[fao_]

> but if the GenAI can do this now, what will it sound like a year from now

(For reference, I'm responding with such a long post because I have a pretty unique perspective to share compared to the hacker news crowd, and also, I wish someone had told me this too, when I was a teenager.)

I heard it five years ago and hated it because it sounds like slop, I heard it today and hated it because it sounds like slop. Game devs (the ones you actually want to work for that aren't just pulling asset flips), by and large hate AI art, and gamers by and large hate it too (There's a whole movement about not using it in games lol).

On top of that, professional musicians are so, so guilty of using music libraries to produce music — Guy Michelmore on Youtube (@ThinkSpaceEducation) has a really, really good video that I can't find right now, where he demonstrates using music libraries to bootstrap a composition. It's really unlikely to be the case that if you're working as a professional musician, that you're going to be producing all of the work of a given composition (even though it is very, very valuable to do that as a beginner because it helps you learn a shitload). Finally adding to this point, there's a cottage industry of people on Youtube who spend time pulling apart world-famous songs and figuring out who they're reusing for the bassline, what bands they sample parts of the audio segments from, etc. Hell, there's a whole browsable library of this: https://www.whosampled.com/

Separately, as a burned out folk+classical musician whose friends and family went on to be nationally recognized musicians (I dropped out of the folk scene due to gender dysphoria and presentation woes lol, but one family member did tour the world playing music when i was a wee bab), music has never, ever, ever been super profitable for anyone other than the very lucky or the very, very wealthy. You are very, very lucky to break even on the amount of time you spend, let along equipment costs. Even the internationally recognized composer John Cage had his main living selling mushrooms to Michelin star restaurants. Everything else I can say about this already has a really, really good write up about this here: https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-...

So between "You're unlikely to actually make money solely off music", "Professionals rarely write the entire piece themselves and will reuse things from other artists, either from a music library, a sample bank, or making their own samples", and "There's a whole slew of game developers out there that want real, human-made music, with all the soul and artistry that that entails", I don't really see a reason why this would take the wind out of anyone's sails.

But even if all of that wasn't the case, the question is ultimately: Why are you engaging in a hobby if it not being profitable, or you not being successful, causes you to lose any motivation? Why is that the main source of motivation for you, such that the possibility of losing that motivation causes you to lose all pleasure from the wonderful, unique experience of writing, composing, and performing music? I think this comes down to like, is your motivation for making music external, or internal. Does your joy of making something come from making the thing, expressing yourself and being artistic (ultimately being human in the process, because Art seems integral to us as a species, and engaging in it is stepping into and pushing forward this wonderful, complex history of self-expression), or some ephemeral possible future reward? Ultimately, it shouldn't matter whether or not you become a professional game musician (Which, by the way, is *absolutely* doable, and a worthy *goal* to have. I really hope you succeed!!), because the motivation to express yourself through a certain medium should ideally come from the joy you doing that and learning how to do it.

Essentially, it all comes back to the age-old, often stated: do you love learning because you love the idea of having knowledge at the end of it, or because you love the process itself. Learning to love the process is always, always going to be a stronger source of motivation and will last you through times when the progress and process are incredibly difficult.

[benchly]

I appreciate all your insight!

I suppose my next question to yourself and anyone else who listens and says "this is AI slop" would be thus; if it was presented on Spotify or some other platform and not advertised as AI generated, would you still be able to tell the difference? Would your target audience?

This is where it gets fuzzy, for me. Lets say I make an album with 10 tracks of low-fi hiphop and want to sell it for $15USD with a liberal license that allows for use in commercial product. Let's also say that Bob uses GenAI to make a low-fi hiphop album that sells for $8USD assuming the same license. Which do you think the solo unpaid game dev who needs vibe music for her new cozy urban farming game is going to go for?

It's not just about consumers being able to tell the difference between GenAI product and human product, which they have proven pretty terrible at when we look at code, visual art and writing. The HN crowd is perhaps more adept at it, but as much as I enjoy this site, the HN crowd represents a tiny fraction of the available market despite what certain egos around here may think.

That is what takes the wind out of my sails; not that the GenAI can easily produce electronic music that sounds like mine, but that it can do it on a speed and scale that renders me not competitive.

To clarify, I never intended to make it my full time job. I like electronic music, saw a lot of artists on Bandcamp selling albums and doing music for games and figured hey, I think I can do that and maybe supplement my primary income a wee bit...you know, because here in the US, rather than fixing the predatory economy, we just push everyone into turning every hobby into a side-hustle. To your point about why I am engaging in a hobby where motivation is so easily lost, well...I will need to chew on that a bit. I am the type of person who enjoys trying different things to learn what I like and what I don't before investing in it more. I also wonder if there's a difference in the fact that I make electronic music with, well, electronics (into a bit of circuit bending, as well), versus someone who plays a guitar or oboe, which takes significantly more dedication and practice than what I enjoy doing.

Was I relying on making money off music? Nah. I am not even remotely close to that level, yet. But would it have been nice to put up a few albums to sell on platforms like Bandcamp? Sure! But the advent of GenAI makes me wonder if my limited free time would be best spent on other hobbies that stand a better chance of both satisfying my desire to create and putting a few extra bucks for lunch in my pocket once in awhile.

[fao_]

> if it was presented on Spotify or some other platform and not advertised as AI generated, would you still be able to tell the difference? Would your target audience?

These are all fair questions but this one is a good bouncing off point to circle to the whole of it.

So, I can yes, because the instruments sound wrong. I would expect an audience of people who mostly listen to stuff I make to also catch this vague "off" feeling with the music. But regardless to that there's kind of, two things to this, which is that - someone who is making AI-generated music is fundamentally too lazy and too broke to bother with a) paying an artist for the cover (i.e. the cover is likely to be also AI generated and weird), and b) building any kind of audience or relationship with other artists in the scene (it would be very, very difficult to do that without giving up that you're also using AI, and subsequently getting shunned in the industry, too).

Like something I perhaps failed to communicate in the last message but, ok so context is- I used to move in indie dev circles (notably the Ludum Dare IRC and indiedev twitter) as a wee bab -and although I wasn't like, great at networking or whatever, and frankly wasn't very good at producing anything of merit because I was a dorky little teenager with ADHD lol, I still managed to build personal connections with people in those spaces because I just, like, interacted with them.

The majority of sales that you see right off the bat for any artistic product are likely to be not from your own audience -- if you're new to it you probably don't have an audience yet -- but instead from the audience of other artists who you have vague relationships with, who look at your work and go "wow, holy shit, this is so cool" and then share it. Like, realistically Spotify isn't going to be a fantastic moneymaker because of both visibility and how stingy they are with paying out. What can become an incidental money maker are the relationships you build with artists, game devs, etc. in the scene, and eventually the relationship you build with your audience. It's literally just "talking to people" and going "hey i fucking love that piece of music" and having a cool enough profile / website / whatever that eventually someone gives it a click, that's your foot in the door, and it's enough to build from.

In addition to bluesky/mastodon/soundcloud/bandcamp/etc. there's also specific subreddits for people to advertise themselves to game developers, and for game developers to go "hey I am looking for xyz type of music". That's another foot in the door. It's very, very slow "work", but making friends is always slow -- and like, because we're on the VC-brained hacker news I feel I have to explicitly say -- don't approach it like Networking(tm), approach it like making friends. Join communities, find people whose art you appreciate, post about your own art (everywhere you can think of). All the shitty WIPs and whatever, that's still usually interesting enough for people to go "wow this is interesting" and follow you over it, and interact with you over it.

The trick to the modern web is literally "authenticity", and nobody making something with AI has that. The difference between someone who pops off on tiktok and someone who doesn't is often literally how authentic their video feels, and ""consumers"" are getting increasingly good at spotting someone who just wants to get clicks and views, versus someone who is passionate at creating and wanted to share something they made. Between all the weird AI slop, all the corporate-produced shit, everyone on the web right now are absolutely starving for unique, "cool" people who just do what brings them joy.

You don't want the people who click on something on bandcamp and go "eh it's free might as well use it for my game", you want the game developers who are even slightly discriminating about their tastes, who have a set idea and want to hire someone who makes music that fits that taste, and who is respectful and "gets" the themes, subject matter, and artistic expression of their game. Someone typing "dark moody music guitar bass punk rock short loop" into an AI-generator isn't that, and can never be that. Art tells a story, and AI has no perspective from which to make that, it's the same problem with AI writing.

> To clarify, I never intended to make it my full time job. I like electronic music, saw a lot of artists on Bandcamp selling albums and doing music for games and figured hey, I think I can do that and maybe supplement my primary income a wee bit...you know, because here in the US, rather than fixing the predatory economy, we just push everyone into turning every hobby into a side-hustle.

Honestly I absolutely understand that. My first internship was around twelve years ago now, and I fell out of it due to health problems, I recovered from those a little and was lucky enough to get another tech job while I was homeless in 2022, and I gradually became so, so ill in the place I was staying that just like the first job, my performance cratered about 6 months into the job. So now I'm kind of stuck here being incredibly capable at my job, but unmedicated (with the NHS refusing to diagnose me) and probably the single worst CV in the entire world. I've spent like, 3 years recovering from all of that and now I'm at a point where it's like- shit, what do I do now?! and it looks like the answer to that is making art and primarily Writing, which... lol, I always tried to avoid art being my primary money-maker because getting to a point where you can sustain yourself off it is very, very difficult, if impossible.

> To your point about why I am engaging in a hobby where motivation is so easily lost, well...I will need to chew on that a bit. I am the type of person who enjoys trying different things to learn what I like and what I don't before investing in it more. I also wonder if there's a difference in the fact that I make electronic music with, well, electronics (into a bit of circuit bending, as well), versus someone who plays a guitar or oboe, which takes significantly more dedication and practice than what I enjoy doing.

This is great!! Being discerning and discriminating about what you're investing your time into is a great quality to have IMHO. And nah, I can do music with physical instruments, but I've been poking at electronic music for like ten years and never really got anywhere satisfactorily because you have to come at it from a completely different direction lol.

I really do wish you luck!!!