms” themselves are a bigger problem than anything about AI.
You can just buy music from artist directly, there has never been a need to use a platform
Anyone else is this the first you've heard of "Deezer"?
I'm in Canada and have been a Deezer subscriber for almost 2 decades now. Their premium subscription is well worth the money - I pay less than $90 for the year. They also have one of the highest track counts available compared to other streaming services (according to google).
They're not as popular in N. America, but they have some really neat feature. Including uploading your own MP3s and labelling of AI tracks.
I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.
Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.
So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.
[0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...
44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).
> …it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally…
"Extremely unlikely", you say? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-...
This is the very definition of unnaturally: the creators of those AI songs spent a ton of money promoting them, for whatever reason.
If that were true, then I agree that, "it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally unless the creators spent a ton of money promoting them" would be true. But if you're on MusicTok or using any other popular music discovery channels today, you are encountering at least some AI-created music naturally even if you don't realize it.
Is there a way to listen to say the top ten AI songs?
Do any of these AI music generators produce output that can be iterated upon like the output of coding agents?
Probably yes, but let's hope not
I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.
I agree with you, but I hope they prevent people uploading thousands of AI generated albums. If people start doing that, it can become difficult for non-AI artists to gain visibility in the recommendation systems etc.
Why prevent? You can solve that by marking them with a red size 72 font text saying "AI generated".
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks
Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.
Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
No, not really. Spotify is trialling a voluntary “AI Credits” thing where people can highlight use of AI when they release music.
https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/
The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist?
And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record?
And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
> The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
This may be more of an economic problem. There is a stark difference between a music track with 1% human work/effort, and 0%. You can make many musical tracks if you have to do only 1% of the work, but you can't make >100x what you made without AI (Amdahl's law). While the latter can scale infinitely; you could upload a billion tracks if you wished, you're limited basically by bandwidth and automation. So a classifier or policy which permitted the 99% AI but banned the 100% AI may be adequate.
There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
I wouldn't say that porn is not allowed on every platform. basically every mainstream "content posting" platform (fb, ig, tw, tiktok, etc) allows softcore porn, and in fact pushes it on users, both on content an on advertising. if the same was true with AI music I wouldn't bother with the platform
Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.
It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
It’s not a corner case when you have to enforce it.
Someone will end up in the middle and then you’ll be responsible for accepting or rejecting it.
The bulk is obvious but the debate isn’t for the obvious.
But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case.
If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.
What is “mostly” AI in the context of music?
Of course ~nobody wants low-effort "I pasted a one-line prompt into Suno and got this out" in their feed. If they did they'd be listening on Suno and not Spotify. The problem is there's no objective, let alone automated, way to tell the difference between that and the corner cases. Artistic quality is an inherently subjective metric, not something that can be enforced via rules.
Who is listening to that crap anyway when you got literal decades worth of great music to choose from?
New great music is being released every day. What should I do, arbitrary decide to never consume any music made past today?
Nah but I venture that you could distinguish AI generated music from great new music. And if you can’t, what’s the issue?
The same people who read AI-generated stories about AI. Which is, roughly, most of us. There are AI-generated blog posts on the front page of HN multiple times a day. Right now, I see "I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs", which is AI slop. I'm sure there's more.
Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.
But this can be easily fixed by turning the autoplay, the slop's best friend, off.
Me personally, I sniff AI on Spotify by empty "about" sections. Which is sad as I always held dear that it's the music that must speak for the author, not the vice versa.
The solution is easy, don’t use Spotify. They are money grubbing vampires leeching off musicians anyway and using your subscription money to fund shady arms companies.
Lots of people are listening to it. There’s an AI brand named “Eddie Dalton” on Spotify right now with 589k monthly listeners and a couple of million streams on its top track. This is one of many.
Lots of people don’t care about whether the music they listen to is human created or not - just as lots of people don’t care about lots of other AI slop so long as they are entertained by it.
If they don’t care what is the problem?
The biggest issue for new musicians is not AI generated slop, it’s a predatory industry and a backlog of 80+ years of excellent music.
The biggest issue for new musicians is getting people’s attention. AI music that people are happy to over human music listen to is absolutely part of the problem.
I agree that this is the biggest problem, but the existing backlog of hits is far that have been recorded since way before I was born is far “worse” in that regard than AI slop.
It’s easy (at least for now) to compete with slop - it’s way harder to compete with e.g. Queen, Eminem and the Beatles.
It’s like saying cancer is a problem when you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound to your chest.
The engagement mechanisms and audiences for heritage artists vs new artists are very different. New artists are not in competition with heritage artists like the ones you mention: those artists are a constant passive consumption baseline against which new active “lean in” consumption needs to fit. A lot of music listening is passive consumption. Start an algorithmically generated “radio” style playlist from one of those big name heritage artists and Spotify will then serve up payola content (baked in in the major label deals, “Spotify Discovery Mode” for indies) that positions new music within that playlist for algorithmically receptive listeners. If AI created music is going head to head in that algorithmic market for listening slots, that has a significant disadvantage for new human-created music.
Big name heritage artists aren’t the problem - they are the thing that underpins a lot of consumption and keeps people coming back to platform.
I can assure you it’s not a corner case: this is one of the things that a lot of creators are concerned about. If a major streaming platform decides your music is not acceptable because you used some AI as part of your production process and blocks your song as a result that has pretty big consequences.
Spotify, for example, already said that any track that gets under 1000 streams will not get any money. What if it says “any track that uses more than a proportion of AI will not make any money” - but refuses to say how it makes those decisions so that people can’t game the system.
If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?
You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.
bandcamp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605490
Deez what?
This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.
Does Deezer charge per song?
Sounds like a free backup service to me.
If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop.
Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad.
Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder.
If you want to make money, good luck.
Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast.
On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly.
And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.
I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.
This is good and cool.
Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%!
Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.
I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.
... And most streams are fraudulent.
I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.
How do they tell? Because they're awful? Some of them might be good. And many, if not most, songs created by unknown artists are terrible.
They call it UGC, user-generated content. I’ve been calling it UGB for a long time, the B standing for Bullshit.
"97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music."
Is this the new Coke vs Pepsi challenge?
Of course, it takes 2 seconds to shit out an ai song. I'm surprised it isn't way higher
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Great reason to steer clear of deezer
Why is that? They're being honest and reporting their numbers. Other platforms are not telling you.