The Velvet Sundown are a seemingly AI-generated band with 325k Spotify listeners | Hacker News Reader

The Velvet Sundown are a seemingly AI-generated band with 325k Spotify listeners

musically.com

12 pointsZeljkoS11 comments

I like to work to music, but find anything with words distracting. So I listen to a lot of random youtube playlists of lo-fi/chillout stuff, which has just been swamped with AI lately.

I don't think this will be a big deal in a few years once it's as good as human musicians, but right now it's super annoying because the music is always subpar and it's hard to separate out the genai on youtube.

It's not about the quality, it's about the lack of real human intent underlying it and the fact that AI inevitably regresses to the mean. AI will never(or at least not anytime soon) replicate that, it'll always be fast junk food for our brains.

I’ve been unironically listening to covers done by AI Plankton. His voice works surprisingly well

Not too surprising that this is finally happening. It’s going to become more and more difficult to filter through all this AI music slop. But can it even be described as slop if me or someone else genuinely enjoys listening to it?

Is the end goal to just pump as much AI music as possible and watch as all the ad money comes in? I wonder how Spotify will handle this spam of AI slop as it becomes more prevalent.

Spotify will generate the music with AI, slowly sunset human create music in the catalog, and keep all of the subscription rev for themselves with no need to pay humans for the music.

I should stop paying for Spotify. I'd like my artists to get paid.

You should not use any streaming service and buy the albums then.

from the record label, which will also try to replace musicians with ai sooner or later

If nothing else, switch to Tidal, who 1) pay 3x more per stream to the artist than Spotify, and 2) also has a much more egalitarian algorithm that doesn't funnel most of the money to the big names (in terms of how they "cut the cake", their payout thresholds basically steal revenue from smaller artists to give to bigger ones).

> I wonder how Spotify will handle this spam of AI slop

I'm sure they're hoping that it becomes so normalized that they'll never have to pay an artist again.

It is fair to say that McDonalds is a very literal form of slop, yet I enjoy it. That said, I despise AI music, and at least McDonalds doesn’t literally steal food from better restaurants, whereas AI music companies are just indefensible thieves[1]. And I suspect consuming an AI-generated song is considerably unhealthier than consuming a Big Mac, which at least has some protein.

[1] LLMs and art generators don’t understand text or images but the illusion is quite robust. The thing that grinds my gears about AI music is the AI inevitably “tips its hand” and reveals it doesn’t understand melody or rhythm in the slightest. An AI music “hallucination” isn’t a weird face in the background or a fictional citation, it is the AI briefly having the musical sensibility of a baby on a toy piano.

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