I had no idea how bad it had gotten, since none of it was being shown to me. Then a friend sent me his AI music on Spotify, I listened, and my recommendations were all AI for my usual genres suddenly. It's like they have a flag for your account that says "we can save money, this guy will listen to the cheap stuff".

I've switched to Deezer because of this. They're making an effort to keep the simulacra under control and prevent it from polluting recommendations.

https://en.deezercommunity.com/product-updates/deezer-just-r...

The AI songs do suck, but what's even worse is that I can't block artists on Spotify or YouTube. My only recourse was to down vote each song individually, which didn't prevent the songs from showing up, just "Showed my preference".

I don't know what service is safe, but it seems like the incentives for the companies is not to direct me to what I want, real people performing music.

The same thing is happening on YouTube, my recs are stuffed full of obviously AI generated music compilations lately. It's obvious from the volume those channels are posting (often ~3 hours of "new" music every single day) that little to no curation is happening, it's just elemental slop straight from the firehose.

Most people love making AI music by throwing a 5-word prompt at Suno and being in awe at "their" creation.

However, it is also a fact that the vast majority of people can't care less to listen to their friends' and family's Sunos, as they were not involved in the process and therefore can't vibe to the random soul-less soup.

Please keep your slop for yourself.

I’ve been using tidal since forever because Spotify’s recommendations were crap, and Apple Music’s weren’t good.

I think I’ve heard one AI slop thing in my daily discovery queue, once.

It’s hard to say if that one track was ai slop or not, given my tastes (I downloaded Poppy, Music to Scream To, for example).

AI slop is starting to remind me of Atari in the early 80s that lead up to the video game crash of 1983. Content saturation of the lowest form in quality pushed to make money.

I love making AI music.

Sometimes I freestyle rap over instrumentals that I’ve created with AI, record myself and then use that recording to create an AI song.

Some of the songs I really love, like this one:

https://suno.com/s/o4oyu5Eq7nMdQyzK

There’d be more to say - but of course, creating songs without regard to their quality or your input in them is slop that shouldn’t be shared.

Spotify's biggest enemy are the record labels that they have to pay license fees to. Slowly ramp up the AI slop while ramping down the label-owned material and hope subscribers don't notice. It's a play that worked for Netflix, which used to have every major show a decade ago and is now majority mass-produced Netflix Original slop.

Would be pretty ironic if AI destroys the value attributed to the brand name of these firms who are not policing the mounting slop.

How about vinyl? How much AI slop is being pressed onto vinyl records?

one thing that I've never regretted, and is paying dividends, is that I've been buying and collecting physical music since I was a teen and grown my own library. Thankfully I have a lot of music buffs in my family who encouraged it.

What I do is pick one or two dozen records at the beginning of the year and limit myself to them, listen actively instead of just putting it on, don't just treat it like noise. Don't need to bother with any subscription service or AI bs. Even before the AI slop if you looked at the numbers, random influencer crap was much more heavily promoted than some of the greatest music in human history, there's such a recency bias in the entire streaming industry.

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Tangent to this, some AI software is good for to experimentation. Here is an excellent example - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=alb_ZFHVXCU

We're being both figuratively and literally boiled alive by what AI is doing to our civilization.