I've been thinking about this for a month or two now, and there is still a lot to process (obviously). In a way for us musicians and producers, it feels like a "pencils down" moment... The teacher looks at the clock, stops everyone, and we all have to hand in our work, wherever we are at. We either wrote good/recorded songs that made a splash, or we are now going to drown in the sea of auto-produced stuff that people are about to unleash on the world of music consumption. The reality we are about to witness is one where disposable songs are literally created on the spot by an app for an ephemeral job posting, a birthday wish, or tomorrow morning's alarm clock sound... And then maybe never played or heard again. The value of a song is on a different level altogether, one that is hard to relate to... And it seems unlikely we will ever live again in a world where so-called "classics" are made, or at least where everyone agrees on them as such. The quest of breaking the barriers of producing great music, something that I have literally been training half my life to do, is over. The barrier doesn't exist anymore, for anyone.
That's kind of a bleak outlook. But there's another side to this. The fact that music making will now be a fully democratized commodity actually secretly elevates some particular aspects of music making. Consider the fact that making music without AI (especially weird stuff that is really outside the bounds of what AI is good at), will now be at a premium. Humans will remember, and even seek out stuff that exists outside the norm. We can think of the New Wave movement, in the early-mid 80's, as being sort of an analogous shift. The LinnDrum was invented, MIDI, tons of studio automations... All of a sudden, there was a new sound and it was extremely low cost / high margin. The big labels pushed it hard and it found its way to saturation, which led to... The punk music movement. This direct response was the antithesis of all that. It rewarded grass roots, real instruments, garage sound, edgy lyrics, people working their asses off without a $1M advance, just for the love of the craft.
If you carry that out, it's believable that people are still going to look toward bands and songs that are outside AI in some way. I'm not trying to be a luddite here - being an AI collaborative band is something that will be very interesting (and, as far as I know, still yet to be any sort of a Zeitgeist), but the thing people will latch onto is: "this doesn't sound like AI!"... Specifically, once everyone has access to make and (knowingly) hear generated music, it will immediately follow that real people, w/ real instruments, shot on real video cameras - making real music that is catchy and says something meaningful - will be held in higher regard because of the scarcity laws. Mistakes, imperfections, even un-exciting, monotonous aspects of a song being allowed... flies in the face of everything I have seen in generated music thus far. It will stick out like a sore dick in a whorehouse, and "no news is bad news".
I really like the idea of the hybrid approach. Write music from the heart, use AI to complement your skill set, create something that transcends, and be transparent about how you did it. People love to know the process. One of the things I have enjoyed the most about my friends playing with Suno is when all of the inputs are disclosed ("I made a recording this way, used a click, slider 1 at 25%, added style cues of blues + 4 on the floor backbeat, added lyric corrections", etc.). The only thing greater than people's hate for being deceived is their love for being brought along for the ride of making a song. This is how some bands born on Youtube have gotten to be so big. They don't just make the music, they take you on the journey and share the human experience. At its core, making music is a very human experience, and that doesn't have to stop just because someone involved AI. I would love to watch a video where someone makes a great record using elegant, judicious applications of AI within the process. It's fair to say that, within our combined skills, we have decent musicianship, production, and to various extents, recording and mixing, but we lack in some areas like arrangement and repeatability. If we use AI to fill in that gap, but show how we used it to make a great song, then learn and play it for people and bring them joy, that's a win.
So far this year, the stock market seems to be headed towards rewarding companies that have defensibility against AI takeover, and I think this theme dovetails perfectly within the music regime.
No comments:
Post a Comment