[jastanton]

> I can't concieve even the flimsiest of reasons why anyone would ever listen to (or license/sync/track/ ) any of those generated songs once the novelty of "music made by the AI" is gone.

Easy: Independent/single-dev operations needing some quick background music for a project (game, whatever)

[gazebo64]

This is already easily solved by using royalty-free music or by licensing pre-made music from numerous publicly available sound libraries online -- with the added benefit of supporting actual musicians instead of plagiarist tech middlemen.

[bambinella]

I think you got this wrong. Usually you use one electronic musician to create all the background music (or license pre-existing popular music), and with music AI you make that musician more productive. It is not like non-musicians will even be able to select the bad from the good of the AI output. It takes a trained ear to build functional AI music as well.

Nobody will hire live studio musicians or a symphony orchestra to create background music. Way too expensive.

[gazebo64]

What exactly am I getting wrong? You insisting that nobody hires studio musicians or orchestras, and claiming that "usually you hire one electronic musician" are both demonstrably false opinions that have almost no relation to my point that background music is obtainable through on-demand licensed libraries.

[drusepth]

Also: People (especially kids, students, etc) who want to make music but don't have the technical expertise to (yet?).

Obviously these tools don't do everything necessary to make great music, but the barrier of entry to making music is being lowered, and the quality floor is being raised -- and that'll result in a lot more would-be "musicians"[0] creating music that wouldn't otherwise exist[1].

[0] I leave the argument of whether these generative musicians count as "real" musicians to the Scotsmen in the audience.

[1] Bonus question: does art still hold value if no one sees it?

[zaptrem]

The creator sees/hears it! (and if they don't it really shouldn't have been generated lol, waste of compute)

[column]

o1's take on your bonus question seems reasonable :

Yes. Art can have intrinsic and personal value for its creator, independent of any external audience. Unseen art lacks immediate external value [to others] but retains latent worth, potentially realized when discovered or appreciated in the future.

[vunderba]

This comes up quite a lot - lowering the barrier to entry for creating a bunch of media that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Eh I don't think the world is exactly clamoring for even more music.

I can't speak for everyone's process, but if you don't know how to make music, I'm not convinced that this allows you to do so because the medium of input (aka writing text) is far too divergent from the resultant melodic output to allow for any kind of meaningful individuality.

[duped]

> Also: People (especially kids, students, etc) who want to make music but don't have the technical expertise to (yet?).

But fuck all the people who have a career teaching them those skills as a part of a thousands-year long artistic tradition whose value isn't solely defined by the exchange of currency for lessons, but in that it subsidizes those artists' work which goes unpaid and furthers human experience.

It's wonderful techies with a surface level knowledge of the arts are cannibalizing the entire supply chain and marketplace so they can make a buck off the AI craze.

The barrier to entry is already zero. AI lowers the ceiling, not the floor.