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Comment by refuse | Hacker News Reader

I happen to know someone in the music industry. Not huge, but you might have seen them on MTV and you've probably heard their hits.

They say modern songs get written by a huge group of songwriters in hotels. Individual words and phrases will earn credits. They go through the list of everything floating in the songwriters' heads and whittle it down on a huge whiteboard and anything put up there and put into the song gets credited. I think the phrase they used to describe it was "Shit Smoothie Song Writing."

The person I know hates this and doesn't work with these people but they know the industry, etc.

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It’s called a writers room. Get a few songwriters you like in a room and jam together for a few hours. Typically everyone in the room splits the credit even if you were just breathing the air and lending a vibe.

Writers rooms and all the writers credits don’t begin to scratch the surface of ghostwriting, though.

Many popular songs are picked up from ghostwriters who are paid a flat fee and don’t even get a songwriter credit. Many songs

> lending a vibe

If the vibe would get me $$$ I wouldn't mind to share it with "vibe-lender"

This seems to be a corporate version of what I’ve witnessed: large groups of people getting together in vacation rentals or studios at writing camps and breaking off into small groups, each writing around a theme and passing ideas around fairly democratically, in a messy, creative, communal way. Then sharing and layering later. That leads to lots of contributors to one work of art, as they all reach for the best way to tell a story and fit it to a musical vibe that enhances it (or the other direction, it takes all kinds of approaches).

Never a whiteboard, so if that’s literally true I guess that environment would make me sad and disillusioned too, and I’m sorry your friend was dealing with it. But it’s certainly not the only model!

That process sounds easily automatable! I can’t wait for that to be unleashed so that human pop song writers can delve deeper.

Yes, but can you automate being a record company executive's nephew?

nepobaby dynamics notwithstanding, yes I think you can simulate them for that particular role. Even if they’re given another position, because now the system has been improved / more optimized. You can never be rid of the nephew, but that was never really the goal to begin with. The goal isn’t to get rid of the nephew per se, but to replace human labor with something more efficient and effective so that we can … have leisure time?” Whether that role was previously occupied by the nephew or someone unknown. The incentives of capitalism drive optimization (at some level, not globally necessarily).

This has existed in tech for a long time. We call it the “Pet Project”.

Based on various published conversations with Sydney, it seems AI may have already achieved this level of thought.

That's not fair. Those AIs are stealing the credit by stealing TikTok posts and ancestry.com listings of the real nephews of record company executives. Those nephews deserve recognition for their IP and ID.

I mean, I just threw "write me a song that britney spears would sing." into chatGPT and the result could have fooled me. I won't bore you with the result. Even included some rhymes without prompting that.

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