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Looks like AI Music is having its ChatGPT moment: https://app.suno.ai/
Lyrics, long (2-minute) songs, different languages, quite high quality. If you're too lazy to write your own lyrics ChatGPT will do it for you, which gives it the whiff of terminal genericness. My personal favourites:
Bean Soup: https://app.suno.ai/song/524dd0c0-c4e3-4c94-9968-aaa7c93c6fbc
LOOK MOM I AM A MUSICIAN!!!: https://app.suno.ai/song/aada88a3-9d7f-422a-843d-2a544379d059
You could take this and just slap it in a game I reckon - not the greatest video game OST of all time but perfectly decent: https://app.suno.ai/song/4c95e7de-8d99-4db0-af7d-922c274569bd
Per their terms of use, you fully own anything you make if you made it while you have their 10 dollar subscription. I think a lot of people lose work over this.
The question of whether and where composers lose their jobs is more about status than cost or automation. As with, say, pilots and running an air route, their labor cost is a relatively minimal part of the product. Already, developers often spend much more on music than they have to, eg. hiring symphony orchestras to record their soundtrack on Abbey Road when the gap between that recording and a well-produced synthetic track with modern tech will be extremely minimal and won’t matter to pretty much any players.
It reminds me of the discussion we were having last week where it turns out that most businesses aren’t actually run in the interests of shareholders, something as true for a local mom-and-pop store as it is for Google and Citigroup. Shareholder influence often rarely even asserts itself, these are places that exist primarily to support their own internal hierarchy, their employees who actually operate the machine.
Sadly, I think the artists lose this one.
Businesses like Google with huge moats can be run as private fiefdoms. But businesses that are disrupted end up having to compete on cost. Look what's happened to newspapers.
Most older consumers still get their music from Spotify or the radio. I think incumbents will continue to do well here. Probably AI music will get locked out of the market.
But my understanding is that younger consumers get most of their music from TikTok. When human artists have to compete with AI in an algorithmic feed, they will lose. Human artists can only produce so much. AI can throw infinite spaghetti at the wall to find what sticks. The best earworms will get amplified by the algorithm.
At some point, these earworms will be attached to a real-life human group (like a KPop group today), and the real-life humans will tour, dance, and sing the AI song. Some groups will get really big. People will pay thousands of dollars to watch them live, holding their device aloft to capture the moment for posterity.
There will still be a small market for real human artists. It will be similar to how there are still horse-drawn carriages today, a quaint relic of a simpler time.
Probably bigger than that. Music is already a "winner take all" kind of market, with most of the money going to those on top, many of whom already don't write and produce their own work. Replacing the "back office" with an AI changes little.
In the rest of the market, people are more likely to care that there's a human making the music rather than just that it sounds good. Can't wait for the scandals that reveal a particular musician has actually been ai generating his tracks though.
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