Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

But music production and distribution is (actually, was) my home turf, so here's my two cents on the topic:

I've already heard music qualitatively on par with the tracks available on your demo page. I've heard it way more than I truly wanted or felt it was necessary, at least once a day while tracking on pro tools hundreds of albums you've never ever heard of, in studios in France and LA, for years.

It was made with people with the best intentions, coming from all sorts of walks of life, and yet it was obvious from the first note they played that they were condemned to the oblivion, their music destined to be basically never heard by anyone.

And this has been done every day, multiple times a day, in every studio around the world, since the '60s.

20% of Spotify music has never been played once. IIRC less than 40% has been played more than once.

There's a genuinely humbling scene in the 2002 documentary "Scratch" where DJ Shadow, a world-renowed DJ and producer, wades trough stacks of EPs out of a record store in NY that have never, ever been played once[1], which perfectly captures how little of the musical output being recorded we actually get to listen to.

Making music is very easy. Making music people want to listen to is hard, mind-bogglingly so. For every whitebread pop track you've heard on the radio, there's thousands of other similar tracks that have been discarded by an A&R, a radio DJ, some label, or simply by the audience.

I'm saying this with no ill feelings towards you or your work, but I can't concieve even the flimsiest of reasons why anyone would ever listen to (or license/sync/track/ ) any of those generated songs once the novelty of "music made by the AI" is gone.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gpKYnRdf0A&t=6s

When this critical number is not amassed then the genre effectively dies.

With A.I. we can resurrect dead genres, but not only that, we can combine genres together, popular genres with one another, also popular and unpopular genres or popular and dead genres.

Using A.I. for music is easier and much faster than traditional means, and this could greatly reduce the critical mass of musicians to support a genre. It could be reduced as much as 10 times, or 100 times, like one person creating 10000 songs or something similar.

By trying to compare A.I. music to traditional music, you are comparing 10 songs a real band makes, with 10000 songs an A.I. (human) musician makes. It's apples and oranges comparison.

I don't see why human music cannot be a genre, the best of all genres but just one, and an innumerable amount of A.I. genres which may not be so good, but they are infinite.

The real human music genre might be the best forever or just for the next 3 years, but so what? Let there be more genres some good some bad. No one is gonna listen to a cheap copy of an already existing song of an already existing genre, but songs already in existence should be used to train A.I. weights.

Regarding A.I. weights, smaller models forget much of the information they are trained on, and they are cheaper, faster and easier to be fine-tuned, also probably easier to apply RL reasoning on. In that way, A.I. musicians (or real musicians) could run the model in their computers and use it as an instrument instead of relying in companies with big models, slow and expensive.

And some times big and inefficient models copy text/code/music verbatim from the training data. But this is a bug, when small models become competitive enough, most people are gonna use those. They might even carry them around, like a personal band always ready to make melodies for them.