An end to pop?
seths.blog
seths.blog
There is already "too much" content to consume, for some definition of too much. If AI-assisted music creation boosts the number of songs on Spotify from 50,000 to 500,000 per day -- does it really matter? If you're an artist who doesn't have a fanbase, you're currently releasing music into the void, and you would be in a world of AI-generated music spam, too.
Making a popular pop song is 10% about the song itself and 90% a combination of marketing and luck. AI isn't going to change this. Thinking that people are going to stop listening to Nicki Minaj or Taylor Swift because other music exists is, frankly, really stupid.
In turn, that could widen the long tail of what people are interested in a lot.
I think a lot of people will think AI is their meal ticket to pop stardom. I think they misunderstand how the music industry has operated: it's a club. There are hundreds of thousands of 'brands' and 'stars' out there with no dedicated following but enough money to pump themselves into the image of stardom.
There's a difference between looking like you're impacting lives, and actually impacting lives. Like there's a difference between a machine-generated image of a mountain on a computer screen, and standing in front of a mountain.
The catch here is that you need to do something new and original to attract a following that way. Training a computer to generate a Drake song (or imitate McCartney's voice) doesn't empower new artists like AI evangelists think it does. If UMG can pay someone else to copy Drake's flow and release a new Drake track for 1/10 the cost, that isn't "democratizing" artistry, it's extricating the artist from the art altogether. If you do want the support of a label for your own work, you need to meet the right people. AI-generated music doesn't change that.
The only "gates" these people want to get by are ones put up by practicing music enough to make something novel. AI might be useful as a tool to assist actual musicians in their processes, but in my experience the musicians that create interesting music do so because they have a strong vision, not because they're exceptionally technically proficient.
Through ~2001: Pre-broadband - early web, dot-coms. Everyone got email. If they were more adventurous, they made a home page, got on IRC or Usenet. This era inherited the "US college student with campus internet access" dynamic that dominated the earliest years of the Internet. "The Internet is for porn" etc. There's a lot of overlap between this era and the next one because broadband added so many capabilities that it was like two sibling versions of internet, akin to 8-bit vs 16-bit personal computing.
2001-2008: Web forums, instant messengers, early Web 2.0. A much broader set of people came online and were courted by the new platforms. This was both a broadening and an erasure of any prior history or culture - the "toxic gamer" archetype, the start of influencer trends in various categories(photos, fitness, tech products...), etc. But commerce and community was broadly mediated through "your own web site" rather than platforms.
2008-2020: Post-iPhone smartphones, dominance of centralized internet platforms and algorithmic news feeds. Now the Internet's culture really was accessed by "everyone" and this became clear by around 2012 as more and more social media-driven movements swept through the world. Status-seeking behavior online became very conspicuous, with a ton of activity, styles of messaging, etc molded to juice algorithmic KPIs.
2020 marks the line where we went to full Internet dependence. And... it's also roughly when ordinary people started expressing more agency over how their news feeds should work, and when the really rapid generative AI breakthroughs started. So all at once the blind status seeking of the smartphone era is breaking down, and the new challenges involve finding appropriate sources of truth and filters in an ocean of spam content.
- record one or more sounds
- have extensive knowledge about filters, mixing, mastering
Without the latter, even if you're amazing musician/singer and you have decent gear and a nice interace and good ideas, you still need to sit down and mix the thing so that it sounds good in the car/airpods/phone/laptop.
> Plenty of in-the-box musicians and producers are making top quality songs with not much more than their Macbook.
I'll bet you money that if one of their songs has repeat status in your music player, that song is likely not the first song they've ever recorded.
They had to build mechanical skills first. AI-generated music skips that.
mechanical skills are EARNED, and are a lot of fun to exercise when functioning.
*before anyone suggests "ableism" I refer you to Django Reinhardt, the drummer from Def Leppard, and anyone who has overcome physical disabilities to express themselves upon the musical instrument of their choice.
ATM, LLM's of reasonable sophistication for such tasks are not running on your laptop, and at the point they do, something else will be getting all the limelight, and it won't be within your reach.
As a lifelong musician and composer and producer, it's just automating things away that I don't want automated away. Producing music is about making decisions.
You act as if Radiohead just inserted money and out came pro music, but really you appear to be wishing to skip any hard work and appear to be asking for instant gratification. Well, I can tell you, as someone who could readily train AI in music, that you only cheat yourself by cutting corners. Knowledge is power to do what you actually really deeply want to. Handing off the minute decisions that add up to making a masterpiece = cheating oneself of being a creator.
And is the difference between the hypothetical bedroom-produced version of the same Radiohead album and the actual album actually that noticeable?
I work in film/video, and you definitely can produce something that would have cost millions of dollars 10 years ago by yourself, with minimal costs. I struggle to compare the scale of engineering needed to make albums versus movies.
Create enough hours in the day to do the work.
No amount of skill or knowledge will get me over the hump that it takes hundreds, maybe thousands, of person hours to produce a Radiohead album.
Thousands of man-hours is the five members of the band, plus their producer, plus an audio-engineer working 40 hrs/wk.
There are 43 business days in 2 months, or just under 3 days per track. 3 days to do a bunch of technical work to balance the recordings juuust right, and then balance those recordings between each other to make it worthy of being called a Radiohead album. Personally, 3 days per track actually doesn't sound like enough time for that since you mix it, and then have to listen to that particular mix until you get bored, and then come back to it after, listen to it again some more, figure out how you feel about that mix, and then repeat.
Of course, you can half-ass it and throw the tracks into Ableton, spend 20 minutes and call it a day, but you didn't used to get to be Radiohead with that kind of effort. ML algos on the horizon seem like they'll be able to do just that.
Ok computer took two months of mixing, and some time for the mastering. 80% of it were live takes. What's the AI supposed to do?
Imagine I’m a schmuck who can croon into a microphone. It’s just me. I have a dayjob because this is a hobby.
“Just a quick 2 months of work” is a total nonstarter. I’ll just keep crooning in the shower
“Just 2 months, it’s not a lot” is like telling someone “Oh cleaning the house is easy, just ask your maid”
If you want to record a couple jazz songs for kicks you can very easily and satisfactorily do this today, for very little money (just higher up this thread people have recommended great tools) and it will be higher quality that what was playing on the radio in the 90s. And I'd argue that if you were as good a crooner as Radiohead are -eh- experimental musicians, I'm sure you'd find the time to make an album that would make yourself rich.
Sorry I'm a little ranty - gonna get a drink I guess
You don't need two months of mixing for your crooner album. You can mix it yourself on the weekend and be 80% there.
Like the guy that did Tubular Bells keep re-recording it because it's not good enough for him - but I'm fine with the version he first produced. AI isn't going to change anything here.
OKC is one of the best Albums of all time imo. But it’s also one of the most popular ones in my own list. So not like all the other works of art for music I come across requiring such intense amt of human labor put in. The capital wouldn’t be there. Capital means capitalism. Which isn’t democratic.
Before generative AI, you would've had people copying your style, but that took effort and there was ethics involved, many artists wouldn't like to outright copy someone because it's lame (it is).
Now though, there is zero cost to copying someones style and it can be done in a more faceless way.
I don't think there is much inventive anymore to make something original and post it online. Maybe just play live only?
I don’t know about “democratization” — what incentive is there for someone to make that kind of stuff at home? Once upon a time you could imagine being found like, say, Bieber or Elvis, but if the factories can pump that stuff out easily, the commercial sphere will be fully populated, as with other industrial consumer products like breakfast cereal (how much cereal is sold at Farmer’s markets?).
Homemade music will remain what it has always been — fun.
This trend will only be further amplified by a surge of AI enhanced music, as Seth Godin argues. And after that, fully AI generated music will be the final nail in the coffin of Pop. Everything will be highly individualized.
We may still occasionally have songs going viral, but those will be only short flashes of popularity, nothing that lasts for weeks or even months, and they will be forgotten quickly, lost in the flood.
That hasn't been true since at least gramophones.
> And nothing means anything anymore. What’s the point? Just background noise?
I'm gathering that you generally don't listen to purely instrumental music.
Ultimately the beauty in harmonies or a certain rhythm etc. is ineffable (you judge words and lyrics with another part of your brain). Can you enjoy visual art without sharing it? Can you enjoy food without sharing it?
Good. The latest is not necessarily the best, and there is plenty of lost treasure just waiting to be found.
I guess in the future extraverts won't listen to music.
Our appreciation for music will not disappear. It is time for democratised music.
Our demand is pretty constant. We can't simply consume any more software or content than we do now.
But with AI, supply is going to get jacked maybe another 5x-50x. That's great news as a hobby content creator, but for professionals it just means much stiffer competition for smaller rewards.
Same applies to Software. It has become pretty trivial to reverse engineer any software with AI now, except for the best in class AI models. All of this is probably bearish for most AI startups' hopes for hitting it big. Just too much supply of software.
Seth is right, stars in the previous century were known by everyone. Even the old-timers knew (and loathed) that bug group that invaded the U.S. in the 1960's.
For better or worse, we once had a shared cultural reference. No longer.
Regardless, it’s not just about popstars. People like listening to music that they can connect to on a human to human level. They do also like listening to music that is just there to dance to. Both can coexist, but I don’t see people connecting with music that AI writes simply because there isn’t a persona there to connect with.
I think Lady Gaga is a great example of what the poster is talking about. I know so many Lady Gaga songs and I am not even a fan. I have never tried to listen to any of her music but the shared experience means I just know so much from 15 years back.
Contrast that with Harry Styles. I look him up on youtube right now and I have never heard a single one of his songs before this. All I know is he is a giant star but it stops there.
I follow a bit of indie music but that’s about it personally.
(There's another conversation about whether Sir Paul should be leaning into his current voice and writing material that's better suited for it, but... in a world where we've got ample autotune and other vocal effects being deployed for younger artists, I don't see any harm in giving McCartney's voice a boost with technology too.)
What Seth says here is a bit more dramatic, but its a natural evolution to information access, tech, and single author productions. In fact, really this is the next step, where the single person is no one, its scaled "nobody" based on mixed IP.
I am very certain that when the output loses its value due to endless supply, as the article fears, we will return to other more human values in order to judge what we like
Nope. Good art stands on its own merits. The only useful thing about knowing who did it is that you can find more of it.
> I am very certain that when the output loses its value due to endless supply, as the article fears, we will return to other more human values in order to judge what we like
Wonderful. The less attention that people give to celebrities, the better.
People have been saying "art is dead" for 150 years+.
This is just the latest iteration of "art is dead".
"This time it is different". As if no one has ever said that before.
Marble sculpture had its time as the dominant medium of the day. These articles are no different than lamenting the demise of marble sculpture.
- For artistic pictures there is no pop. They do not have nearly the same popularity as music.
- Music follows changing fashions and even progress of some sort. Each time period (e.g. decade) comes with distinctive music styles, and while there are some revivals, usually they do not repeat. Artistic pictures are much more static in comparison, at least in the last few decades. Pictures are influenced by available tools (e.g. Photoshop and graphic tablets), but a painting today doesn't look markedly different from a painting 30 years ago.
Since music follows fashions, just imitating past music genres may not be as popular as it is popular to imitate existing art styles with Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. But imitation is exactly what current generative models do. Which may ultimately limit the popularity of fully AI generated songs created by amateurs. Musicians may still have an edge by using AI tools to create new music styles.
I predict a renewed interest in human scale art and culture and socialization. The lines for the toilet at the worlds biggest party are surely long...
There is no dearth of gigs for solo musicians playing music for wineries, breweries, restaurants, weddings, etc, and especially here in Texas!
Also, like 80% of whatever Seth Godin writes is crap. The rest is barely passable.
When he started out, he was a twenty-something business hustler dropping value bombs, written in Palahniuk-style blog posts. But he was very unique at the time, and certainly a pioneer in pushing how valuable you can make your own personal brand just through blogging and social media.
Unfortunately for him, he was so successful he inspired an enormous amount of copycats, diluting the value of his once-unique style.
There's been a lot of talk about podcast listeners having parasocial relationships with the hosts of the podcasts they listen to. I wonder if blogs like this were a forerunner of developing a brand by drawing people into a proto parasocial relationship.
* https://paigespage.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DRF_book-f...
I'm not sure if this can be shoehorned as "curiosity", but it dangerously touches on a meta level that HN has historically been keen to avoid (as opposed to other, more common social media platforms)
This is not meant as a critique of our comments, just a self-observation.
1. scarcity is a forcing function for pop culture (true!)
2. AI will make new creations ubiquitous; bye, bye, scarcity (maybe true?)
3. without the forcing function, there's no more pop culture (doesn't seem so true at all)
While Godin is curt, he's not so succinct. And there's a lot of conjecture asserted as true. There's still some kernel of something interesting there, but honestly, it feels like I put more work into reading Godin than he put into writing.
> PS my friend Paige has a new book out.
It's far easier to read and generally keeps the writing less flowery.