It’s quite remarkable that musicians are so inherently conservative, yet change has been a constant factor in music. What, we’re conservative? Yes, for example, most guitars use designs of the 1950s, complete with chrome (!), exposed screw heads and colours from the General Motors paint shop. Change is constant? Yes, just listen to the first few dozen podcasts in https://500songs.com/.
Consequently, at least since the end of WWII, there has been an endless petition of complains about what the young kids of today are listening to, how no one appreciates serious music any more, how musicians are being hard done by, how technology is taking the soul out of music, how it used to be real but now it is all just copies, blah, blah, bloody blah.
Today is no different.
Before you object that today is different because of the scale or pace of change, because according to Deezer more than a third of all music being uploaded today is AI generated, just recall how powerless black musicians felt in the 1950s when all of their popular releases were immediately copied by white musicians and then shamelessly released to the white market, at least an order of magnitude larger, with not a single cent of copyright paid. Today is not so different. Not great, but not different.
Musicians have always been financially exploited, any band will confirm this. You live in a squat while your manager drives around in a Rolls-Royce, not the other way around. Mary Spender, by no means a minor Youtuber musician, lost 12,000 GBP on her recent small tour of the UK. When Pink Floyd sacked Richard Wright and then had to hire him back as a jobbing musician, he was the only one who made money. Music is an industry in which everyone takes as much as they can get and the actual music is just the raw material that gets fed in at one end of the machinery.
If AI directs all the money people are paying for music into the pockets of the fat cats/tech bros (use whatever term suits your generation), then what’s new? Nothing.
What? You object, saying look at Taylor Swift and her billions, look at the Rolling Stones in their country mansions? Fine, just remember that there is a single factory in Indonesia that churns out over a million guitars each year. That’s a lot of new musicians every year, one factory.
So maybe now you will say but not everyone wants to be Taylor Swift, and you are right. That’s actually one of the points I want to make: if you just love playing music, no one is stopping you, not AI, not a music public with different tastes, not a greedy industry, no one. You’re just as free to do what you want to do as a musician in the 1950s or the reign of Henry VIII, or a time when the best we could do was hit a stick against a hollow log. Only the neighbours object.
OK, but forget the money, what about creativity? That’s never been at threat the way it is today, surely? Well, before we get into a tizzy about this, let’s just reflect that some of our most creative and original actual musicians and artists have been fascinated by algorithmic approaches to their media for literally decades. Check out the program for the 1968 exhibition Cybernetics Serendipity - it covered both music and art. So, there is a long history of how workers in several creative media have striven to remove the human from the artistic decision-making process. Why? Because creativity is a process of discovery, of finding out what happens, of trying to dispense with what you’ve done before and find a new way. There’s a popular notion of creativity as a process of ‘inspiration’, as if it channels something from the supernatural or spiritual world, but if you actually listen to what creative people actually say when describing how they work, I think you will see that there is more to it than that. It hinges on discovery. It is curiosity-driven. It is an urge that runs deeper than any tool. Creative people simply create. That’s how the adjective gets applied. Take away their paints, and they will scratch patterns in rock. Take away their guitars, and they will drum on the table. Give them a new tool and they will play with it. And what is AI music if not a new tool?
Right, but not everyone wants to remove all trace of human touch from art, you might say. Of course, and that just shows how things have evolved since the late 1960s; nowadays generated art can be indistinguishable from the fruits of our labour, that’s what we seem to be aiming for, today. And we are almost there. Or if not today, then give it another year. In that sense, it’s actually getting better, fast.
So, finally, we get to the point of asking: what on earth is at the root of the panic about AI music?
It can’t be the new financial model - it’s hardly any worse than the previous ones.
It can’t be the death of music - that’s been greatly exaggerated.
It can’t be the loss of creativity - that will remain as long as humans exist, and perhaps even longer.
So what is it?
Fear of change.
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, I think the most used term I have in my life and uttered in recent years more and more (so of course also long for this AI thingisch)
