Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> According to the RIAA’s former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months after Napster’s release, the music industry shifted into full panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

> “I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled.

> The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.

They're about to be more terrified. Suno and Udio are just the beginning of the complete unraveling of the need for studio capital.

It's going to happen to Hollywood too.

View on HN

Steve Jobs was able to use their fear to sign up most publishers on itunes.

And sell outrageously priced MP3 players. There’s no way people were stocking those things with music they paid for.

> outrageously priced MP3 players

Like the best Apple designs, the iPod redefined its product category. And it put Apple back on track for ARM-based mobile devices.

> There’s no way people were stocking those things with music they paid for

Indeed. But you could also rip physical CDs, and the iTunes store managed to sell a lot of 99 cent song downloads, as it was legal, easier than messing with file sharing, and cheaper than buying a whole CD just for a single song.

Arguably the music industry messed up greatly by not making CD singles cheap and ubiquitous (and solving issues with 3" CDs in slot-loading car players, etc.)

This is exactly what happens when a reverse salient collapses and opens up a new channel of distribution.

OT: thanks for introducing me to the term “reverse salient”! That’s a very useful concept.

> no wireless. less space than a nomad. outrageously expensive

Mostly, yeah. My dad, brothers, and I (all one household) had probably 200 CDs between us that we ripped and listened to repeatedly. Paid once per person? Doubtful, but yes, we paid.

Maybe, but don't discount media lobbying gov't, and trying to generate moral outrage about AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety, etc to make sure only big corps control AI.

>AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety

This isn't generated outage, it's genuine, and objectively justified. Trying to find clients was hard enough for artists to begin with.

We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction, but instead we're automating art and interaction so we can focus on slaving away even harder. This is somehow worse than any traditional dystopia story. Government propaganda posters were at least the work of a human hand.

It's not a conscious choice. It's the fact that the convolutions that create human visual and auditory pleasure are simple signals relative to logic and reasoning.

Nature itself is somehow shaped such that it is easier to create beautiful patterns than it is to engineer complex logical deductions.

It is a fundamental aspect of physics and reality. Beauty is just simple patterns.

We figured out that art is simple math. Engineering and law and planning not so much.

> We figured out that art is simple math.

Art is not about making things beautiful. It's about making things meaningful. Unless compelled by external reasons (Money,...) artists wish to express themselves and to do so the best way the can.

> Engineering and law and planning not so much.

All of these aims to be as precise as they can be and wish that they could be Math. But Nature and Humanity randomness won't let them be.

> We figured out that art is simple math. Engineering and law and planning not so much.

Simple math... but mostly a ton of existing human-generated art. Don't act like generative AI isn't standing on a lot of collective shoulders.

> Engineering and law and planning not so much.

Maybe OpenAI should have trained it on that first? Simple math, right?

> Don't act like generative AI isn't standing on a lot of collective shoulders.

Everything is standing on a lot of collective shoulders.

I'd phrase it as: pop art and culture have been optimizing themselves against the human psyche for so long (much longer than engineering and law and planning) that we have a pretty firm bead on what an every-person will like (mathematically-speaking).

There's tons of avant garde art, but on average it's less popular (because that's not what it's optimized for).

I wouldn't be surprised if GenAI commoditizes pop art, but in turn creates greater demand for abstract, more unique forms.

By its nature, pop art and culture reduce itself to the common expectations of everyone. And as such has only few knobs to tune. But humans can appreciate a wide range of qualities and the more you play on these dimensions, the more reduced the people that will "get" it and appreciate it.

GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably.

> GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably.

GenAI is just a tool. Creating unique art with unique perspectives is going to be more accessible to more people.

Not everyone will put the work in, but there's a new opportunity in a world full of opportunity cost.

I'd make the argument that the nature of tools drives much of mass/low-cost art (that is, the majority).

Very few people have the training and complete skill set to fully customize everything.

Consequently, the further you get away from "doing the thing" (e.g. playing an instrument) to "operating the tool that does the thing" (e.g. writing music for a player piano), the stronger impression the tool leaves on your work.

See also the corralling of c64 demos into hardware limitations. Or early electronic music vs 80s+.

The electronic music point is good, but I wouldn't label electronic music as inferior or not art.

It's about choosing which parts of your stack are artisanal vs which parts are implemented for you. These choices impact the form factor, but I wouldn't say that they diminish the work itself.

Not making a point on superiority-inferiority, but rather novelty-homogeneity.

Early electronic music (e.g. musique concrete) was nuts, because they were literally building sound. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=919RleFXcNM

Once the presets were packaged and productized... you ended up with 808 music.

Which wasn't worse, but was objectively less unique.

Yep. Imagine you are a producer that doesn't sing very well but knows exactly what you want. There are TTS VSTs that allow for custom models. You can change the key, length, modulation, etc. by just dragging the mouse along the word(s) and it integrates into your DAW like any other instrument.

> objectively justified.

Subjectively.

GenAI is just a tool.

Artists learn the craft of analogy, allusion, satire, and storytelling. These are portable to new forms and methods of creation, and they'll continue to serve artists that use GenAI.

Software engineers have been constantly reinventing themselves since forever. The stack and frameworks you learn won't last forever, and the field continually gets easier to enter year over year. This is no different than what artists now face.

And now bigger forms of automation and process are available to artists. They don't need studios or big budgets to achieve monumental works - they'll be making movies and games soon. (Without publishers!) And the 99% of non-artists aren't going to put the work in.

These tools are going to be incredible for the artists that adopt them. We're going to see a whole bunch of Vivienne Medranoses, Zach Hadels, and Michael Cusacks.

> We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction

We have being doing that for over 100 years now. Look at industrial productivity per worker, it skyrocketed throughout the 20th century. It has plateaued only because all the low and medium hanging fruit was long ago picked and now engineers are busy doing incremental improvements.

I am genuinely curious what sacrifices would have to be made of we went with a fully automated community, from growing food to putting it on store shelves, to running the store, cleaning it, everything. Obviously not all foods are possible to automate end to end, but I wonder how far we could go.

Don't blame "AI" for all the cheapening of the arts. It's been that way for a long time, largely due to mass media giving away for very cheap. No one already wants to pay for anything, and artists don't help by putting their works in digital form on the internet. If I want to train a computer model on all this digital stuff, so be it.

If you want to be an artist: perform music live, make a real object like a painting or sculpture, act in a play, etc. Don't be a digital "artist" it's already worth next to nothing.

The royal we.

What steps have you personally taken to automating hard labour?

I never said I worked in AI. You're confused.

One of the funniest moments in modern music history, to me, was when Kim Dotcom got a bunch of superstars to sing on a track about how much they loved MegaUpload. One of the least funny moments was when the RIAA and MPAA essentially directed American and New Zealand authorities to raid his house, shut down the MegaUpload website, seize all the servers, and jail a bunch of his employees (Kim himself only barely escaping extradition).

Episodes like that really do make me fearful of what corporations might push government to do. If they want to get you on something that isn't illegal, they'll try to make it illegal. If it's already illegal, they'll try to make the punishment as severe as possible. Oversight of, and accountability from, these entities is paramount.

I was reading parents comment with a bit of cynicism

until I tried suno and I believe we are going to see significant garnishing of wages in creative field

https://suno.com/song/dc950e10-6bbe-4649-8cdb-7a4d81762aae

I believe we are going to see significant garnishing of wages in creative field

A wage garnishment is any legal or equitable procedure through which some portion of a person's earnings is required to be withheld for the payment of a debt. Most garnishments are made by court order.

You think because of auto generated music there are going to be court orders to take money out of the paychecks of people in 'creative fields'?

Garnish wages means taking money out of what someone has already earned.

Reduced wages then shall we

Reply on news.ycombinator.com