[jsheard]

Yeah I've heard this story before. What's actually going to happen is that Spotify and every other music streaming service will be filled with 50 million functionally identical AI generated songs made by people looking to scrape off a few cents when people listen to them by accident.

[ein0p]

Spotify is already filled with “10 million of functionally identical songs” made by people “looking to scrape off a few cents”. The state of the art, such as it is, could hardly be any worse.

[janice1999]

Automating slop will absolutely increase its volume multiple orders of magnitude. At least human made music, however terrible, stands the chance of accidentally being interesting.

[ein0p]

When everyone can produce “slop” in seconds the value of slop rapidly approaches zero and you have to do something the machine can’t do, which is produce original, superior material. You also get to use generations as a starting point and improve upon them. I think if anything this will only improve the human SOTA.

[jsheard]

The value of slop does approach zero, but as the time and money required to produce slop also approaches zero it takes very little incentive for people to keep churning out infinite amounts of slop. If it costs 2 cents to make an AI generated song and the EV on its Spotify revenue is 3 cents then it's worth doing if you can automate it. Meanwhile everyone making an actual effort, using AI or not, gets buried under an ocean of shit that nobody has the patience to wade through.

This is the principle behind AI-generated SEO blogs, the content is garbage that nobody wants, but they are profitable nonetheless.

[janice1999]

I think that's naive - good luck finding the "superior" material when the marketplace is flooded with garbage. Amazon users are facing this exact issue at the moment with chatGPT generated 'books'. Users and site operators cannot scale up to filter out the low quality sludge being generated by AI.

[ein0p]

But we already have to do that. The marketplace is already flooded with garbage. People who do original things will still float to the top. People who already produce poorly made crap will have to do something else

[ipaddr]

Why would they float to the top? Marketing budgets will push garbage to the top like what happens now in music. No real change. Leaving the audio tune era into the AI era isn't going to change anything.

[ska]

> The state of the art, such as it is, could hardly be any worse.

That seems highly unlikely to be true.

[norwalkbear]

The AI actually makes better music than most of the amateurs on spotify

[orthecreedence]

Right, this will probably end up being like how autotune was for singers.

I don't really want "anyone" to make music. I want people who are good at making music to make music. Yeah we should remove barriers for those people, but honestly nothing beats practice and dedication. Tech seems more and more focused on regurgitation instead of creation.

[recursive]

Autotune sounds different than non-autotune regardless of whether it's used by a good or bad singer. As a result, it can be used for creative purposes, even by good singers.

Drum machines sounds different from kits, which doesn't mean that drum machines are an inferior version of drum kits. They are different, and there's room for both.

Maybe you will never like any song with autotune in it. That's fine. But the idea of objectively "good at making music" leads to some nonsense. There's no accounting for taste.

In my opinion, the more music made, the better. There's something for everyone.

[spacechild1]

> Yeah we should remove barriers for those people

The thing is, we have already removed all of the financial/logistic barriers. Anyone who owns a laptop can setup their own little home studio with a mic + audio interface + pair of speakers for under 200 bucks. That's how I started as a kid. But as you say, you still need practice and dedication (and some talent). If you get rid of that, you essentially get rid of art.

That being said, I do remember Magix Music Maker and Acid Music from the early 2000s where you could easily create your own songs by drag&dropping loops on a timeline. Actually, that's what got me into music production as a kid. I think this kind of software can be a great starting point. The problem with Suno and Udio, IMO, is that the interface is too basic and offers very little control over the actual music.

Now, the actual problem is that people will abuse these programs to spam established distribution channels with low effort AI garbage on a massive scale. We already see this happening in other domains (digital visual art, books).

Of course, you can't expect tech companies to consider the broad effects of their products on society...

[api]

We were already there a few years ago before the generative AI boom.

I'm starting to wonder if this stuff is actually going to make real art "hand made" by real people more valuable in some ways because it'll stand out from the mountains of auto-generated trash. Problem will be finding it.

[spacechild1]

> Problem will be finding it.

Exactly! Looks like we will need more curation again.

[api]

Yahoo was ahead of its time.

[ipaddr]

Spotify recently changes terms to only include songs with certain numbers of downloads (1000) for payouts eliminating this strategy.

[eurekin]

Multiyear long spotify listener.

I think it's already flooded with spam from non real artists. I had weekly discovery playlists, where I did downvote all of proposed songs... Each new set was still coming with most boring, uninspired, flat and predictable structure (and abstract cover art), which for me is an exact equivalent of those NFT images.

The images are designed to be a set of replaceable elements that have to follow the same "joint structure". Once you see it, all charm is lost and that vague "why does it look so funny" feeling is simply replaced with disappointment.

[spacechild1]

But with these AI tools it will happen on a much bigger scale!

[gunsle]

Yeah, music streaming is already way overcrowded with actual humans making music, I don’t see how this will ever actually take off.