521–530 of 751 posts
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays
I'm still sad about the company's sale to Epic and then Songtradr, but glad to see that the service hasn't turned to garbage yet.
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stan…
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Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
How common were HiFi CD players without DACs? My recollection is that S/PDIF never really caught on that much so output to the amplifier was almost always analog.
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I believe if you go down the rabbit hole of "mood playlists" and spotify created playlists, then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for and that could probably include AI generated music. If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
Is there a good way to know if what you are listening to is AI? I listen to a lot of outrun and synthwave type stuff and it isn’t as easy as googling the artist’s name, a lot of it is made by artists that don’t tour and are quite small etc.
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
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I’m not going to listen to people poo poohing what I’ve been doing with Suno, my seven year old and I rocked out to a song that took me less time to make than it took to listen to about my character’s D&D adventure last night. I’m just having fun. The big secret right now is Suno will output good stuff but then it’s tortuous to get the lyrics to line up if you want to change anything, or add a word, it screws up the…
No one is upset about being able to generate stuff for personal use. They are upset by the industrial scale of dumping AI slop on platforms like Spotify that make it increasingly difficult to discover anything good anymore. There is lots of good music still being created these days, but you'll never find it by just hitting next on streaming sites because 99% of the content had about 5 minutes of effort put in before…
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Art is interesting because it’s fundamentally human and challenges you. Slop is incapable of doing that.
So in the future when we need an expert to discern the real art that's fundamentally human you'll be available, right? The concept that there is some hidden quality to human made art strikes me as the same line of thinking that lead people to try to measure the weight of the soul.
Art is someone making creative choices. It's someone putting a bit of themselves and their own lived experiences out there because they wanted to share it.
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except that what you’re describing is the CONSUMER SIDE of meaning, not the SOURCE of it. yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural resi…
I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way. While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not. I know that the track I'm…
I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.
Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.
I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.
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I've been reading about Spotify pushing generated music but haven't seen that myself so I'm interested to know in what context it happens. Is it certain music styles? Spotify's own playlists? That smart shuffle feature? I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music. It's expected to include some tracks that are new to you. Then suddenly you notice "artists" you've never heard of with empty descriptions and "albums" from 2025 only.
I suspect it's honestly a huge threat. Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time. Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music co…
This might work for people who like music as wallpaper to help them study or drown out external distractions, but none of it is going to evoke much feeling or stir memories. It's like calling chewing gum food.
If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression? Obviously AI isn't entirely capable of that, but eventually with BCI devices it might be. I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not in…
People have been doing this for decades already, FL studio, Abelton, etc. Not sure what AI has to do with it.