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AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

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Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internally, they refer to it as “perfect fit content” (pfc). It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement. For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”

That makes all the sense in the world to me. I'd call that an entirely legitimate use for AI generated music.

The barbers I went to recently were playing a channel on the TV which was an endless series of clips panning through ultra-nostalgic French Riviera-style scenery, accompanied by mellow guitar music. Seemed fine at first glance but like all AI stuff it got weirder the closer you looked - boats on land, outdoor dining areas underwater, giant lanterns larger than houses, mangled looking food, that sort of thing.

Someone had clearly just set up a few prompts and let the AI get on with it, creating probably hundreds of channels of this stuff.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#582
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been doing the same over the last few months. The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt. Don’t miss Spotify one bit.

Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise… Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.

>(Sony hifi grade, not ES)

I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?

I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#584
post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" when what is described is garden variety corruption, only takes a trivial amount of secret coordination in a group smaller than your average terrorist cell, and could probably even be defended as legal with a small legal team (Spotify probably has a big one). There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for…

> Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" > Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is... ...textbook definition of conspiracy theory Also note how your entire text is just unsubstantiated claims. Including emotionally charged words like "terrorist cell" that give your words so much weight and meaning.

Your "textbook definition" is BS. A theory that someone conspires is not enough to call something a conspiracy theory.

You would not call a prosecutor who accuses someone of "criminal conspiracy" a conspiracy theorist, even though they have a theory that someone is conspiring.

A terrorist cell is just another example of a real type of group which obviously conspires. You're not a conspiracy theorist for believing they exist.

Conspiracy theorists is something we call people who believe in a grand conspiracy, one which, had it been real, would have required superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy. That's the brush you for some mysterious reason want to tar critics of Spotify with.

And for the second time this week, someone demands "evidence" for expressions of distrust.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it), The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left t…

Why not look online and get a "hifi grade" older used one?

Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#586
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The program, according to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Magazine, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s most popular mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a network of “ghost artists” operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly. https://edm.com/news/spotify-using-ghost-artists-minimize-ro.…

> operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly. As I already wrote elsewhere, no one, including the article's own authors, understood a single thing from the article. Spotify doesn't produce its own music. It licenses 100% of its music from external distributors. Apart from a few scammy companies there are dozens of companies who…

>Spotify doesn't pay artists.

So Indiy artists can't directly put their music on Spotify? Sorry I have no idea how this works, I guess that's the point of Bandcamp?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#587

I'm not ideologically opposed to making music with AI, but the dream would be new songs which which showcase the new sounds and musical forms that AI enables, like Believe for autotune, or Rumble for electric guitar, or Autobahn for synths. I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks". But everything I've seen is pastiche, either nove…

I'm a moderately frequent user of Suno and have encountered some unusual AI-generated effects that I've not come across before in more traditionally synthesized music. One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny. Another is transitioning between vocals and instr…

>Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.

I think there's something cool here, seamless morphing between sounds was one of the things they were trying (and failing, obviously) to do at IRCAM way back when. Finally we might be able to morph in something approaching perceptual space.

(and glitch is always interesting too, of course)

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#588
post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial. Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.

Where did I claim in my post to have written music worth listening to or nontrivial code? Seems like you’re just insulting me in particular instead of providing a counter-argument. There have already been AI-created #1 hits. Sure, there’s music that has all of the attributes you lay out as “requisite” for “good” music, but this is classic moving of the goalposts. It’s how people always justify that AI is not here yet…

> There have already been AI-created #1 hits.

It's an old story, but it was a fabricated one.

The only reason this sort of tracks is that a lot of people today don't listen to music, they just put it on as background noise to drown out the silence. It seems to pay off for some producers, but I don't think there's big money there, or a real threat of replacing artists.

By and large, the general public has shown that they notice the vapidness, blandness, and incongruity of GenAI music, and don't much care for it apart from seeing it as an interesting curiosity.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest pill to swallow as a musician is that despite everyone who ever listened to you telling you you're great, despite being in a band and playing shows, despite maybe even selling some merch...if you are not in the top 1%, you probably will never even get chance to play a show that might put you on someone meaningful's radar.

I hear you and feel you on this being a hard (hardest) pill to swallow, and I think I have a helpful phrase. It helped me quite a bit so I hope it helps you: 'For the love of the game.' When you don't make any money and no one comes to your shows; when the booking emails go unanswered and the likes on soundcloud remain <10, just remember why you picked up the instrument in the first place. For the love of the game.

I like that strategy.

As a non-musician, but being into music to an unreasonable degree, I always thought that the best artists are those where I feel that, even if no one bought their records and there were just five people at their concert, they'd still be doing the exact same thing and with the same passion. Audiences notice.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#590
post #5

I've been having fun making stuff in Suno, I'm not a musician but I've always enjoyed "producing tracks" using Abelton and find the Suno + Abelton combo to be real magic on the weekends. I think some of the stuff I made isn't too bad and I'd love feedback on it. For a few weeks I went back and forth about uploading them to my soundcloud and resolve with this: I wouldn't have insisted we only allowed art made with MS…

...and now deviantart is deader than dead because overrun with slop.

Anyway I don't think your case is really so bad. As long as the creator at least has put in the effort to listen to their own stuff from beginning to end at least once (yes that's a low bar), you're already miles ahead of people who'd auto-gen 100s of albums and slap them on there in one go. Music is more inherently rate-limiting than image generation where only half a second or less is needed to take in an image superficially.

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