91–100 of 237 posts
AI seems like a scapegoat here when I think the real answer is simply that it was a tired genre that died out like many music fads over the years. (Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.)
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I think you’re arguing against continued development of AI? (Apologies if I’ve misunderstood) I won’t use the word “Luddite”, but your argument could be applied word-for-word to automatic looms: “[The automatic loom] is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth… how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams…
Truthfully, I don't give a shit about AI. It's a tool to generate mediocre garbage, be that writing, be that images, be that music, whatever, and in those tasks, it can largely succeed. If you want a lifetime of generated Lo-Fi to listen to, it will do that. If you want a lifetime of generated hentai to fap to, it will do that too, and the outputs meet your standards, congrats, you are an average consumer of mediocre…
My latest and possibly last track is called "I ain't even writing music anymore byeeee" because AI can take the shit I hear in my skull and translate it pretty good to an mp3.
I'm done. I made so much $0 that I'm set for life from my music.
https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music...
You can peruse my older tracks. My soundcloud is hotlinks and esoteria, not my collected works.
edit: i should explain that track. It was conceived, "written", "mastered", "cut", and then published by me within about 30 minutes of the news of the South Korean Coup attempt. The lyrics are in Lojban. about 5-8 minutes of that 30 was arguing with chatgpt-4o about the proper Lojban transliteration of coup d'etat, i put my foot down, and the lojban translation of that specific word is mine, everything else is from an online translation site. So i wrote the lyrics, managed the translation, and udio or whatever did the music. it took ~12 minutes to re-run the generation and extend it to find the correct "sound".
This is almost exactly what i heard in my head when i heard about the coup attempt. Oh also i don't know how to write "metal" or "djent", so this is what djent sounds like to me; i hope this helps clear up any confusion about why that specific song "sucks" or whatever.
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Lofi music is a really popular genre to listen to as background music, I wouldn't say it's a tired genre. Perhaps for creators it is, but for listeners it's not.
How much background music do you realistically need though? If there's a few thousand hours, would you notice if it repeated at some point? (Assuming the general style of the genre is staying similar and you don't listen to specific songs you discovered but just put on some collection of songs from the genre.) Is there new elevator music being composed all the time too?
AI seems like a scapegoat here when I think the real answer is simply that it was a tired genre that died out like many music fads over the years. (Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.)
The article doesn’t seem to me to scapegoat AI as much as the dual role which Spotify has being both the dominant distributor and recommendation source as well as creating their own content: even if they were paying studio musicians that would still be a major conflict of interest, just as it is when Ticketmaster/Live Nation controls band management, venues, and ticket sales or when Amazon uses their knowledge of buying habits to compete with their own sellers. We should have laws requiring separation between the delivery layer and content creation, but sadly that is not the era we live in.
I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine , which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these pl…
I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million.
If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this.
Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.
> We can support musicians we like by adding them to our personal playlists and playing their music every day. We can also just buy their albums like ye olden times. Buy tracks for $1.29 like ye slightly less olden times! If you have disposable income, buy albums! It's easy and also fun.
I’d love a way to directly Cash app or Zelle my favorite artist
I guess the closest equivalent is Bandcamp where artists can still use a pay-what-you-want model
The first two albums by Nujabes, the "godfather of lo-fi," are some of the best I've ever heard. Metaphorical Music and Modal Soul.
For the uninitiated, Champloo is the second anime series by Shinichirō Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame. Where Bebop is science fiction meets jazz, Champloo is medieval Japan meets hip hop. Weirdly under-rated IMO.
To this day I still bump into fellow Nujabes fans in the wild and it’s like having a secret handshake
As a long time (actual) hip-hop fan, I do find it quite hard to muster sympathy for this weirdly isolated, and perhaps disposable, genre? Kind of like, okay, how much did you try to build with the origins of the thing you're using to make new music? Reminds me a bit of "nerdcore" hip-hop; which also made little sense because e.g. Del the Funkee Homosapien and RZA were also nerds making VERY nerdy music, but for "some…
There seems to be a lot of anger around Spotify these days, often misplaced I reckon. One of the biggest impediments to new artists making a living from recorded music is not the existence of Spotify and other streaming platforms, rather it's the massive and growing library of existing music, some of which is excellent. But it's not impossible. My neighbor manages his music career himself. In 2024 he went from having…
If you're going to do all of this, what's the point of the algorithm?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truthfully, I don't give a shit about AI. It's a tool to generate mediocre garbage, be that writing, be that images, be that music, whatever, and in those tasks, it can largely succeed. If you want a lifetime of generated Lo-Fi to listen to, it will do that. If you want a lifetime of generated hentai to fap to, it will do that too, and the outputs meet your standards, congrats, you are an average consumer of mediocre…
Money flows to the things people want. The real housewives, the view, twilight, etc. Hell people make millions simply playing video games on twitch. But nobody is owed an income for doing something they love. The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that ans…
It's not about love. Tons of creatives work jobs they loathe just as much as any other profession, but it's what they're trained to do. It's their specialization, one honed over their entire lives, which can be like 25 years, or 50, or 70. What are those people supposed to do when the job market for the skill they're in rapidly shrinks?
And, in a larger view: what do you think is going to happen to the society you live in when thousands, millions of workers who work these jobs, now no longer can make rent? Can't pay their bills? Can't buy food? Like this is one of the better arguments against socialized medicine is that we have millions of people in the USA who work in the insurance industry, both for insurers, and for doctors offices. Medical billing is an entire job description and skillset, and like, I don't think that should be a thing, I think we should get rid of it, but I'm also cognizant that we'll have tons of white collar professionals who will need financial support and job training as part of that because I'm not a heartless monster and don't want to send millions of people to die on the streets.
> The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.
A tiny, tiny minority get wealthy. Most creatives, even successful ones, earn like... a middling middle class income, in good times. But that income also comes with a lot of it's own issues: having to arrange their own insurance, their taxes are a nightmare, and the income stream isn't steady like a paycheck, it's gig-based.
And a whole lot more do it, indeed, for the love of their craft and oftentimes have other jobs to make enough to get by.