That's fine until, for example and by analogy, you go to the store to buy beer, and you don't particularly care for IPA, but IPAs have crowded out half the beers that used to be there including the one you used to sit back and enjoy.
The problem with that approach is when what people like impacts other people negatively. If your habits don’t make things worse for others, have at it!
This is actually the definition of competition. You are just being drowned by AI music so no one can discover your music. Steam had the same issue years ago with asset flips drowning out the discoverability of actual titles and they implemented many curating tools to help resolve the issue. Acting like AI music isn't having a similar effort on genuine musicians is just playing dumb.
as a musician, the internet has made it that there already is a shit ton of competition. AI will make it worse sure, but it was already a 'problem' and never going to be solved.
The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
once they have an audience - who cares about competition?
The hardest pill to swallow as a musician is that despite everyone who ever listened to you telling you you're great, despite being in a band and playing shows, despite maybe even selling some merch...if you are not in the top 1%, you probably will never even get chance to play a show that might put you on someone meaningful's radar.
> The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
That applies to people spamming AI slop too.
People are right to complain about spammers.
Platforms are right to try to stop spam, even though everyone knows that spam is a problem that is never going be solved.
> Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
Live shows, by their nature, have almost zero reach. A performance for 40 people takes place once in a single location at a specific time and then it's over. You're either there when it happens or you missed it. A song on youtube or bandcamp can be heard by millions quickly over a few weeks or gradually over years. Social media was a massive boon for musicians.
Sadly, it will get substantially harder to grow a following on tiktok or any other social media platform if those platforms are flooded with AI generated garbage. Real artists will be harder to find. Anyone doing anything new will be drowned out by AI regurgitating everything old. When creative people can't succeed, the creativity they'd inspire in others is lost and everything stagnates.
In order to find the stuff to listen to you have to... find it. If you had to wade through, say, 1 million AI generated books to find one that isn't, then ALL of your reading would be AI generated.
Yet your argument is deeply flawed too. Flooding the market with slop makes it much more difficult to discover genuine, quality, art from smaller creators.
Spotify has a history of intentionally boosting internally produced, royalty-free and/or AI music over actual artists.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
That article is bandied around, and no one either reads or understands what's written there. Neither do article authors BTW.
1. Spotify doesn't have "internally produced music"
2. There are companies that provide white-label ambient/white noise/similar music.
3. Spotify may have preferential licensing deals with some of them (as any company would seek preferential contract terms)
4. Some of that music is generated (AI or otherwise)
Preferential contracts to AI-gen music makers is equivalent to "internally produced music" in my mind, even though they're not technically equivalent.
`==` vs. `===` essentially
> You're just mad that people actually like AI music.
Yes, I am! I'm also mad that people like shitty over-produced pop, though (including me sometimes), so what can you do. Life is shit.
Let people enjoy what they like. It makes it easier to just sit back and enjoy what you like.
That's fine until, for example and by analogy, you go to the store to buy beer, and you don't particularly care for IPA, but IPAs have crowded out half the beers that used to be there including the one you used to sit back and enjoy.
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The problem with that approach is when what people like impacts other people negatively. If your habits don’t make things worse for others, have at it!
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Oh I do! But I'm also a (failed) musician so a bit bitter (lol). Still do it for fun, though!
Curation is a real concern. 'Flooding the market' is bad for everyone, being seen is difficult as is. It's even harder in a slopstorm.
Is this not the constant state of the world? A technology floods a market, the market finds a) the price floor and b) ways to curate
If you’re a producer in that zone, you adapt or get minimized.
This is actually the definition of competition. You are just being drowned by AI music so no one can discover your music. Steam had the same issue years ago with asset flips drowning out the discoverability of actual titles and they implemented many curating tools to help resolve the issue. Acting like AI music isn't having a similar effort on genuine musicians is just playing dumb.
as a musician, the internet has made it that there already is a shit ton of competition. AI will make it worse sure, but it was already a 'problem' and never going to be solved.
The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
once they have an audience - who cares about competition?
The hardest pill to swallow as a musician is that despite everyone who ever listened to you telling you you're great, despite being in a band and playing shows, despite maybe even selling some merch...if you are not in the top 1%, you probably will never even get chance to play a show that might put you on someone meaningful's radar.
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> The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
That applies to people spamming AI slop too. People are right to complain about spammers. Platforms are right to try to stop spam, even though everyone knows that spam is a problem that is never going be solved.
> Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
Live shows, by their nature, have almost zero reach. A performance for 40 people takes place once in a single location at a specific time and then it's over. You're either there when it happens or you missed it. A song on youtube or bandcamp can be heard by millions quickly over a few weeks or gradually over years. Social media was a massive boon for musicians.
Sadly, it will get substantially harder to grow a following on tiktok or any other social media platform if those platforms are flooded with AI generated garbage. Real artists will be harder to find. Anyone doing anything new will be drowned out by AI regurgitating everything old. When creative people can't succeed, the creativity they'd inspire in others is lost and everything stagnates.
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I feel that human artists as a class are more entitled to distribution than generated slop.
And decisions like Bandcamp's above reflects essentially the same view.
if no one wants the slop, then its not competition. the problem is that people do actually want the slop and artists are mad about it.
That's not how discoverability works. If it becomes too much of a chore to sort through the swamp people will often just opt for whatever is popular.
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Many people don't care because it sounds like music.
It sounds like music, because it was generated by a model that was trained on actual music.
It is music that has been chewed up and regurgitated. It provides no benefit to the actual artists whose music fed that model.
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I have not met a single person offline who wants more AI music
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but people do want it. people who listen to top 40 want slop. most people want slop
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In order to find the stuff to listen to you have to... find it. If you had to wade through, say, 1 million AI generated books to find one that isn't, then ALL of your reading would be AI generated.
A sufficient proportion of junk can cause a market to fail, taking down "legitimate" or "quality" purveyors.
Yet your argument is deeply flawed too. Flooding the market with slop makes it much more difficult to discover genuine, quality, art from smaller creators.
ad hominem has no place on HN.
The market was already flooded 20 years ago.
Your biggest competition as musician is not AI or any new music it’s the music released in the last 50 years.
I predict that slop won’t significantly change the game - which was already rigged against new (and good) artists when I was a little baby