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by Saline9515 313 days ago
It still requires work, dedication and produces authenticity. A world where AI can produce music instantly commoditizes it.
2 comments

Music is already a commodity. You can just buy some anonymous background music to play in your restaurant. No effort required.
Yes but I don't want to hear some anonymous background music.

A better example would be Spotify replacing artist-made music recommandations with low-quality alternatives, to reduce what it pays to artists. Everyone except Spotify loses in this scenario.

In the future, everyone will have their own ai agents capable of generating music to their own tastes. They won't be using spotify.

The future with AI is not going to be our current world with some parts replaced by AI. It will be a whole new way of life.

My prediction is that personal generation is going to be niche forever, for purely social reasons. The demand for fandoms and fan communities seems to be essentially unlimited. Big artists have big fandoms, tiny ones have tiny fandoms, but none of that works with personalized generations.
You can have a million 'social' followers now, all posting on how your personally generated music is great, along with posting their faces and lives.

What does social mean in a future that could just simulate it.

Well, maybe. But there are overwhelmingly large numbers of people who want to be in a fandom, and that means being fans of some shared thing. Maybe that shared thing will be AI generated, but it won't be a world of solipsists.
Communities around fictional universes are already fractured and shrinking in member size because of the sheer number of algorithmically targeted universes available.

Water cooler talk about what happened this week in M.A.S.H. or Friends is extinct.

Worse, in the long run even community may be synthesized. If a friend is meat or if they're silicon (or even carbon fiber!), does it matter if you can't tell the difference? It might to pre-modern boomers like me and you.

I think things will look a lot more like Vinge's Rainbows End than everyone burrowing into their own personal algoentertainment. I can't speak for GenZ but when D&D can sell out Madison Square Garden, there doesn't seem to be any softening in people's interest in fandom.

Virtual influencers might be a big thing, Hatsune Miku has lots of fans. But it's still a shared fandom.

I mean you can just listen to human made music if that’s an important part of the experience for you. I doubt humans are going to stop anytime soon
If you flood the space with AI-made music costing a few cents to create, human artists will have a much harder time to survive professionally.
But availability of new works shall change once the floor of how popular you need to be to survive off of art will change and it will, since not everyone will care. Taylor Swift will be fine either way, but it's not about her.