1. Platforms like Suno lack the granular control that can make a song distinctive and interesting. A prompt is an all-or nothing paradigm. There is no gradual build towards a final result like in normal creative processes. Yes you can supply lyrics but that’s hardly a substitute. And on top of that it’s painfully slow due to the nature of the technology.
2. As a result of 1, experienced music producers (familiar with regular DAWs) don’t want to use it. They probably prefer something with instant feedback. Tweak a synth param, you can instantly hear its effect. And changing one instrument doesn’t randomly affect unrelated things.
3. As a result of 2, the majority of AI generated music is throwaway and or created by amateurs who don’t have the ear for what makes a song good.
So the stuff that is most popular?
But (semi) jokes aside, I think that AI music tools are just not fully developed yet. The current approach is more or less one shotting a track. Whereas I think a system that allows one to generate layers would bring in many new sounds. Something like a "speak to instument" system, where you can hum melodies and then generate instruments to play those, then compose a track with all those individual parts.
They were right and wrong. A lot of it was really formulaic bullshit, and much of it doesn't hold up at all. But it also spawned one of the most creative and exciting periods in music history.
Will this be the same? It feels like it won't, but that's how things feel in general because I'm old. So who knows?
AI music on the other hand comes not from the underground, but from corporations. You'll be hard pushed to find any critics or music connoisseurs singing its praises.
The culture changes.
Classics:
Busdriver - Me-Time (With The Pulmonary Palimpsest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a0Y-CRx4nE
Kendrick Lamar - reincarnated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek7UvQPCQnE
Black Star - Re:Definition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt2lLWxxV9w
Leftfield:
Themselves - Each Ant in Their House: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjkZDGZ5SB8
Sole & Dose - Human Races the Tortoise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RP52H9bdag
Last 12 months:
Little Simz - Lotus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BplWSCZpY&list=RDZ2BplWSCZ...
Jim Legxacy - idk idk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZzvQP2fV-c&list=RDsZzvQP2fV...
I guess you could argue that drum machines offered simplification/automation when they first appeared compared to the option of a human drummer, but also, those machines opened up all sorts of creative and stylistic possibilities that simply couldn't be done by sitting someone at a traditional drum kit. Using AI to make music doesn't do this -- it's a shortcut that has no argument in its favor whatsoever except that it saved the person making it time (and/or enabled them to generate something they couldn't have produced through their own work). That's why it is fundamentally uncool in a musical context, and always will be.
It's got no hook.
Yeah, I heard that. It was so "good" that dude-man here stopped playing the track when it showed up. ;)
If there is something good to this composition (which, again, is inclusive of its lyrics), then that goodness is the mechanical dryness of it all -- which is absurdly profound.
And to be clear, I'm very OK with mechanical music and also with absurd music. These things can be a lot of fun.
The absurdity-level mechanality could have been a hook in and of itself with a bit of occasional embellishment. There was an obvious play-on-words about "British tube meat" that wasn't explored at all.
"British tube meat at its absolute best"
"My British tube meat is a dripping mess"
So the song's got no hook. It can't even succeed at being background noise because the missed opportunities shine so brightly that they're impossible to ignore.
2/10. Needs work. (In this way, it's very similar to the vibe-coded stuff I fuck around with.)
As a classical music fan there's a kind of variation in depth and complexity that probably peaks with late Bach and Beethoven and I always thought it would be interesting if tech could go beyond that but so far it's not close to equaling it.
As for the lowest common denominator part, it is true for all types of generative AI. AI will almost always spit out the lowest common denominator of the medium it tries to generate.
I'm sure someone can make unique or passable music with the help of AI tooling, but they can't do it by just saying "make me this music", no matter how much effort they think they have put into the prompt.
If you practice piano, you will get better in some predictable way, even if it takes a long time.
If you spend more and more time tweaking a prompt, you will be pulling songs from some distribution of possible songs but you will never have the level of control that conventional music producers have.
"Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles" is classic hindsight bias. In retrospect, once everything has sorted out, and all the good music has risen to the top, it's easy to look back in history and point to the highlights. But when you live through it, it looks a lot more like a mess with no redeeming qualities.
When AI image generation was a thing that hobbyists were messing around with (before it became good sometime in 2023) a lot of the creative-type people that abhor AI today were interested in it. Same thing with LLMs and stuff like AI Dungeon. ( I don't think AI music generation had a similar hobbyist era but not sure. )
I think the main thing that changed was how big and commercial it became. There's nothing counter-cultural about AI anymore, it's become the polar opposite. Nobody was making billions selling synthesizers & convincing investors it would replace 99% of musicians.
If we are going to say that the knee-jerk reaction to AI is somehow different I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
But the idea of being able to just create endless music with low effort is too compelling for too many, so the good stuff is drown out by the mass amounts of low-effort slop being produced.