>But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing.

Isn’t this an argument against all new music, even human made?

Either we have it all already, or there’s room for new things that we haven’t heard before.

> what's the argument for it

Record companies can sell it and don't have to pay any royalties. They only pay the artists pennies as it is, but that's too much for them.

There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing

You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.

Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.

If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.

> I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human.

I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).

As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.

As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.

BIAB is still best in class (even if the UI is practically Soviet era) simply because of the sheer number of RealTracks, which are actual performances by musicians that dynamically adapt to your chord progression.

I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.

What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.

https://mordenstar.com/blog/dutyfree-shop

> I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?

Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.

I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).

I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...

> This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.

It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.

I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.

Deezer had an analysis where they found almost all the listeners for AI music was fraud bots.

Yes it should be easy to find people in one’s immediate social circle who are listening to these tracks if they are that popular. I’ll wait…

Time for a cross, like the New York Times bestsellers.

I played around with Suno a little too. It's actually kind of crazy what it can produce. I mean I don't think it's objectively good in any way but for many applications this (and a lot of other generative AIs) are what I'd call "sufficiently good".

When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".

So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.

So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.

But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.

There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.

The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.

Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.

You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.

I've noticed this too. I have a few theories about this. Disclosure: I know a little about audio, and very little about audio generative AI.

First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.

I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.

Perhaps this is what the human is for - to apply an EQ curve.

Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).

I suspect it's because AI generates music as a waveform incrementally not globally so it favors smoothly varying sounds, not sharp contrast. If it generated MIDI data and then used a MIDI synth to create the audio, you wouldn't get that.

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

Likely not a bad way to clean money.

So it’s perfect for the times. :(

Definitely still at #3 in the UK when I open “iTunes Store” (not Apple Music) and go to the Album Chart… at least it was the case two minutes ago.

I don't like most AI music I've heard, but you shouldn't be voted down for expressing a preference.

I do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.

If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.

Why?

This comment is like 20 years out of date haha. People shifted to single hits when the iTunes store was selling songs for 99 cents. Now (and by now I mean for over a decade) we’re in the age of streaming, and you can easily access whole albums with zero friction. It’s the best time ever for the full listen through experience. And artists are responding by releasing long albums.

What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.

I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.

music has been a product of its form factor for a long time. It's no coincidence that the wax cylinder, 78, 45, 33, cassette, CD, and mp3 dictated changes in how music was packaged (single, lp, ep, album, b sides) and the average length of a popular song.

Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.

Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.

charts will become totally meaningless.

Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.

You're only describing pop music. Thankfully this is a tiny fraction of all music.

I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.

One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.

I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.

I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.

Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.

I'd say the same thing about two thirds of the iTunes top 100. Different people love different songs I guess.

The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.

> completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it

You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.

Pre-video ad served by YT was quite literally a scam.

Which says all you need to know about where all this is headed, I guess.

It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.

the comments are very suspicious and very scary

The AI comment push on that video is certainly an interesting look into the future. Record labels have their work cut out for them in this brace new world.

I've been making all my own music lately with suno 5.5. It's pretty sweet, it allows me to explore concepts in a different way. This sucks though. Here's hyperpop version of https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 -> https://suno.com/song/516c7e52-a03e-490d-ba26-8d9a332eeea7

Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?

I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.

“Soon” we will see celebrity AI gossip?

Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...

baby gronk got rizzed up by livvy?

right, but at least human hands used to touch the process. even in 2000s copy-paste boy band era it was at least human

This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.

The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.

The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.

The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.