Quick update that vinyl sales have increased 5-10% year over year in the last 10 years. New record stores are opening up where I live. Not closing them.
Someone made a joke about printing presses earlier. I know someone who works at one and they are slammed with business. They work overtime a lot due to so much demand.
So sometimes this is just understanding the market you want to be in and the options you have. If we were all releasing pop music it would be a different model involving a lot of touring. But underground music is about finding your niche and focusing on that.
Everything I release (if itās ever even remotely noteworthy) will be on YouTube within days. Those who fret over physical media are well catered for. Iām not thinking weāll go exclusively physical, just making the physical side of it something that is interesting and thought through and worth doing, rather than just trading on nostalgia and getting others to do the dirty work.
I donāt see this as us Vs AI, I see it as AI creating a situation where the current status quo of all of us posting our shit into the ether becomes even more pointless than it already is, so we either adapt or move on.
Everyone else can do whatever they want, AI or otherwise. Iām looking into doing things differently to how Iāve been doing it the last few years and I think I can take a few people with me maybe, see if we canāt do some interesting things using whatās left of our hands and minds.
There is not but you miss the point. How many actually will? Probably not that many, itās disposable music. Do you listen to ai music? Know anyone that does? No.
How many labels are going to invest in putting ai music on physical media? Itās going to be a very small amount since no one will buy it. Selling records means actually leaving your house and being involved in a scene. It requires human interaction. Robots canāt do that last time I checked.
There is no clean cut solution but for me streaming aināt it anymore. If it works for you, cool. A lot of djs still spin vinyl and a lot of people listen to it in the genres i release in. Maybe not the case for you.
Iām not getting involved in anymore Ai discussions here but have to correct you here.
Ai tracks have already reached no1 on Spotify and in countries like Germany has charted. Dont believe me. Check.
It might not be apparent on this forum, but I think the bulk of the population donāt really care where music comes from.
This is probably pessimistic, but - with strategies like Spotifyās - numbers a likely to buy in AI music in the future.
This being said, as long as there will be a group of interesting people to be interested in flawed human music, itās not too much of a problem for me, weāll stick together
AI is another chance for us to decouple independent and underground music from under the boot of corporate distribution and consumption machinery.
Thereās a reason there hasnāt been anything really new and interesting since Grime got co-opted (maybe with the exception of Hitāem, but jokes like that run out of steam fast).
By piggybacking on their distribution and hosting services, we become both dependent on them psychologically and we begin to see ourselves as part a bigger industry. We stop taking risks for fear of losing some sort of relevance in the system. We start bending our vision to meet streaming criteria, diluting our purpose and humiliating ourselves for nothing.
Weāre not part of their industry, they only let us on there so they could harvest our ideas. Theyāve done that now, so theyāve no use for us anymore.
Donāt mourn it, use it as motivation to get things going your own way.
Who gives a fuck how many AI songs are in the top 40? Are any of us ever gonna be in the top 40?
Weāre not even on the same planet as most of this shit, so we should stop trying to be.
Thereās a million fucking humans that can do better than me at this shit, and yet still I shift a few units and make a few fans. Why should fucking AI trouble me?
The advent of AI music is great. It will become so overused, overwhelming, and oversaturated that the next wave of human luddites with be begging for analog copies of your 5 hour improvised techno jams and your dusty boom bap ballads.
Iāll still be plugging away trying to make a damn boom bap beat I actually like.
Until the swarms of AI micro death drones are released from the secret underground government black sites and decimate the human population.
People fear change, jobs are created and jobs are lost, AI is a tool, like any other. The combine harvester, photography, the computer, and now AI. Suggesting it should be banned is absurd. Perhaps the most relevant example of this phenomenon for this audience:
Musicians feared drum machines from their invention, with early unions like the Musiciansā Union and the American Association of Musicians raising concerns about job loss. The first drum machines, like the Chamberlin Rhythmate in the 1940s and the Wurlitzer Sideman in 1959, were met with a backlash from musicians who worried the technology would replace their roles.
i think the main difference that worries people is who is making the tool and the reasons why they are. i dont think the guy making the combine harvester was looking to milk the entire world for their most valuable asset or preparing an earth escape plan, or selling penny stocks (crypto) a few years before co-opting the farming industry.
The inventors of all those didnāt get to wholesale steal the prior art to create the new useful thing. AI at its heart is a plagiarism machine that the new robber barons have no intention of paying the creators they are stealing from to fuel their LLM engines into existence
I think that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works and what it is. Itās no more plagiarising prior works than I am by listening to music and creating my own.
That aside I think that these conversations always focus far too heavily on the negative.
AI as a tool will (literally) help save lives and make countless lives easier. Will it also change the job landscape? Quite probably - but every technological advancement does and there are always people at the top of the ladder that take advantage of that fact. But hereās the thing - rich people make money because poorer people spend it - for them to spend it they need to have some too. The wholesale collapse of the economy benefits nobody.
If AI is what brings us a bit closer to UBI then Iād see that as a win, personally. Protecting jobs that can be easily automated makes no more sense today than it did 125 years ago when we started building factories, and the people that benefit from it the most (in addition to the employer class) are those that fear it the most.
Is some fear natural? Of course - but enough with the doomsaying already, itās tiring. AI isnāt going to stop you making art, and it isnāt going to prevent you from enjoying it either.
i think we are talking about different things. Consumer Aimed AI (music AI, stock trading AI, AI assistants built into consumer products) is 100% grifting scam drivel. yes, there are legitimate purposes for AI, but the models that are going to identify a hidden cancer cell or whatever they look for isnt going to be scraping every speck of data they can vacuum up to do so. the day the AI companies start funneling their energy into life saving applications will be the day i stop assuming they are all evil
not to mention the whole āwe dont actually know whats going on in there but we hope it works outā philosophy is pretty dumb
The response will probably be āthe user plagiarised by uploading protected contentā.
But it does expose how suno (and any subsequent popular audio llm system) works, and flimsy their copyright system is. All audio thatās been allowed to slip through we can assume is now part of its training dataset.
I canāt believe PRS/distribution havenāt cosied up with suno, both to protect artists but also thereās potentially mad bank to be made if artists get a % if their data is used. But it would inevitably end up Spotify 0.000002% levels of return.
One slight caveat to this is that, in the whacky world of emerging tech, rich people tend to make a lot of money off of the even richer people/organizations who invest in them. Too many startups are just pump-and-dump schemes with extra steps.
This is why my biggest near-term concern re: AI is the potential financial bubble being created through incestuous investments and inflated valuations among chips manufacturers and tech companies. Lots of money being passed around, lots of hype, unclear how itāll all turn out.
Long term, I believe the value of human creativity will endure. I think we are unique and complex in how we express ourselves and how we interpret each other. Storytelling and music-making is in our DNA. āAt first glance, the human brain is ticking all the boxesā¦ā
Rich people make money because less rich people spend it on crap they need poor people to make.
People who talk about job landscapes donāt remember the 80s, havenāt been to the Welsh Valleys or the Yorkshire pit towns.
You all talk about these massive job losses like they donāt still have a massive social and economic legacy. Probably because these losses generally happen to the sort of people you donāt spend much time around or even really know about at all.
Letās see how much you enjoy your market correction when it takes all your nice little corporate middle management jobs. Letās see how Tunbridge Wells puts up with itās own version of Orgreave.
All this is bollocks though. Weāve been trying to replace my (we assumed) very AI friendly role with AI for a while now. Problem is, we want to deliver a quality service and all the AI models weāve tried just canāt be trusted to do the job properly every time. But most of our competitors jumped on the bandwagon a while ago, and all any of our customers do is complain about how shite their service isā¦
I reckon you suits are safer than you think. Time to give Barry Island a go for your holidays, see how the other half live for a bit, just in caseā¦
