A lot of confidence in such predictions with zero precedence...
I think a lot of people will think AI is their meal ticket to pop stardom. I think they misunderstand how the music industry has operated: it's a club. There are hundreds of thousands of 'brands' and 'stars' out there with no dedicated following but enough money to pump themselves into the image of stardom.
There's a difference between looking like you're impacting lives, and actually impacting lives. Like there's a difference between a machine-generated image of a mountain on a computer screen, and standing in front of a mountain.
Is there a difference in practice? Don't a lot of celebrities get pictures of themselves "helping" people after a natural disaster or something when in reality they were there for not much more than the photo session?
Jim Morission accurately predicted "the machines" or "single person" in this context. I've also been reading more on Bob Moog, as one of those first engineers to birth the liminal device.
What Seth says here is a bit more dramatic, but its a natural evolution to information access, tech, and single author productions. In fact, really this is the next step, where the single person is no one, its scaled "nobody" based on mixed IP.
AI is fundamentally deflationary. That's due to simple rules of supply / demand.
Our demand is pretty constant. We can't simply consume any more software or content than we do now.
But with AI, supply is going to get jacked maybe another 5x-50x. That's great news as a hobby content creator, but for professionals it just means much stiffer competition for smaller rewards.
Same applies to Software. It has become pretty trivial to reverse engineer any software with AI now, except for the best in class AI models. All of this is probably bearish for most AI startups' hopes for hitting it big. Just too much supply of software.
Gonna go ahead and say there literally isn’t unless you’re counting a small increase in programmer efficiency over using tutorials/blogs/stack overflow.
What do people get out of reading Seth Godin's blog posts? Genuinely curious. It's a blog post with 9 "paragraphs". The number of "sentences" in each "paragraph": 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 5, 2, 3, 2. Many of the "sentences" aren't actually sentences but are just sentence fragments. The post consists purely of vague assertions and observations, which aren't researched, aren't argued meaningfully, and don't seem very insightful. Do people just enjoy the nostalgia of reading a popular blog from way back and the feeling it gave them when this kind of thing was novel and exciting?
It's a natural progression of his writing style. It's reductive romantic style, tuned for virality in a sea of endless info. Of course, its shallow, but this one invites conversion of an observation that is quite impactful. I thought it was well done for a general audience, and probably some target to an aging generation. No one around me listens to McCarthy, and if they do its all regression.
Even without any knowledge about the author and without having read TFA, the comment exchange of you both makes for a satisfying and interesting read.
I'm not sure if this can be shoehorned as "curiosity", but it dangerously touches on a meta level that HN has historically been keen to avoid (as opposed to other, more common social media platforms)
This is not meant as a critique of our comments, just a self-observation.
Seth has delivered the daily food for thought for decades — this in itself is already the message; regardless of swings of superficiality. I'll take that over the twenty-something business hustler who drops rehashed 'value bombs' on Twitter any day. Now let's talk about pop. I for one welcome that KK's 100(0) true friends finally materializes, but I also miss widespread collective cultural (pop) experiences. Can't have it all.
My less charitable interpretation is that Seth is one of the first "business hustler" personas, and used the power of the internet, blogging, and eventually social media to promote that persona and turn it into a business in and of itself.
When he started out, he was a twenty-something business hustler dropping value bombs, written in Palahniuk-style blog posts. But he was very unique at the time, and certainly a pioneer in pushing how valuable you can make your own personal brand just through blogging and social media.
Unfortunately for him, he was so successful he inspired an enormous amount of copycats, diluting the value of his once-unique style.
Just seems kind of weird to refer to someone you don't know by their first name. I don't ever do it, personally. I'm not that familiar with this blog or the group of people who follow it closely. But if it's common to refer to the author by their first name, it seems like their marketing and branding is very effective.
There's been a lot of talk about podcast listeners having parasocial relationships with the hosts of the podcasts they listen to. I wonder if blogs like this were a forerunner of developing a brand by drawing people into a proto parasocial relationship.
1. scarcity is a forcing function for pop culture (true!)
2. AI will make new creations ubiquitous; bye, bye, scarcity (maybe true?)
3. without the forcing function, there's no more pop culture (doesn't seem so true at all)
While Godin is curt, he's not so succinct. And there's a lot of conjecture asserted as true. There's still some kernel of something interesting there, but honestly, it feels like I put more work into reading Godin than he put into writing.
One thing I would be interested to see would be a new type of instrument that takes advantage of foundation models in a way that results in a user experience that is considerably more difficult than a toy guitar with a few buttons, but considerably easier than actually playing your favorite songs on the guitar. Even better if it can be used for a type of sound that is unique and can't be replicated on more traditional instruments.
I don’t agree with this. Sure, maybe AI will start producing some hit songs but I don’t see it ending pop music as we know it. Fans of popstars are not just fans of the music, but of the persona. Do you think Taylor Swift would have as much success if she were just a computer writing emotionally charged songs? I don’t think so, because the appeal of those songs is that the listener feels like they get to know a real person.
Seth is right, stars in the previous century were known by everyone. Even the old-timers knew (and loathed) that bug group that invaded the U.S. in the 1960's.
For better or worse, we once had a shared cultural reference. No longer.
Not sure if you’re just blinded by nostalgia, but I would consider Taylor Swift one of the most well-known popstars in history. You realize that she just broke the record for most attend U.S. concert for a female performer right?
Regardless, it’s not just about popstars. People like listening to music that they can connect to on a human to human level. They do also like listening to music that is just there to dance to. Both can coexist, but I don’t see people connecting with music that AI writes simply because there isn’t a persona there to connect with.
Kanye West, Drake, The Weeknd peaks anre after 2008. Adele could be in there. Justin Bieber and One Direction were her contemporary starting. While peaking after her.
BTS is possibly on track to be bigger than Taylor Swift’s highest peak
I follow a bit of indie music but that’s about it personally.
I think Lady Gaga is a great example of what the poster is talking about. I know so many Lady Gaga songs and I am not even a fan. I have never tried to listen to any of her music but the shared experience means I just know so much from 15 years back.
Contrast that with Harry Styles. I look him up on youtube right now and I have never heard a single one of his songs before this. All I know is he is a giant star but it stops there.
I think the doom and gloom about the arts dying by generative Ai is a bit overblown. Yes, generative Ais can significantly outproduce humanity in the arts, sure. But in the end it’s never only about the final piece of music/canvas/etc it is about the person that did it.
I am very certain that when the output loses its value due to endless supply, as the article fears, we will return to other more human values in order to judge what we like
> But in the end it’s never only about the final piece of music/canvas/etc it is about the person that did it.
Nope. Good art stands on its own merits. The only useful thing about knowing who did it is that you can find more of it.
> I am very certain that when the output loses its value due to endless supply, as the article fears, we will return to other more human values in order to judge what we like
Wonderful. The less attention that people give to celebrities, the better.
50,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. On Soundcloud, it's over 120,000 per day. Is Seth not aware that people were already making lots of music, and that more music is released beyond Drake and The Weeknd...?
There is already "too much" content to consume, for some definition of too much. If AI-assisted music creation boosts the number of songs on Spotify from 50,000 to 500,000 per day -- does it really matter? If you're an artist who doesn't have a fanbase, you're currently releasing music into the void, and you would be in a world of AI-generated music spam, too.
Making a popular pop song is 10% about the song itself and 90% a combination of marketing and luck. AI isn't going to change this. Thinking that people are going to stop listening to Nicki Minaj or Taylor Swift because other music exists is, frankly, really stupid.
... or it will homogenize that lower 80th percentile (which needs to do something out of the ordinary to stand out) and decrease interest in it even more.
There's already a ton of really, really good music in that 80th percentile, that barely ever gets heard. Some of my favorite songs ever have like 10,000 plays on Soundcloud. Lack of quality is not the reason that bottom 80th percentile doesn't get heard (or the converse: it's not the reason that most people don't listen to that bottom 80th percentile).
We already see a lot of this "rise of the long tail", even without AI. Through the rise of individualized music streaming and the demise of the relatively few radio and music TV stations, there is much more fragmentation now than before the Web.
This trend will only be further amplified by a surge of AI enhanced music, as Seth Godin argues. And after that, fully AI generated music will be the final nail in the coffin of Pop. Everything will be highly individualized.
We may still occasionally have songs going viral, but those will be only short flashes of popularity, nothing that lasts for weeks or even months, and they will be forgotten quickly, lost in the flood.
In this future, what is the point of music at all? Music used to be a communal thing. First it was songs around the camp fire, slave music, clubs. We have always experienced music together. Even after Spotify we have shared our favorite songs and playlists. We still go to concerts. But if no one has the same frame of reference anymore and all music is atomized and personalized. And nothing means anything anymore. What’s the point? Just background noise?
> And nothing means anything anymore. What’s the point? Just background noise?
I'm gathering that you generally don't listen to purely instrumental music.
Ultimately the beauty in harmonies or a certain rhythm etc. is ineffable (you judge words and lyrics with another part of your brain). Can you enjoy visual art without sharing it? Can you enjoy food without sharing it?
> We may still occasionally have songs going viral, but those will be only short flashes of popularity, nothing that lasts for weeks or even months, and they will be forgotten quickly, lost in the flood.
Good. The latest is not necessarily the best, and there is plenty of lost treasure just waiting to be found.
Only you will consider it a treasure. Other people will not care. Everyone will have their own personal favorites, at which point they can't even be called treasures.
I doubt that taste is that arbitrary. Regardless, do you think our value systems are that dependent on what other people think? Do I really need someone else to confirm that something tastes great or looks great?
I guess in the future extraverts won't listen to music.
Famous songs have been very important culturally. They provide some common ground, a shared experience, something which creates a sense of community. This may go away with AI, and arguably already has, to some extent, due to individualized streaming.
Interesting - I used exactly this example (AI used to give recent McCartney music his young voice) not very long ago. While there are a lot of applications of this technology that make me uncomfortable, I'd love to see this used in this way. McCartney's last album suffered a bit because of his voice, IMO, and I'd love to hear it re-cut using this technology.
(There's another conversation about whether Sir Paul should be leaning into his current voice and writing material that's better suited for it, but... in a world where we've got ample autotune and other vocal effects being deployed for younger artists, I don't see any harm in giving McCartney's voice a boost with technology too.)
We already seen a lot of AI generated art recently. But these were just pictures. What about AI generated music? There are substantial differences between music and pictures:
- For artistic pictures there is no pop. They do not have nearly the same popularity as music.
- Music follows changing fashions and even progress of some sort. Each time period (e.g. decade) comes with distinctive music styles, and while there are some revivals, usually they do not repeat. Artistic pictures are much more static in comparison, at least in the last few decades. Pictures are influenced by available tools (e.g. Photoshop and graphic tablets), but a painting today doesn't look markedly different from a painting 30 years ago.
Since music follows fashions, just imitating past music genres may not be as popular as it is popular to imitate existing art styles with Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. But imitation is exactly what current generative models do. Which may ultimately limit the popularity of fully AI generated songs created by amateurs. Musicians may still have an edge by using AI tools to create new music styles.
While I agree that art has become more static since the dawn of the internet, the same can definitely be said about music, particularly pop music, which hasn't advanced significantly since the 2000s. However in various corners, sampling and synthesis have advanced by leaps and strides over the past decade. Also if you're just limiting visual art to painting, I think you're skipping over an entire era of installation-based and generative art (not necessarily machine learning-based) that has only recently flourished. And just to touch on your first point, "pop art" has been a term since the 50s. It overlaps pretty significantly with the visual style of comic books, which are most prominent in animated features and video games today. Corporate art similarly has its own style (think those flat diverse figures with bright colors). I'm not even sure how one would start to compare the relative "popularity" of these two domains, let alone determine that "music" is more popular than "art".
Hm... Regarding the last sentence: Many people pay for Spotify, and in the past they paid even more for records and CDs, but people rarely pay for pictures, if ever. Maybe once to decorate their new flat. People also go to concerts of their favorite musicians, while they basically never visit art exhibitions.
Genuinely confused how people think AI will "democratize" music by allowing people to "create without a gatekeeper". What exactly does this mean? Music has already been democratized. You don't need a label to release music and build a following anymore. Mainstream acts like Radiohead and Chance the Rapper have proven this over and over again.
The catch here is that you need to do something new and original to attract a following that way. Training a computer to generate a Drake song (or imitate McCartney's voice) doesn't empower new artists like AI evangelists think it does. If UMG can pay someone else to copy Drake's flow and release a new Drake track for 1/10 the cost, that isn't "democratizing" artistry, it's extricating the artist from the art altogether. If you do want the support of a label for your own work, you need to meet the right people. AI-generated music doesn't change that.
The only "gates" these people want to get by are ones put up by practicing music enough to make something novel. AI might be useful as a tool to assist actual musicians in their processes, but in my experience the musicians that create interesting music do so because they have a strong vision, not because they're exceptionally technically proficient.
A Radiohead album is an incredibly sophisticated feat of audio engineering requiring a team of people beyond the band itself to make. The production costs are substantial. It takes more than just practicing enough to make something like that. If AI gets to the point where I can record something in my bedroom with similar production values, I’d count that as democratization.
What do you think the AI could do that you couldn't by searching the web?
And is the difference between the hypothetical bedroom-produced version of the same Radiohead album and the actual album actually that noticeable?
I work in film/video, and you definitely can produce something that would have cost millions of dollars 10 years ago by yourself, with minimal costs. I struggle to compare the scale of engineering needed to make albums versus movies.
I don't know what to tell you brother, two months of mixing is very doable for humans beings... As it was done by two people to make OK Computer? I don't think having an AI will change much for your music production if 2 months of mixing is too much work. Don't even know what you'd ask it to do - you'd probably have to readjust it until it's the way you want it...it would probably take the same time don't you think?
Well we're talking about making a record like OK Computer. It's a work of art, it takes time and intent and attention to details.
If you want to record a couple jazz songs for kicks you can very easily and satisfactorily do this today, for very little money (just higher up this thread people have recommended great tools) and it will be higher quality that what was playing on the radio in the 90s. And I'd argue that if you were as good a crooner as Radiohead are -eh- experimental musicians, I'm sure you'd find the time to make an album that would make yourself rich.
Sorry I'm a little ranty - gonna get a drink I guess
You don't need two months of mixing for your crooner album. You can mix it yourself on the weekend and be 80% there.
Like the guy that did Tubular Bells keep re-recording it because it's not good enough for him - but I'm fine with the version he first produced. AI isn't going to change anything here.
I get it, but I see so many possibilities here. Fitter Happier and Climbing up the Walls have string arrangements performed by an orchestra. Can you imagine writing a score and spinning up a virtual orchestra to play it? There are so many subtleties in phrasing, dynamics, and intonation that make the difference between just Ok and excellent. It doesn’t seem impossible to imagine giving your score to your virtual musicians and communicating with them in natural language and hummed phrases in an iterative process until they get things just right. You’d have to agree this would be democratizing, right?
A lot of time and attention can still be spent with 2 months if AI can do a lot of it.
OKC is one of the best Albums of all time imo. But it’s also one of the most popular ones in my own list. So not like all the other works of art for music I come across requiring such intense amt of human labor put in. The capital wouldn’t be there. Capital means capitalism. Which isn’t democratic.
Reading on the recording of OK Computer, "about 80%" of it was live, no audio separation, it took two months to mix, I can't find the time it took to master. I don't know where the thousands of man-hours were spent?
OK Computer ended up with 12 songs, although OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017, the 2017 reissue of OK Computer included 3 extra previously unreleased tracks (plus a bunch more extras). If we assume those 3 tracks were mixed and mastered for OK Computer's original release, but just didn't make the cut for whatever reason, we have 15 tracks.
Thousands of man-hours is the five members of the band, plus their producer, plus an audio-engineer working 40 hrs/wk.
There are 43 business days in 2 months, or just under 3 days per track. 3 days to do a bunch of technical work to balance the recordings juuust right, and then balance those recordings between each other to make it worthy of being called a Radiohead album. Personally, 3 days per track actually doesn't sound like enough time for that since you mix it, and then have to listen to that particular mix until you get bored, and then come back to it after, listen to it again some more, figure out how you feel about that mix, and then repeat.
Of course, you can half-ass it and throw the tracks into Ableton, spend 20 minutes and call it a day, but you didn't used to get to be Radiohead with that kind of effort. ML algos on the horizon seem like they'll be able to do just that.
If production gets easier, I’m guessing the competitive bar will raise to a point where you still can’t do this with little effort. There may be an adjustment period where you can, but I think it will be temporary. An arms race will kick off with the new tools.
You don't need AI for this, you can do it now. Any analog music production gear in existence has a software emulation that's 99.99% accurate and available for a few hundred bucks at most (and of course can be easily acquired for free, as with all software). High quality audio interfaces are available for cheap. Most expensive thing would be renting out a studio to record vocals with a good mic, and even that is arguably unnecessary. Plenty of in-the-box musicians and producers are making top quality songs with not much more than their Macbook.
I’ve recorded at home with a similar setup. Getting things to sound just right takes a lot of effort and tinkering though which I just don’t have time for due to the demands of work and family. I might have a couple hours per week to devote to music. If I could go from writing a song to making a professional sounding recording in a couple hours, that would be amazing. This isn’t a hypothetical either. I’m an ML researcher and plan to experiment with stuff like this when I have time. Making it stupid easy to produce professional sounding recordings would absolutely be democratizing in my opinion.
Already lots of magic tooling for exactly this, some of which (allegedly) uses AI. Look into Gullfoss for AI assistance with mixing and iZotope Ozone which has an "AI mastering assistant." And there's even more basic "one knob sound good" plugins of varying effectiveness, like OTT, Sausage Fattener and Soundgoodizer.
Thanks for the recommendations. All of my music equipment is in storage now, but I hope to set up a small studio later this year. Will definitely check this stuff out.
The gear has indeed gotten cheaper, but you need to
- record one or more sounds
- have extensive knowledge about filters, mixing, mastering
Without the latter, even if you're amazing musician/singer and you have decent gear and a nice interace and good ideas, you still need to sit down and mix the thing so that it sounds good in the car/airpods/phone/laptop.
> Plenty of in-the-box musicians and producers are making top quality songs with not much more than their Macbook.
I'll bet you money that if one of their songs has repeat status in your music player, that song is likely not the first song they've ever recorded.
They had to build mechanical skills first. AI-generated music skips that.
Raydev appears to have no interest in learning anything about the music production process nor putting in any work.
I suggest that they are using "expensive gear" as a proxy for "effort, work, sweat, time"
mechanical skills are EARNED, and are a lot of fun to exercise when functioning.
*before anyone suggests "ableism" I refer you to Django Reinhardt, the drummer from Def Leppard, and anyone who has overcome physical disabilities to express themselves upon the musical instrument of their choice.
One of the highest selling songs of the decade, Old Town Road, was made by some kid on a laptop in his bedroom. He has outsold Radiohead, the song went 16x platinum. Production value means nothing in the success of music, even some of the most successful major artists with major label backing put out badly mixed garbage and still outsell Radiohead. Music is like code: consumers don’t care about the input.
"democratization"!? It wouldn't be YOU or another PERSON gaining these capacities, in such a scenario, it would be the tool, and you would be the toolmakers customer.
ATM, LLM's of reasonable sophistication for such tasks are not running on your laptop, and at the point they do, something else will be getting all the limelight, and it won't be within your reach.
As a lifelong musician and composer and producer, it's just automating things away that I don't want automated away. Producing music is about making decisions.
You act as if Radiohead just inserted money and out came pro music, but really you appear to be wishing to skip any hard work and appear to be asking for instant gratification. Well, I can tell you, as someone who could readily train AI in music, that you only cheat yourself by cutting corners.
Knowledge is power to do what you actually really deeply want to.
Handing off the minute decisions that add up to making a masterpiece = cheating oneself of being a creator.
My generation at the dawn of the public internet has contributed to it pouring in a constellation of mini local cultures and experiences, "scenes". Into forums and boards. Hell, even in deviantart and myspace, blogs and newsletters. The current generation's culture is instead what they obtain from the internet itself. Make a word viral and everybody will repeat it, worldwide. "content". What will the AI generation do, rehash this "content"? Value is lost forever, everything is now the same everybody stops there.
I think there are roughly three eras of the commercial Internet's culture now, and we're entering the fourth:
Through ~2001: Pre-broadband - early web, dot-coms. Everyone got email. If they were more adventurous, they made a home page, got on IRC or Usenet. This era inherited the "US college student with campus internet access" dynamic that dominated the earliest years of the Internet. "The Internet is for porn" etc. There's a lot of overlap between this era and the next one because broadband added so many capabilities that it was like two sibling versions of internet, akin to 8-bit vs 16-bit personal computing.
2001-2008: Web forums, instant messengers, early Web 2.0. A much broader set of people came online and were courted by the new platforms. This was both a broadening and an erasure of any prior history or culture - the "toxic gamer" archetype, the start of influencer trends in various categories(photos, fitness, tech products...), etc. But commerce and community was broadly mediated through "your own web site" rather than platforms.
2008-2020: Post-iPhone smartphones, dominance of centralized internet platforms and algorithmic news feeds. Now the Internet's culture really was accessed by "everyone" and this became clear by around 2012 as more and more social media-driven movements swept through the world. Status-seeking behavior online became very conspicuous, with a ton of activity, styles of messaging, etc molded to juice algorithmic KPIs.
2020 marks the line where we went to full Internet dependence. And... it's also roughly when ordinary people started expressing more agency over how their news feeds should work, and when the really rapid generative AI breakthroughs started. So all at once the blind status seeking of the smartphone era is breaking down, and the new challenges involve finding appropriate sources of truth and filters in an ocean of spam content.
The catch here is that you need to do something new and original to attract a following that way.
Before generative AI, you would've had people copying your style, but that took effort and there was ethics involved, many artists wouldn't like to outright copy someone because it's lame (it is).
Now though, there is zero cost to copying someones style and it can be done in a more faceless way.
I don't think there is much inventive anymore to make something original and post it online. Maybe just play live only?
Current pop music is the result of an industrial process (teams of writers, complex recording and post processing, and of course, focus groups all along the way) so a transformer system just automates some of that. The process is rather fascinating, actually, though personally I find the output mostly pretty dull.
I don’t know about “democratization” — what incentive is there for someone to make that kind of stuff at home? Once upon a time you could imagine being found like, say, Bieber or Elvis, but if the factories can pump that stuff out easily, the commercial sphere will be fully populated, as with other industrial consumer products like breakfast cereal (how much cereal is sold at Farmer’s markets?).
Homemade music will remain what it has always been — fun.
There’s tons of small changes AI will be able to do to make albums sound better. Many indie artists will continue to stay clean but many will embrace AI. Tech always ends up getting used. Using AI as a supplement isn’t overall being mainstream or conformist.
I think it's rather the opposite. Those tools are controlled by large capital, at the level of being capable of wowing people with cutting-edge realistic content.
I predict a renewed interest in human scale art and culture and socialization.
The lines for the toilet at the worlds biggest party are surely long...
AI music will be cool for 10 minutes and then you realize one of the reasons you listen to music is about shared human experience. If it’s just a generated blip that everyone is generating and resharing it’ll eventually have the same appeal as blogspam. AI music will cause people to go back to seeking out performed music played on instruments or in a live setting. You'll have music sites that only allow music that has videos of humans playing/creating it. Every AI action will have an equal but opposite human reaction.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadI think a lot of people will think AI is their meal ticket to pop stardom. I think they misunderstand how the music industry has operated: it's a club. There are hundreds of thousands of 'brands' and 'stars' out there with no dedicated following but enough money to pump themselves into the image of stardom.
There's a difference between looking like you're impacting lives, and actually impacting lives. Like there's a difference between a machine-generated image of a mountain on a computer screen, and standing in front of a mountain.
What Seth says here is a bit more dramatic, but its a natural evolution to information access, tech, and single author productions. In fact, really this is the next step, where the single person is no one, its scaled "nobody" based on mixed IP.
Our demand is pretty constant. We can't simply consume any more software or content than we do now.
But with AI, supply is going to get jacked maybe another 5x-50x. That's great news as a hobby content creator, but for professionals it just means much stiffer competition for smaller rewards.
Same applies to Software. It has become pretty trivial to reverse engineer any software with AI now, except for the best in class AI models. All of this is probably bearish for most AI startups' hopes for hitting it big. Just too much supply of software.
> PS my friend Paige has a new book out.
I'm not sure if this can be shoehorned as "curiosity", but it dangerously touches on a meta level that HN has historically been keen to avoid (as opposed to other, more common social media platforms)
This is not meant as a critique of our comments, just a self-observation.
* https://paigespage.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DRF_book-f...
When he started out, he was a twenty-something business hustler dropping value bombs, written in Palahniuk-style blog posts. But he was very unique at the time, and certainly a pioneer in pushing how valuable you can make your own personal brand just through blogging and social media.
Unfortunately for him, he was so successful he inspired an enormous amount of copycats, diluting the value of his once-unique style.
There's been a lot of talk about podcast listeners having parasocial relationships with the hosts of the podcasts they listen to. I wonder if blogs like this were a forerunner of developing a brand by drawing people into a proto parasocial relationship.
It's far easier to read and generally keeps the writing less flowery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588329
https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
1. scarcity is a forcing function for pop culture (true!)
2. AI will make new creations ubiquitous; bye, bye, scarcity (maybe true?)
3. without the forcing function, there's no more pop culture (doesn't seem so true at all)
While Godin is curt, he's not so succinct. And there's a lot of conjecture asserted as true. There's still some kernel of something interesting there, but honestly, it feels like I put more work into reading Godin than he put into writing.
Seth is right, stars in the previous century were known by everyone. Even the old-timers knew (and loathed) that bug group that invaded the U.S. in the 1960's.
For better or worse, we once had a shared cultural reference. No longer.
Regardless, it’s not just about popstars. People like listening to music that they can connect to on a human to human level. They do also like listening to music that is just there to dance to. Both can coexist, but I don’t see people connecting with music that AI writes simply because there isn’t a persona there to connect with.
I follow a bit of indie music but that’s about it personally.
I think Lady Gaga is a great example of what the poster is talking about. I know so many Lady Gaga songs and I am not even a fan. I have never tried to listen to any of her music but the shared experience means I just know so much from 15 years back.
Contrast that with Harry Styles. I look him up on youtube right now and I have never heard a single one of his songs before this. All I know is he is a giant star but it stops there.
I am very certain that when the output loses its value due to endless supply, as the article fears, we will return to other more human values in order to judge what we like
Nope. Good art stands on its own merits. The only useful thing about knowing who did it is that you can find more of it.
> I am very certain that when the output loses its value due to endless supply, as the article fears, we will return to other more human values in order to judge what we like
Wonderful. The less attention that people give to celebrities, the better.
People have been saying "art is dead" for 150 years+.
This is just the latest iteration of "art is dead".
"This time it is different". As if no one has ever said that before.
Marble sculpture had its time as the dominant medium of the day. These articles are no different than lamenting the demise of marble sculpture.
There is already "too much" content to consume, for some definition of too much. If AI-assisted music creation boosts the number of songs on Spotify from 50,000 to 500,000 per day -- does it really matter? If you're an artist who doesn't have a fanbase, you're currently releasing music into the void, and you would be in a world of AI-generated music spam, too.
Making a popular pop song is 10% about the song itself and 90% a combination of marketing and luck. AI isn't going to change this. Thinking that people are going to stop listening to Nicki Minaj or Taylor Swift because other music exists is, frankly, really stupid.
In turn, that could widen the long tail of what people are interested in a lot.
This trend will only be further amplified by a surge of AI enhanced music, as Seth Godin argues. And after that, fully AI generated music will be the final nail in the coffin of Pop. Everything will be highly individualized.
We may still occasionally have songs going viral, but those will be only short flashes of popularity, nothing that lasts for weeks or even months, and they will be forgotten quickly, lost in the flood.
That hasn't been true since at least gramophones.
> And nothing means anything anymore. What’s the point? Just background noise?
I'm gathering that you generally don't listen to purely instrumental music.
Ultimately the beauty in harmonies or a certain rhythm etc. is ineffable (you judge words and lyrics with another part of your brain). Can you enjoy visual art without sharing it? Can you enjoy food without sharing it?
Good. The latest is not necessarily the best, and there is plenty of lost treasure just waiting to be found.
I guess in the future extraverts won't listen to music.
Our appreciation for music will not disappear. It is time for democratised music.
(There's another conversation about whether Sir Paul should be leaning into his current voice and writing material that's better suited for it, but... in a world where we've got ample autotune and other vocal effects being deployed for younger artists, I don't see any harm in giving McCartney's voice a boost with technology too.)
There is no dearth of gigs for solo musicians playing music for wineries, breweries, restaurants, weddings, etc, and especially here in Texas!
- For artistic pictures there is no pop. They do not have nearly the same popularity as music.
- Music follows changing fashions and even progress of some sort. Each time period (e.g. decade) comes with distinctive music styles, and while there are some revivals, usually they do not repeat. Artistic pictures are much more static in comparison, at least in the last few decades. Pictures are influenced by available tools (e.g. Photoshop and graphic tablets), but a painting today doesn't look markedly different from a painting 30 years ago.
Since music follows fashions, just imitating past music genres may not be as popular as it is popular to imitate existing art styles with Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. But imitation is exactly what current generative models do. Which may ultimately limit the popularity of fully AI generated songs created by amateurs. Musicians may still have an edge by using AI tools to create new music styles.
The catch here is that you need to do something new and original to attract a following that way. Training a computer to generate a Drake song (or imitate McCartney's voice) doesn't empower new artists like AI evangelists think it does. If UMG can pay someone else to copy Drake's flow and release a new Drake track for 1/10 the cost, that isn't "democratizing" artistry, it's extricating the artist from the art altogether. If you do want the support of a label for your own work, you need to meet the right people. AI-generated music doesn't change that.
The only "gates" these people want to get by are ones put up by practicing music enough to make something novel. AI might be useful as a tool to assist actual musicians in their processes, but in my experience the musicians that create interesting music do so because they have a strong vision, not because they're exceptionally technically proficient.
And is the difference between the hypothetical bedroom-produced version of the same Radiohead album and the actual album actually that noticeable?
I work in film/video, and you definitely can produce something that would have cost millions of dollars 10 years ago by yourself, with minimal costs. I struggle to compare the scale of engineering needed to make albums versus movies.
Create enough hours in the day to do the work.
No amount of skill or knowledge will get me over the hump that it takes hundreds, maybe thousands, of person hours to produce a Radiohead album.
Ok computer took two months of mixing, and some time for the mastering. 80% of it were live takes. What's the AI supposed to do?
Imagine I’m a schmuck who can croon into a microphone. It’s just me. I have a dayjob because this is a hobby.
“Just a quick 2 months of work” is a total nonstarter. I’ll just keep crooning in the shower
“Just 2 months, it’s not a lot” is like telling someone “Oh cleaning the house is easy, just ask your maid”
If you want to record a couple jazz songs for kicks you can very easily and satisfactorily do this today, for very little money (just higher up this thread people have recommended great tools) and it will be higher quality that what was playing on the radio in the 90s. And I'd argue that if you were as good a crooner as Radiohead are -eh- experimental musicians, I'm sure you'd find the time to make an album that would make yourself rich.
Sorry I'm a little ranty - gonna get a drink I guess
You don't need two months of mixing for your crooner album. You can mix it yourself on the weekend and be 80% there.
Like the guy that did Tubular Bells keep re-recording it because it's not good enough for him - but I'm fine with the version he first produced. AI isn't going to change anything here.
OKC is one of the best Albums of all time imo. But it’s also one of the most popular ones in my own list. So not like all the other works of art for music I come across requiring such intense amt of human labor put in. The capital wouldn’t be there. Capital means capitalism. Which isn’t democratic.
Thousands of man-hours is the five members of the band, plus their producer, plus an audio-engineer working 40 hrs/wk.
There are 43 business days in 2 months, or just under 3 days per track. 3 days to do a bunch of technical work to balance the recordings juuust right, and then balance those recordings between each other to make it worthy of being called a Radiohead album. Personally, 3 days per track actually doesn't sound like enough time for that since you mix it, and then have to listen to that particular mix until you get bored, and then come back to it after, listen to it again some more, figure out how you feel about that mix, and then repeat.
Of course, you can half-ass it and throw the tracks into Ableton, spend 20 minutes and call it a day, but you didn't used to get to be Radiohead with that kind of effort. ML algos on the horizon seem like they'll be able to do just that.
- record one or more sounds
- have extensive knowledge about filters, mixing, mastering
Without the latter, even if you're amazing musician/singer and you have decent gear and a nice interace and good ideas, you still need to sit down and mix the thing so that it sounds good in the car/airpods/phone/laptop.
> Plenty of in-the-box musicians and producers are making top quality songs with not much more than their Macbook.
I'll bet you money that if one of their songs has repeat status in your music player, that song is likely not the first song they've ever recorded.
They had to build mechanical skills first. AI-generated music skips that.
mechanical skills are EARNED, and are a lot of fun to exercise when functioning.
*before anyone suggests "ableism" I refer you to Django Reinhardt, the drummer from Def Leppard, and anyone who has overcome physical disabilities to express themselves upon the musical instrument of their choice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Town_Road
ATM, LLM's of reasonable sophistication for such tasks are not running on your laptop, and at the point they do, something else will be getting all the limelight, and it won't be within your reach.
As a lifelong musician and composer and producer, it's just automating things away that I don't want automated away. Producing music is about making decisions.
You act as if Radiohead just inserted money and out came pro music, but really you appear to be wishing to skip any hard work and appear to be asking for instant gratification. Well, I can tell you, as someone who could readily train AI in music, that you only cheat yourself by cutting corners. Knowledge is power to do what you actually really deeply want to. Handing off the minute decisions that add up to making a masterpiece = cheating oneself of being a creator.
Through ~2001: Pre-broadband - early web, dot-coms. Everyone got email. If they were more adventurous, they made a home page, got on IRC or Usenet. This era inherited the "US college student with campus internet access" dynamic that dominated the earliest years of the Internet. "The Internet is for porn" etc. There's a lot of overlap between this era and the next one because broadband added so many capabilities that it was like two sibling versions of internet, akin to 8-bit vs 16-bit personal computing.
2001-2008: Web forums, instant messengers, early Web 2.0. A much broader set of people came online and were courted by the new platforms. This was both a broadening and an erasure of any prior history or culture - the "toxic gamer" archetype, the start of influencer trends in various categories(photos, fitness, tech products...), etc. But commerce and community was broadly mediated through "your own web site" rather than platforms.
2008-2020: Post-iPhone smartphones, dominance of centralized internet platforms and algorithmic news feeds. Now the Internet's culture really was accessed by "everyone" and this became clear by around 2012 as more and more social media-driven movements swept through the world. Status-seeking behavior online became very conspicuous, with a ton of activity, styles of messaging, etc molded to juice algorithmic KPIs.
2020 marks the line where we went to full Internet dependence. And... it's also roughly when ordinary people started expressing more agency over how their news feeds should work, and when the really rapid generative AI breakthroughs started. So all at once the blind status seeking of the smartphone era is breaking down, and the new challenges involve finding appropriate sources of truth and filters in an ocean of spam content.
Before generative AI, you would've had people copying your style, but that took effort and there was ethics involved, many artists wouldn't like to outright copy someone because it's lame (it is).
Now though, there is zero cost to copying someones style and it can be done in a more faceless way.
I don't think there is much inventive anymore to make something original and post it online. Maybe just play live only?
I don’t know about “democratization” — what incentive is there for someone to make that kind of stuff at home? Once upon a time you could imagine being found like, say, Bieber or Elvis, but if the factories can pump that stuff out easily, the commercial sphere will be fully populated, as with other industrial consumer products like breakfast cereal (how much cereal is sold at Farmer’s markets?).
Homemade music will remain what it has always been — fun.
Also, like 80% of whatever Seth Godin writes is crap. The rest is barely passable.
I predict a renewed interest in human scale art and culture and socialization. The lines for the toilet at the worlds biggest party are surely long...