AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping Billboard Chart. That Should Infuriate Us

Sorry, no, I find this all to be a bit too precious by half - I don’t think country fans have the discerning musical taste that the author somehow expects here. Attention and money is “taken” away? No, dude, people are giving their money and their attention, willingly, eagerly even, to this “ai slop.”

People used to support “actual songwriters and artists” because they had no choice, there was no other source of music! Not because they thought there was something special and worthwhile about the songwriters and the artists themselves, by and large.

I don’t think you have any right to be ‘infuriated’ that your romantic ideals about how people consume entertainment didn’t get born out over time as technology shifts and the market follows.

The reality we’re all been shown is: most people simply do not care for authenticity, for ‘real’ or for what is true… they just want something that makes them feel the way they expect, and they aren’t interested in thinking about it any further than that.

Why should this be true literally everywhere else, but not country music?

If artists want to outperform AI, the solution is simple: create better songs. This may finally force the genre to innovate.

But who and what are "real artists"? Much of the boring BS (i.e. "slop") the record monopolists serve us on the charts via Spotify etc. composed and played by "real musicians" is so monotonous, standardized, and superficial that it hardly requires real musicians, and I certainly wouldn't call these creators "real artists."

For me, true artists are not only people who have mastered their craft to perfection, but those who advance culture and humanity and create new things that the world has never seen before, and which therefore often do not appeal to the masses. It's a joke anyway, considering that most of today's popular artists don't even have to compose, arrange or play "their own" music anymore; there are even prominent cases where the "artists" move their lips, but someone else is actually singing. So we cannot even be sure, who actually is the real artist.

Ironically, as a musician myself (used to be a professional musician and producer twenty years ago, still making music), I find the arrangements and solos that Suno has generated from my uploaded pieces much more creative and even "human" than most of the stuff that the record monopolists serve up these days (see e.g. https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1428).

In my view, the real danger is not so much that AI music will become "legitimate" (most people can no longer distinguish between human and machine-generated music anyway), but rather that the record monopolists, with their market power achieved through lobbying and other shady practices, will crush innovative companies like Suno (ironically, ostensibly in the name of the musicians whose exploitation enabled them to gain this power in the first place) and then use this technology themselves to improve their margins even further by eliminating other cost factors such as composers and studio musicians. Since more and more people are consuming anonymous playlists without ever caring about the musicians who made the songs, nobody will notice. But they will continue to pay for their Spotify subscription, most of which will continue to go to the record monopolists.

(originally posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876674)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45878415#45878963