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I don't think I fully understand what you're getting at here. I mean I get the idea that record companies always had the option of hiring studio musicians to churn out whatever, but the effective cost to produce and distribute that kind of thing was never zero, the way it is now.
Get some random band together, put them in a studio, let them work for weeks, and if it sucks you're out "only" low five figures? What kind of Stone Age shit is that? Your competition is a guy with a laptop, his product is basically indistinguishably as good as yours at this point, and oh yeah he has no expenses, can never go out of business, and there are endless thousands of him.
If you're a record executive who has been given a 1 million dollar budget to develop an artist that the label expects to have a hit, what do you think is the better strategy?
Scout someone whom you think has potential and spend the 1 million signing, recording, and promoting them.
Sign 100 bands more or less at random and spend $10,000 signing and recording them, and just release the music and hope it promotes itself. You're going to pay them up front for the rights to the recordings so they're just making an album for hire and aren't under contract, and you won't even bother to keep their phone numbers. What they record now is it.
The artist you spent the whole million on might make the money back and might not, but the chances of that happening are much better than assuming that one of the hundred albums you just threw into the market with no promotion is going to be a big enough hit to recoup the costs of all the others is practically zero. The calculus doesn't get any better if you can record 200 artists for $5,000 apiece, or 400 for $2,500 apiece. At that level of investment it's akin to a lottery, and lotteries don't become better investments just because the price of tickets is cheaper. It's actually worse than a lottery because at least the lottery has calculable odds and a guaranteed winning number.
Acquiring the rights to potentially popular music and gambling on it in the form of promotional dollars will remain a viable business model, but that's really all we're talking about here. The "record company" of X years from now may well be one guy with a squad of AI agents trying to get his hookiest AI songs into the right TikTok cat videos.
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Yes it was, because people were willing to do it for free and studio space has also been available for free for decades.
Distribution became free at least 15 years ago and well before AI.
The thing that has been in limited supply is attention and interest, and that been true for like 50 years at least.
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Maybe the point is that in making the next Taylor Swift probably 0.1% spend is on music (regardless of whether AI or human made) and 99.9% is on marketing, both standard and native.
Even for a mega artist like Taylor Swift, that's not entirely true. Marketing is certainly part of it, but there's a lot more that goes into it. Even if you cynically assume that pop stars are all marketing and no substance, labels pay a lot of attention to what gets released. The reason that people like 2Pac seem to have immortality is because they all record a lot more than the record company is willing to release, especially with pop musicians who use outside songwriters. If it were simply a matter of spamming the market with material then they either wouldn't record as much (to save money), or release everything they did record (to maximize revenue). The reason they don't do this is because they need to maintain a certain quality standard and avoid saturating the market. In the 50s and 60s artists were required to put out several ten song albums per year. By the end of the sixties, release schedules slackened, and by the 80s an album a year pace was considered pretty good. Now they can go years between releases, and this isn't due to lack of material in most cases; those 50s releases included a lot of filler.
So yes, they are paying attention to the music, and AI doesn't allow one to pay any attention to the music, especially when it's made by people with no musical experience. It's just spamming in hope they can make more money than they spend, with little control over the content. And marketing includes a lot more than what one typically thinks of as marketing. It includes touring, arranging press interviews, making sure critics review the album, making public appearances, having ins with radio stations, and all of that.
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I don't claim to know how it's all going to shake out, but Joe Blow on his laptop doesn't really need to create the next Taylor Swift, does he? He just needs to capture a non-zero amount of the Music Dollars that exist in exchange for his investment of literally nothing. Once that's possible, and it seems like we're there already and only getting better, the fact that an endless supply of Joe Blows exist pretty much guarantees serious disruption in the long term.
Or maybe not, who knows, right? But when I see someone post something that sounds a lot like "sure this technology makes (thing) for free but it doesn't really suit how the (thing) industry works" my gut says that's it's the industry that's going to have to cope.
Some people capturing a non-zero amount of the market doesn't equate to upending the market to the point that it has to cope. Slop has always accounted for a non-zero amount of the market.
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