AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart
showbiz411.com
showbiz411.com
Write some generic AI music, have have your small accounts using stolen giftcards bought with dirty money pump the track and watch it climb the charts as other jump on the band wagon.
Et voilà instant layering with no connections.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how all the music I don't like gets into the charts. :P
and the same occurs with phone(-repair)-and-vape shops in shopping areas (which I guess are somewhat more understandable, since they only require one employee present each and do get footfall, and the cost to rent a shop has imploded since the coronavirus hit the final nail in the town centre's coffin)
You are not wrong.
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
Rick Beato travels to NeuralDSP in Finland.
It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.
I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.
What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.
Much like saying "I will no longer buy from Brand X on Amazon." I guarantee you that ten "other" companies sell the exact same thing, and they all come from China (or AI, in this case).
Brand reputation is fairly meaningless in a market like that. I mean, sure, Levi's still protects their brand, and Bruce Springsteen won't be putting out any AI musical slop, but if it's ShurFit pants or music by Jest Happening... who knows?
Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.
I find also that much like junk food, AI music is optimized to be catchy. The initial feeling I get is “yeah this is nice”, but then you realize the lyrics are weird, some words don’t exist, the voice is off…
To be fair, you could say the same thing about at least a few pre-AI pop songs.
I'd like to point out that there's absolutely no way an Instagram account that is not even a month old gets hundreds of thousands of likes almost every upload. That should be an immediate red flag to everyone, Instagram included.
Another thing worth pointing out is that iTunes charts in 2026 are pretty meaningless. Do you buy music on iTunes? Does anyone else you know buy music on iTunes? Even those that still buy music have at least 3-4 more relevant stores to chase after. It's like finding a niche book category on Amazon, anyone could astroturf their way to the top 100 and I doubt it'd cost you more than for a legitimate artist to even rent a studio to record an album properly.
That's like asking HN if they buy Christmas CDs at Tesco. This is a very self-selecting group of people. I know people who buy off of iTunes, who don't use Spotify, who've never heard of Bandcamp, who still listen to the radio… there are people beyond your little bubble. It's a big old world.
My wife rolls her eyes at me and my iPod
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_%3F!*%40_Like_a_Suicide
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song comes up, skip it. If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically (assuming we trust Spotify to actually be honest about its algos, which I'll admit we shouldn't https://substack.com/@tedgioia/note/c-236242253)
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a catchy impressive song comes up, what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment. You're just sitting listening to your plastic-and-rare-earth earbuds reproduce digitized waveforms and paying attention to what the music evokes in you. It seems ridiculous to me that we get distracted by questions about "but what if this music isn't made by a human". Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.
The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter and I don't have as strong opinions there. I think we should ideally incentivize people who use AI in generating their music to disclose their usage, though I have no idea if it's possible to do so, so that consumers who care about only supporting human artists with their listenship-stats can filter to that group. And certainly anyone who closely imitates _a specific artist_, crossing the line from "inspired by" and "shamelessly ripping off", should be severely disincentivized from doing so, whether they used AI or not.
But then they sell the mp3 albums at $15, more than the physical version ever was. Come on, there has to be a middle ground. At $5 each I'll buy 20, at $15 maybe 1
If you skip every song because you don't immediately like it, then you never learn to refine you palette.
There is then indeed a real fear when a song comes up catered to you, that says nothing about the artist, but was generated to keep you listening. You're getting pidgeonholed.
Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").
I firmly believe that AI generated content cannot have any artistic appeal, because I believe art is fundamentally an invocation of human expression. This might be fine in some contexts, but in general I'd prefer consuming content from groups that I trust to strike a good balance between these types of appeal (e.g. A24 movies).
I understand the distinction, but I don’t find the examples compelling. The difference between the popcorn and tomato meters, as I understand it, is just the source. The latter are critics’ opinions while the former are “regular people” opinions. Professional critics may have some concern for the artistic value of a movie, but their job is to help you decide “should you spend your time with this” and the entertainment value is a primary consideration. Furthermore, a critic can have early access and needs to write their review fast. An audience member, who has no such obligation, can let it ruminate and have their opinions evolve. In that sense, a critic’s opinion may be more influenced by initial appeal.
By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their diet, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?
The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.
Yes, obviously. It’s almost a perfect demonstration of that.
Halfway through this paragraph I started hearing it in the Trump cadence.
> The source matters, both for meat and art.
Yes, exactly. This is why people care about things like DOC, fair trade certifications, UFLPA clothing, cruelty-free cosmetics, and so on.
To deepen the analogy slightly: is the AI "ethically acquired"? Do the people collating the training data have consent for every piece of music they trained it on?
It implies to trust the algorithm and believe that Spotify developer, first know what they're doing, secondly have your best interest at heart.
I don't believe neither, I don't use their algorithm.
A piece of art is not a self-contained thing, the end result isn't where all (or even most) of the interest resides. The intent of the artist, the point they're making, the history that led to it, the references it makes and why, the choices and decisions taken in making it... that's all inherent part of the art and a huge part of why people might enjoy a piece of art or not.
For example, if I listen to some progressive rock, I might enjoy it for how a fellow human managed to identify and break some rules of traditional songwriting, for their expertise in musical theory, for the references they chose to make to other bands/songs/genres... If I learn it's AI-generated, the song itself hasn't changed but there's no point in it anymore, my enjoyment was directly coming from the fact that it was made by a human: if it's a machine I'll just shrug and say "yeah sure everyone knows machines can do that". Entire genres like punk or grunge make zero sense if not human-made.
For a more extreme example: a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece. If a piece is AI-generated, there's literally zero interest in it (except maybe as commentary on AI itself, fine).
> what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment
I suggest being a lot more humble about your understanding of art and other people's relationship to it
> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.
I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).
Really this stuff is accelerating a conflict between two philosophies of life:
- one where neural network A (electric) produces a set of stimuli for neural network B (meat), which in turn causes the meat to press buttons to maximize the stimuli received;
- one where humans seek meaning in the world and connection with other humans.
Now, the second is losing, and has been since the decline in philosophical dualism across the 20th century; but it can still express the concepts of "important" and "meaningful", which have no place in the first worldview at all.
> The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter
More plainly, as soon as I read the headline about one AI occupying 11 top slots I thought it was obviously being gamed by listen-botting. I don't really know how a system where machines "listen" to other machines in order to extract a small revenue from defrauded advertisers is sustainable, but there it is.
What an awful take. Music is inherently a human act, there's been lots written about this, but the point, and especially for music with lyrics is story telling, emotion, connection, empathy. Things a duck or slug or large language model have not business mimicking.
There is nothing wrong with your approach to music appreciation (removing the author entirely and appreciating it as an isolated work), but it's worth recognizing that a lot of people have different values from you here and their preferred mode of music appreciation is equally valid.
"Who cares if that 'I love you' voicemail is really from your mother. As long as it sounds like your mother, it should give you the same warm feeling."
I can’t enjoy listening to music I know was made by AI. If you can, power to you.
I suspect it's an issue with too big and diverse of a dataset, listening history going back years and tens of thousands of songs.
Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB
tl;dr: the final product is just a receipt of the effort, the sleepless nights, the self-doubt and personal transformation that goes into creating art. They have found a way to automate creating this receipt, without the personal transformation that an artist goes through, a process which leads her to learn more about herself and her place in the world.
An artist will find a way to leverage generative slop into this genuine process, but the by-the-bucket gruel generated in seconds from a prompt will always be a simulacrum of the real thing, despite how good it might sound.
I am pivoting from sterile software engineering where only product and revenue are the guiding metrics, to others where artistry and this personal drive for self-expression will always be valued, despite the attempts at diluting the field for a quick buck by talentless hacks.
The world will always care about Art. It is the most human of instincts.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
as with all art, the hardest part is discovery
artificial scarcity is indistinguishable from greed
I’ve found some of my favourite music in the last decade, during a time in my life by which it’s generally considered that your tastes are set.
Yes.
You will owe royalties.
The latter part is the actual problem.
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
> and partly due to resistance from creatives
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
Anyway, someone may not want to pursue spaceflight for the money, but everything involved in spaceflight still costs a lot of money, which has to be justified. So I think the phenomenon is still there; people still want to appear to be proving themselves through appearing to work hard and appearing to be needed.
I don't live in the US. But I recognize the American system for what it does well.
First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.
I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.
Basically made with pirated mp3s
It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.
That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
It was noise when it was only people; it's still just noise when it also includes bots.
To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"
Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.
In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.
(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)
The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
Soulless and devoid of emotion, or an inspired end run about the minor issue of a (self confessed) inability to conventionly sing.
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
It sounds like AI.
> I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Why are you getting offended on behalf of a computer? Or is there a deeper reasoning for this logic?
Even though they'd be right? Interesting.
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.
Which says all you need to know about where all this is headed, I guess.
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
But that's a relatively easy thing for a human with the right combination of toolchain, ears, and experience to fix. It tends to be a slow process that takes a good bit of time, but lots of actual-mixdowns start off way worse than this before they get polished up by a skilled mastering engineer.
(Maybe in a year or three we'll have the mastering process automated into an uncanny mush of soullessness, as well.)
https://github.com/sergree/matchering
(I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.)
IMO, the ideal would be for all music to be supplied unmastered so the listener's playback software can apply this process to their own taste. Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions. The best sounding music CDs I own are classical CDs on Telarc that have liner notes bragging about the complete lack of mastering.
Eh? I listened to it on quite good nearfield gear, in a decent room, and the AI track linked above still sounds like it needs a good bit of help from a responsible adult to bring it up on this rig. :)
Good mastering helps everywhere -- on all systems. For instance: The sound of Steely Dan is pretty good on playback with about anything, I think, and that sound took a ton of work.
And while classical music is not my first preference, I do love me a good Telarc recording. I strongly suspect that the signal path that they use isn't necessarily quite as pure as they insist that it is. Everything is a tone control, including a microphone -- and money is money. They're not going to reschedule an orchestra to fix an untoward blip at 3KHz. They'll just fix it in post (hopefully, as minimally as possible) and send it.
But otherwise, I agree. The mastering process can be automated. Ultimately, it will be. And for sure, it will also be a customizable user preference.
Some of that work has already been in the bag for decades. Ford, for instance, has been using DSPs in their factory car audio systems to shape sounds in unconventional ways for over 30 years. This gives them a lot of knobs to turn, and to fix into constraints, to help shape a listener's chosen music to sound as good as it can on less-than-ideal built-down-to-price on-road audio systems.
Or at least: It sounds as good it can to a consensus of engineers, or of a focus group.
But the knobs exist. And they don't have to be fixed or constrained: They can (and will) be automatically twisted to suit a listener's preferences.
I'll try to make time to check out your link in a day or two.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
Uhh... Cheap, basically AI generated art for home decor definitely exists.
> And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly
Just like how most people are not sommeliers, most people just listen to pop music "slop"
China is full of factories where exactly this is being done and people are fine with this.
The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”
Sure “we” are; we just call them “prints” or “posters” instead of ”paintings”.
And as everyone knows, some commodification of some thing means we must go ahead and totally commodify all the things.
I feel like the more important distinction might be whether the creator(s) are expressing themselves or are solving an optimization problem of maximizing audience approval. The latter seems true for both some human and AI pop songs.
One is a form of communication that requires (at least to some extent) meeting both sides to meet in the middle, the other is unidirectional broadcasting.
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
Isn’t this an argument against all new music, even human made?
Either we have it all already, or there’s room for new things that we haven’t heard before.
I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).
As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.
As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
Record companies can sell it and don't have to pay any royalties. They only pay the artists pennies as it is, but that's too much for them.
Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop.
To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.
Many YouTube channels started using AI music because they were getting sick of copyright strikes, and I agree some of it is actually very good.
AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
Strong disagree on "most"; most people listen to music simply because it sounds good. For that, AI serves the purpose very well.
artists complaining about not making enough is like programmers complaining their 7 star repo on github isn't making them enough on ko-fi
I mean my github is like that but I wouldn't expect to live off it unless I was Evan You
You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
There isn't that much good electro-swing made by humans, and not much new coming out. One can easily consume it all and want to hear some new tunes in that genre, and maybe AI can help with that.
AI will only sing songs that other people like, so AI singers will naturally attract more listeners.
Or vaporwave's inverse, nightcore, which typically boils down to ”take song, increase bass, speed up”.
Not that you're wrong, but human creativity doesn't mean what it used to.
I guess if AI companies did the same, they would be crushing people into the shape of an input prompt.
I sure do love the dying thrashes of human-creativity chauvanists. AI art, AI video, and AI music will eclipse most humans and there is absolutely nothing that will stop it. And you will use it and appreciate it more too. Once you open your eyes that is.
The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
Also I tend to listen to songs for a few days, during which time I feel they're the best thing ever, which also helps with momentum during work.
After a few days I have to find other songs. Since AI music started getting more traction it's been way easier to find great songs.
I understand the criticisms of AI music, but that doesn't take away from the fact that for me and a growing number of people it sounds good.
Also I am not listening to AI generated music that I generate myself.
These are some channels whose music I like:
- https://www.youtube.com/@EndlessTaverns
- https://www.youtube.com/@TheAutomaticSingerI do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.
It's aleatoric music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music
AI music is just as good as all human-made music. It is at the point of indistinguishability now and anyone actually using suno v5+ knows this.
various genres: https://suno.com/s/Oc5842XzzuBTk4Ma https://suno.com/s/RdmFOKpbi4zyVbRf https://suno.com/s/J4Z8t8jU9JXVJ1DB https://suno.com/s/OhfzCYkmcZhFf1Pk https://suno.com/s/VYHHLW7Hkw2uHjrb https://suno.com/s/cTu7AkoOdAyi0eWz https://suno.com/s/QvOExImOVzo1b2Gl https://suno.com/s/MASINon9lGr9JPLS https://suno.com/s/ujpTfZwVdAKy9W0h https://suno.com/s/DwekDLuEzgyNpYGQ https://suno.com/s/psWqWzDQa6Aq96Pk https://suno.com/s/JEM8G2RxD35ZUpGy
also if you like enders game lol: https://suno.com/s/gQ8eGNgnkfktl0Xq
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c&list=RDhtQBS2Ikz...
The choice is still there for any listener that cares about albums as a format. I don't mean that in a negative way. I suspect that many people listen to both playlists of singles, and albums of their favourite artists, depending on mood.
agreed with this, I would almost go so far as to say there are more full length albums being created than ever before.
Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.
Solo pop or hip-hop performers with a focus on social media have crowded out collectively made music, likely due to the general social atrophy and technology enabling production from their bedrooms.
Anecdotally, I used to be a guitarist and a lot of my friends are musicians and teachers, teenage bands are pretty much nowhere to be seen.
What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.
Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
I'd really love to see an actual source on this claim.
Go on KEXP, find a new band you like, share it with your friends, buy a physical copy, buy a t-shirt, book tickets, like their stuff on socials. Watch the record companies flock to real bands.
For the second time on this thread, start with Angine de Poitrine. Live music is the antidote.
It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing. Even the channels on Youtube that I listen to are so prolific (people generate a large amount of music and just stick it in there) that I never go look for a particular track or anything. And there are so many of them that each one only gets a few thousand views.
The same thing happens with non-AI music too. Artists you've never heard of have songs that suddenly become viral.
But I've also seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gMX_hR-RoM
(I'll do it again, too.)
Up to 70% of streams of AI music on Deezer were fraudulent!
1. Do the survey/focus groups to figure out a hot topic for a song. For instance your exploration shows that 300K girls between 13 and 17 years old were left by their boyfriend, so there is a 300K market for a song about that.
2. Find someone or group who will sing the song. Something your target audience will identify. E.g. "rebellious teenager" (take Britney Spears), "we need a group that will attack larger target" - take Spice Girls - we take one black, one white, one Latino looking (doesn't have to be real Latino, obviously), one polite and nice, one impolite. You get the point.
3. Note: singer/group does not need to know how to sing, they need to move reasonably on the scene, the rest autotune and computers will handle easily.
So, given the process, AI singer is just a little bit different "music" production process, not so much different from the one used up to date except that you don't need autotune anymore.
Luckily there are still people who do music for the sake of doing music and it really stands out as compared to 80% of fodder for listeners that is on YT, radio, Spotify.
I hate it, and I hate liking some of it, as it is easier to find than quality human produced stuff in some styles and I'd prefer to support analog over digital creation.
With that said, there's a blues AI cover of gangsta's Paradise that is pretty sweet played at 90% speed. Again, I wish it was human performed, and I'm continuously conflicted about it.
There will be quality real art music created by these systems, but not by those that prompt alone. This is a whole new level of instrument, and the levels of control beneath are there to seriously transform one's thoughts to music, and melody, and that composed symphony of separate elements into a symphony of intended meaning.
Perhaps traditional music and this form of music should be treated separate. The distinction between AI music that is prompt-only and what can be created from a deeper set of controls is immense, and is not distinguished at this time, and may never be with how surface level this entire public assessment of AI music happens to be.
I don't really like much of the "mainstream" music right now. It's basically whining, high pitched young men. They all sound exactly the same to me, you can't hear or make outall the words, they play the guitar, sort of and all bass sounds have been scrubbed from the track.
Even if they write their own songs, which I honestly think many do, I don't see the point, when it's basically a stream of high pitched tones which you can't hear. Even if you read the lyrics, they are super generic. Might as well be AI, and I think that's really the point. Most people don't give a fuck, AI or not, who cares, it's noise coming out the speaker or headphones. It's not there because it's music, it's there to be noise and isolate you from the world.
However, I also listened to several other artists on the chart[1]. They all, bar a couple, are so low effort that they may also be generated by neural networks, FWIW.
The last 6 years has been no music. I unsubscribed from everything since I felt music was an intrusion in the moment.
I had a quick listen to the "AI singer", and it's soulless, empty, and generic - Which is modern music anyway.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
Check they local college; they likely have free concerts at their auditorium of a variety of genres, though probably more likely you'll get orchestras and jazz bands (which are great).
Over the years it's been hard to avoid noticing that the people who show up for classical and jazz concerts tend to be older. But we're not playing "the music they grew up with." Many of them grew up listening to rock 'n' roll or similar, and when we play an old pop tune, they'll get up and dance.
What I think instead is that they've adjusted their musical tastes to find settings where they can enjoy the performance: Typically quieter, less crowded (though we fill our venues), easier to get in and out of (parking, public transit, etc), and at decent hours.
Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...
[1]: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
The audience will out the good patterns, and it's up to the musicians or AI companies to serve better patterns.
That's very reductive. Music, like writing or painting, is a medium, not a thing with intrinsic purpose. It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, conveying emotion, evoking feelings, expressing a story, ...
This is entirely separate from pop, which is the junk food of music - cheap, filling, bad for your health.
Humans just biologically enjoy rhythmic sounds. We don't care who makes it, we don't care how it is performed live. Those things are just hijacking emotional memory in heightened moments, but that is completely separate from the general natural enjoyment of music.
AI music simply drives the same point home that listening to random music does when you are without a care for lyrics or artists (often, and everyone).
Your point is asinine. You love a hell of a lot of music besides what you attach to live performance. Everyone does. You do not care about the human component.
Unless you want to lie and claim you're some musical purist, this argument is shallow thinking and nothing more.
My take is literalist, not reductive: Music (and any art product) is configuration. The media involved are the physical laws of nature that present the configuration.
> It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, ...
1. You're construing the journey with the result. The act of creating is not typically the result product itself.
2. Any perceived relationship to the artist via product is virtual and parasocial (respectfully stated). You have no relationship with Bach or Shakespeare or Michelangelo--you have an appreciation for their accumulated works. You may have a fascination for their stories and life through literary works. You have no relationship with your favorite artist, you have their works in your media library.
5.6MB? That's an astounding number of combinations. 1 followed by 1733933 zeroes.
> If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
AI is not searching that space for novel patterns for the most part, it is taking what it has heard before and coming up with things based on that. Which isn't a dig at AI, that's pretty much how humans do things too. I don't think today's AIs would be able to come up with something like Stairway to Heaven if Led Zeppelin and the music they inspired had never existed though.
AI isn't "searching" in the standard indexing sense. But if say, Suno, is doing stable diffusion on fourier transform heat maps, and there's a finite space of configurations... it is using a heuristic approach to pick an option from a well-defined (gargantuan) set of options.
That space is mostly noise.
Try cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio for an example of the kind of noise that this space contains.
(If you stick with it and manage live long enough, you'll eventually hear a few bars from Stairway to Heaven. If I also manage to live long enough, then perhaps we'll be able to chat about it in a few million years.)
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...
I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.
With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.
Don't have to as they can retire, but as someone who used to be in a professional band (far from a rockstar), I would have end my life if I have to play one of these songs EVER again after playing them 10000s of times (rehearsal + gigs). I cannot understand how anyone does that without being very much drugged up. Especially once you have the money to quit.
I think if you knew more musicians personally, you would feel different. What you're imagining and the day-to-day lived experience of most real musicians don't exactly overlap that much.
So in a sense you're ruining the music for yourself based on nothing but you're imagination.
I think a lot of modern life suffers from this problem. Most of us live such walled in lives now, experiencing everything second hand, from a distance. The absence of information lets us fill the gap with anything we want, which ends up being more a reflection of our own psychology than reality.
oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!
I took a break from Suno for many months .. attacking everyones slop including my own but my bandmates like my AI songs. Now at practice (80s & 90s music band) we listen and play along to the AI versions and have thrown in two into our setlist. Thus, for me Ive finally found an inspiring human usage of AI music! No text prompter could ever enjoy playing / performing their music in a band and to an audience and receive live human feedback. That's unless they do what millions other musicians have done .. cultivate their talent/musical interest.
Since the Monkeys we all know, there won't be another Elvis Presley - I advise you to look him up, it is massively impressive, what this guy achieved and what records he holds.
Or put another way: what is music? What ain't artificial in music? Is a drum already artificial? Or an e guitar? Playback? Studio music?
The divide between a band and a song writer?
People trashed techno music in Germany during the early 90th as being "machine music without a soul, totally artificial, a computer is doing everything". Kraftwerk on the other hand, was quite the opposite. It is mind blowing, that they had to construct the hardware they were getting their sound of.
But no matter what, techno of the 90th appear to be true craftsmanship in comparison to todays music. Like the 30th Big Bands vs 60th Rock music. I don't imply to say "Everything used to be better." Nothing could be further from the truth. The thing is, some things actually never change except for the medium.
I stopped caring. We are all victim and perpetrator at the same time. You use AI - oh well, cheater I would say.
Women painting their faces - well...
Ever since people went un-natural to be civilized to paraphrase Karl Popper.
I made a cut off regarding literature. I mainly read the classics where no AI was available - but only an editor.
It is tougher than ever but I stopped being judgmental. I try to do, what is expressed with "The bait must appeal to the fish, not the angler." Mundus vult decipi.
We called out WWF for being scripted entertainment while going to the cinema expecting that the hero would actually really die during the first dramatic 5 minutes in the movie - oh well...
Enjoy! If it sounds good, who cares? If someones earns a buck, so what? We pay for Naked Canon etc. just to let lose. :)
The idea is explained by Rick Beato here: https://youtu.be/rGremoYVMPc
https://music.apple.com/no/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.
But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.
The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.
The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.
I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).
Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.
However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.
There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.
So if I:
1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)
2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)
Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.
"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.
I think it tells a lot about AI-generated art. People prompting the AI find it fascinating because they look at it with in the context of their internal thoughts and moods that led them to it. But the generated artwork itself doesn't communicate that context at all. A complete stranger will find it derivative and boring.
I'm guessing that looking at AI art prompted by your friend and family may be a middle road somewhere. So maybe the fact that you have such a positive opinion on AI art is because it's the people you know closely that are doing it.