I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form).
None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
I’ve been involved in one music project or another (bands, albums, solo projects, etc) for the past 25 years.
During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to make a record together. We labored over it for almost two years and finally “released it” on bandcamp to very little fanfare.
A few friends and family had nice things to say, and one random stranger reached out with positive feedback.
I get a monthly stream report from bandcamp, and it almost always says zero.
I am so pleased with this project and have such great memories of making the album that I had two lathe cut vinyl copies made (one for me, and one for my friend).
I put a big part of myself into the project and was able to convey ideas and feelings that I couldn’t express effectively via other methods.
I listen to the recording about once a year. It’s a part of me now, and I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it.
To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
If someone else feels something as a result of your work, that’s a nice bonus, but not something I focus on at all.
If you didn’t sink a career’s worth of time doing creative work professionally, then that’s a nice relationship to have with creative output. For a lot of people, AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission. Mortgages not paid, cancer not treated, birthday presents not purchased for your kids, dreams dashed… and then people telling you the real purpose of creative work ends when you expect it to be anything more than a hobby.
> To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
That's EXACTLY how I used to feel about creativity. I was an art major who didn't make it, and I found that expressing myself via my hobbies was good for the soul.
Then I almost died and completely lost interest in making art!
Facing my own mortality, I realized that the time I invest into my wife, kids and family will have a larger positive contribution on the world, I think.
I know that sounds like a Hallmark Card.
At the same time, I've often wondered what my life would look like if I appreciated my family MORE and my hobbies LESS when I was younger.
I've been asking myself this question in the last year:
> Why do I want to make music?
I picked a basic DJ controller and a midi controller bundled with Ableton. I'm a novice, but I love listening to music and dissecting what makes a good performance. I crave that feeling of getting chills when I find something new that moves me in new ways. This set was a pretty recent example:
That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
I resolved early on that I was never going to make a money doing this, which simplified things greatly. There's a primal part of our brain that craves adoration. I do wish for others to adore my music. Even if it's a handful of people. I do wish to perform publicly one day, even if it's at a park for passersby.
Mostly I just want something to move my brain in different ways. I want to create something beautiful.
I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).
The reality is, essentially nobody makes money by creating music. Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. A Taylor Swift impersonator would make no money singing the same songs. A cover band wouldn't do any better.
It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them. It's so paltry I don't really understand why authors are so concerned about copyright infringement.
People steal my copyrighted stuff all the time. I long ago stopped caring about it. But I do very much like Github as it protects me from others accusing me of stealing their code.
If you want to make money, you'll need a plan that does not require copyright protection.
You're not wasting your time, my friend. But you've got to be very certain and honest as to why you want to learn that.
If your goal is being heard and appreciated, well, you better reconsider.
If you're doing it for your own pleasure and pure love of art, absolutely do go on, without any expectations. It may or may not take off, but the samurai must not care.
Agree 100% with this and I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
In the past learning a skill and do something was mostly for pleasure, and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
Now internet gave us the opportunity to reach the whole world and that changed the expectations.
Can't agree with this more. I also started learning guitar and producing music very recently. I have no interest in getting heard and appreciated (on most days atleast).
It has been a tremendously rewarding journey to create new music and see myself improve. 10/10 would do again.
Walk into any library, book store, second hand shop or wherever they sell media. Look at the hundreds of thousands of book, albums, DVD and I wonder how many of those folks were doing it trying to make it big, grab attention or turn it into a career?
And that is a very VERY tiny slice of the entire pie. For everyone successful artist you find, there are hundreds or thousands that never got lucky or had the skills to make it. I put luck first deliberately.
A good example, based on the IBSN listings there are currently 158 million unique books. That is one unique book for every 53 people on the world, how many can you think of?
I love going to old book stores and pulling out something random, usually some paper back from the mid 60's/70's on a topic you probably never even thought of. How much time and effort went into writing that, editing, producing, marketing it? I look up the authors to if they ever made much of it all, about 99% of the time, their name doesn't turn anything up. Despite their published works, they could still be alive, they are already forgotten under the sheer volume of works out there.
There are TV shows I remember, they had whole crews working on it, actors, writers and producers. The only proof they exist online is about a paragraph or two, didn't even get a wiki page. To be appreciated by those close to you, that should be more than enough, but for some it has to be broader, I do not know why.
I think a part of it is that many people come into this world thinking it is a race. I say, IF and that is a very big if; if life is a race, it is a 100meter race and it doesn't matter what position you come in. Saunter your way, take the long way. And yet when you get to the finish line there are loads of people racing past mocking you and desperately trying to convince that "You think that is the finish line? Nah, this is marathon and the real goodies are there!". And so they keep running as fast as possible, wearing themselves out and getting exhausted to no end. The joke being that there is no other finish line.
You can be content in you, content in now. Just be chill... damn it!
Some people just never found what that thing is for them. And usually you find those things doing them the hard way while you suck. And then the reward is people will see what you do and recognize the work you put in. But if suddenly every person with a prompt does the exact same thing with zero effort, it does take away from the joy of doing it. At least if the joy of doing it is related to the feeling of liking to do "hard things" or liking to think of oneself as one that "does hard things". And I'd say that includes a lot of people and a lot of activities.
I bet a lot of accountants in the old days were really good at basic math, and proud of being fast and accurate and now there's calculators and the amount of people that work on mental math just for the love of the game is probably super small in comparison to when it was a core skill of many more people's jobs.
I’ve asked an artist if they should be worried about the newest generative AI capabilities. This is his (translated) response:
> Artists? Pencil laborers, more like.. I am in favor of using AI in visuals. It will eliminate a lot of mere decorators, and won’t even slightly affect the artists. I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers. Impressionism was born shortly after that. See, I believe many cursed photography, but Monet never saw it as a problem.
> I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers
I like this analogy. Maybe this time around is different, but I like to hope it's not.
What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it. It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply. A healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.
Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.
A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital. Or heck, even learning an instrument when MIDI was first introduced.
Even before generative AI, there is a long-going debate in audio circles around simulated guitar amplifiers. The truth is, the simulations of them have gotten so insanely good that now one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes.
My rule-of-thumb is this: "does this tool I'm using in particular take away from the authenticity of my performance or songwriting?" Example: I am very keen on performing vocals and guitar at the same time, and I don't have an expensive studio setup, and my office has background noise. I use these tools, and yes even some open source AI ones, 1) remove background noise of the individual tracks and 2) do a final master against a recording I want to target (using something like Matchering or similar [0]). It still sounds like me, my voice isn't perfect, my beat isn't consistent, but it sounds like I rented some studio space. So for me it was a cost-saving measure.
>> one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes
And this is actually a problem. Great art usually comes from constraints, real or artificial. These things are a lot of fun to tinker with (a really fun hobby) but one amp, one guitar, and a small number of effects pedals will probably lead to you actually make more and better stuff.
I know this is kind of at odds with this thread in general but
> but I know it requires work (...) to finish it
If you're like me and, when you get to this stage, you tend to burn out and abandon the thing, have you tried using gen AI to get you over that hump?
I love coding and still do but I often reached a point where all the fun, easy things were done and I'd be stuck at 90% with only difficult and boring tasks. I've been using Claude recently to just get me over that hump and finish my projects. It can still be fulfilling if you do it right.
Hey friend, if it helps, every “song” you make will eventually become a symbol and memory of a time in your life. It doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes these sounds have even more fidelity than text when it comes to capturing your emotional state and thoughts at the time. I didn’t realize that for a while but in retrospect all of the “it sounds bad” and “I didn’t finish it” didn’t matter
I love making music, and got into it as a venue to be away from the computer. I still do post-production in Ableton, but everything else happens with gear not even connected to a computer. I've tried to make music with a DAW, but it feels so sterile and boring, compared to actually using hardware to make it.
Maybe get a second-hand Novation Circuit to start with, or some similar "groovebox" that lets you make songs on one device, and see if you actually still do enjoy making music, yet haven't found the right process for you yet.
I don't think you're wasting your time, as long as you're having fun, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world. Sure, AI could probably make "better" (by some definition of "better") music than me, but AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
> AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
Can I ask how you share music with friends? I guess this is part of my problem, I don't really have anyone I could share with or collaborate with. The few people in my life don't listen to the type of music I like.
Maybe you could see if there's someone who finds the "not fun" part fun and you could collaborate with them. That would solve two problems at the same time.
Either way, I strongly encourage you to keep using a DAW if that brings you joy. Using AI to create art is a different skill set, just like using acoustic instruments is a different skill set from using either. Each option appeals a different amount to different people, and you should just do what brings you the most joy.
You have the answer to the "why do it" in the first part of "why you are doing it". Just because something may be created at the click of the button doesn't mean it fulfills the goals you are looking for. People knit even though there are machines that do that for you. You are doing it for you.
1. All that AI really does is a (partially) randomized exploration of the space that has been spanned by existing music. AI creativity, as far as it can be said to exist, is limited by this. You, on the other hand, are human and not bound by any of these limitations. You are free to explore wild things that no AI can do. Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments. Bang on random stuff that has a nice ring to it. Record background hums, apply filters and envelopes to them etc. And there are so many other ways to produce unique creations.
2. Most importantly, music is a form of human expression. It is able to capture the human condition in a unique way. As a human, you can express these things genuinely through your own emotions, experiences, memories etc. AI systems can only produce hollow facsimiles of this. Regardless of whether you are conscious about it, every piece of music that you create is a reflection of you: your thoughts, your emotions, your process. And that imparts the true value on your creations.
> Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments.
I'm not sure if you already knew this, but this is actually a thing already - it's been called "Botanica" and there are a bunch of cool tracks floating around.
I used to make a lot of music in FL, mostly beats. I would make beats similar to whatever I was listening to at the time, try to get a little weirder with it every time. Like making Memphis style beats with crushed drums and warped samples running through PS1 reverb until it's drowning. It was never for anyone, I would send my songs to my group chat with my buddies for feedback. Kind of fell off just because I got into other hobbies. It doesn't need to be for anyone else. A re-mix of a song I did got 2M on YouTube though, the real catharsis was beating the botted 300k views the shitty rapper from my grad class had though. That video is copyright struck so I don't make any money from it, but that was never the goal, I just uploaded so I could send my songs to the boys/listen on my phone to do the 'ol car test.
I just recently setup a very simple home recording studio after picking up drums again at 40. I had the same thoughts, but I'm going it for me and it is extremely therapeutic. Plus, given the genre (extreme metal), I've gotten into much better shape. (Also picked up an 8 string guitar. I never grew out of my edgelordiness. No real point to mentioning this but just wanted to tell someone :)
AI music may eventually satisfy the masses and you can't stop that speeding train, but the process of creating something yourself will always have value if it's something you're interested in creating.
I have done this with music, writing, and many other things. AI doesn’t make any of these things less enjoyable for me because the process of creation itself is the part that I enjoy.
I have a very low bar for what I consider to be a successful creation: it just needs to be enjoyable for myself in the future. Anyone else who happens to enjoy the content I make is a bonus. I have several songs on SoundCloud that I have produced in the past and I still enjoy listening to them.
There are still several avenues for this, and I imagine they'll continue to exist even in a mostly-AI-enhanced world. You'll need to dedicate time to finding them.
For example, Battle of the Bits [0] is a community all about chiptune music. I'm sure you _could_ use AI to help you learn and produce some things, but the community is mostly about sharing ideas about what works at the electronic level, so even if AI became super capable, it wouldn't help you engage with the community in any meaningful way. There are several such communities across different domains and I imagine they aren't going anywhere anytime soon, regardless of how much improvement happens w.r.t. AI, since the focus is on "what you learned" and not so much "what you did".
Similarly, I have seen communities focused entirely on Silicon Graphics workstations, or pc-98 internals. Human passion-based communities aren't going anywhere, Google just makes it incredibly hard to find them outside of word-of-mouth.
> Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
This is the reason why a lot of us make music. Writing orchestral pieces is my own meditation. I don't share most of them, and replacing them with AI would defeat the purpose.
Please keep learning it! The world needs more musicians, even if we never hear them.
Art is a form of communication. You turn to the arts when the other methods to communicate something either do not feel as if they fit, or feel that they will not encompass the idea you wish to convey. Art is a dialogue with other people, not a commodity. The point is to help yourself understand what you want to say, not to say something that is valuable in way that can be exchanged for goods.
So do not become discouraged by the machine generated sounds. They are only sounds, not a message.
It's not a waste of time. Every time some new thing comes out and becomes popular, everyone everywhere says everything must be that thing because it's the future. In America, everyone wanted pure white sliced bread. People wanted frozen TV dinners. People wanted chain fast food restaurants. People wanted no effort reality TV. People wanted endless superhero movies.
Now people want actual food and they want stuff made with human hands and they want to know what's in it. People want TV shows with a proper story. People are beyond done with cookie cutter superhero movies.
The slop wave is going to pass. AI can make stuff that sounds super polished and perfect, but people will want the rough and crude touch of something hand made. They'll want to see videos of musicians showing behind the scenes of how they made something. They'll want to go and see a musician perform. Interest in 100% AI generated music will fade into the background and it'll be relegated to soulless Muzak used for ambiance in soulless chain restaurants too cheap to pay for actual music and too afraid to play any songs that might offend or annoy someone.
If you do it for money it is maybe a waste of time, because the chance to win the race were already low and now you have to compete with a tsunami of AI generated music. If you do it for your enjoyment, nothing changed and nothing will change
I'm having fun building elaborate software that meets my needs precisely and nobody else's. I mean, maybe it would meet other's needs but that production would take away from the fun and learning I have building it, and would also reduce its utility for me personally.
What about finding game creators or similar who could make use of a musical collaborator. Your music gains an extra purpose, you mix with other creatives and those others get their soundtrack sorted before they head to Suno as the easy option.
don't sell your work short. it has value because it comes from you, and struggling to finish is unbelievably common in the creation process - not to mention frustration and a lack of joy.
if you're creating because you feel a drive to create, you are making art and that has intrinsic value to yourself and others. if however you are performing the act of musical creation as a means to an end, what you are doing may be better considered work and not art. the work of others can also be appreciated but it is different.
keep at it though. you are asking good questions and unlike many you are also personally engaging with them.
1. None of this should matter if you do it because it’s therapeutic.
2. If it turns out it’s not therapeutic for you, try something different. Play piano. Learn chess. Learn MMA. Go for a run. Heck, vibecode something silly. Music production is not the only way, if you have it a good try and it just frustrates you, try something else.
Just pick up your instrument and make some noise. DAWs are time sinks.
Music is about the “feel” first and foremost. Playing music on a physical instrument or singing is a feel thing.
DAWs are tools for polishing what was created with feeling into something “produced”. If that’s what you want to end up with, that’s ok. Just be clear with yourself on which you’re trying to do.
I had this exact realization. Taking chords from a chord progression generator, putting it into FL studio, adding a random melody that stays in the key from a cool synth preset, some random drum loop, and end result? I guess it could be called music. Its a combination of sounds that doesnt sound actively bad.
I noticed the problem when I realized I couldn't make music in a specific mood or genre. Sometimes I'd finish my song and think "oh wow, a happy rock song" or "a sad edm song" or whatever but it was always just random chance where I ended up. With music theory knowledge I could always add more instruments or notes that could exist in that place but with 0 direction, whatever I made was always listenable but never more than that.
I'd wager most people who make music are making it for the sheer joy of expression. Like .001% of people who make music get any kind of meaningful monetary return on it, and I think anyone who goes into it looking for monetary return is doing it for the wrong reasons. In my view, AI changes nothing where it matters it music.
For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand, most instruments cost a significant amount of money. Learning it properly is even more important and expensive - fixing something in a DAW is easy, unlearning muscle memory is much harder.
Keeping up said muscle memory also isn't easy. Sure, if you got a free-standing house, no one will care much about a drum set, trumpet or whatever. But most people don't have that luxury in urban sets any more, and typical residential building quality makes even some electronic instruments (e.g. kicks still cause some amount of noise passing through floors) a challenge. Building noise ordnances / HOA rules are a bitch on top of that - most allow only a limited time window in the afternoon, useless for working-class people.
Local community groups... if your community has one, and they have some studio space where noise doesn't matter, great! Most, unfortunately, don't - space in urban environments is already rare and at a hefty premium, space that accepts noise and has adequate resources (in practice: a usable toilet is the most important) is even rarer.
I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.
Fear not, a few of us are building in the direction you're hoping. Leveraging AI to make it easier to stay in a creative headspace with music rather than getting caught in a spreadsheet with endless settings
Sharing is definitely a core part of "why do it", but that can be sharing with friends/family or a living room performance
I have little interest in doing a DJ set in public but I'll spend hours crate digging for new music and mixing circular black slabs of vinyl for nothing more than the love of the craft.
I have ~40 demoes from a music career that never took off. Now I am feeding little Suno with this demoes, turning them into afrobeat with oboe, deep house with harmonica, etc, and reliving the creative joy.
You can make a decent demo in a DAW and run it through AI for a nice production. The art of writing songs is still equally hard IMO. And a good song is still good, no matter what costume it wears.
It's worth doing. Those "no AI" mixes on youtube are doing great, though the vast majority of people is clueless and will happily digest any slop.
Create for yourself, and for those that seek the human effort and passion. There's an increasing number of us.
I'm the biggest doomer on this site, yet I'm certain human art will become even more valuable, and appreciated, than it has ever been before in history. Just don't expect to make billions out of it, or to reach out to the masses that are quite content with industrial-scale mediocrity.
>I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
That's true of 99% of very polished finished work too. Amazing bands and artists in Spotify with sub 1000 streams/month.
>None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
Absolutely. One big concern is that even if you do it and you're proud of it, many will think it's AI anyway.
Plus the over-inflation of AI generated shit. It could all die in a fire.
You are clearly just at the beginning of your musical journey. I am happy for you. Yes, music for me too makes no sense without other people. This means, I suggest, that you must go out and find other people to collaborate with. The more you do it the more you realize just how many people out there are in the same boat as you. And once you find that right person or group, it’s like nothing else. And let’s be clear, this will take you far far outside your normal social circle. The type of people who like the same music as you may be completely different in every other way. It is important to actively seek out the right people and along that journey, define exactly what that person is, as well as who you are. This is the thing I care most about and yes I hope that more tools, AI or not come out to reduce that work that you have to do to make something polished, so everyone can focus on being creative.
> I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way
Well... play in band/orchestra ? You get to meet people, interact with them, build with them, etc.
I've been making music solo using various machines and computers all my life and I love it, but it's probably not for everyone. Yes, you're alone. Yes, (almost) nobody cares, so if you can't enjoy the process there is no point really.
() from time to time someone will show some interest but let's face it: there's just too much good music released everyday, competing with other distractions for the attention of the people.
For people like me, AI doesn't change much, it's another tool. We've been abusing technology in music for decades.
Learn an instrument (guitar,keys,drums...) if you haven't already and go jam with friends and do concerts instead. That's the best part of making music.
The age of music production is almost over, the age of the music industry already is.
I wouldn't want to be in the DAW/VST business today though, because a lot of potential customers are thinking exactly as you do...
I recently wrote more or less this exact comment on another platform recently (although I've been making music for a while).
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.
Mhm... it sounds like the main problem is that you like the result more than the actual process.
If you start a new hobby, you should enjoy the time you spend doing it. Of course, every hobby has its chores or tedious parts, but doing it just for the end product or for the validation you get from others will never work in the long run.
> I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
If you enjoy the process and its outcomes, then it's not a waste of time. If you are forcing yourself to do it or have another motivation for it that is not rooted in genuine interest, then yes, you are wasting your time.
> I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent
This is a spiritual question, so you will have as many answers as there are askers. I found my answer and am happy to share it with you. Why do it? Because I want to. What is worth doing? What I want to do or what gets me to the things I want. Wanting is a very important process, that is often damaged by conditioning. We are told that some things we want are bad and that some things we don't want are good. Or that ego is evil. So many ways this process can go wrong. I think fixing this in oneself is part of becoming an actual adult. Once you know what you want and what you don't want, you no longer are dependent on others telling you what to do or forcing you to do things you shouldn't be doing. Ego is not evil, it's there for a reason. Some people have an overgrown one while others have an underdeveloped one. What is needed is balance. I don't think the pattern recognition machine has anything to do with it. I suspect, that a lot of people who use music as a band aid for personal problems, i.e. people who build their identity around being special due to music making, are the ones who are afraid of AI, but if you just enjoy making music, then what does it matter if music itself is patterned and if a machine can exploit that? It doesn't take anything away from the joy of making music, if you experience it in the first place.
I need to force myself to do almost everything. Simply saying it's a waste of time because of that isn't practical unless I give up on life entirely.
In practice, it's not binary. I'm interested because I want to make music similar to that which I like listening to.
Sometimes I get enjoyment out of it, but sometimes I lose interest maybe because I'm facing a frustration.
My question of wasting time is connected to "can I even create something worth listening to". If nothing I could make is worth listening to, then I guess I would feel the process of creation is pointless.
I've heard others write about how what they produce is worth listening to, to them. I think that is enough, but I also think I lack confidence in my own judgement. Almost like I need someone else to confirm my validity. I have recognized that as a result of emotional neglect, but I haven't figured out how to fix it.
The not-fun work isn’t on the song, it’s on you. Improving the song is a byproduct. This only really becomes apparent over time but you’ll realise you were working on yourself all along.
It depends what you want to get out of it, and what you think art itself really is.
If it's nothing but an end product, that needs to fit a specific aesthetic, with a specific sound, then I probably agree. AI is making that "pointless" in a way.
Almost everyone I know who's been an artist for years though, has come to a similar realization: What you set out to create, and what it turns into through the process of creating it are different things. The meaning, truly is found along the way.
You can always be better, there's always more to learn. Nothing is ever truly perfect, or "complete"
If you write harmony, there's always a different way it could be written, that might fit better, or be more interesting. If you do sound design, whether that's with getting different guitar tones, synth programming, unique recording techniques, there's always more to learn, or a different way to approach it.
If the only point is an end result, then AI can deliver a simulacra of that.
For everyone I know that loves music, or working with DAWs, the end result is an ever shifting target as you learn more, and understand music in a different way.
Ultimately, there are no shortcuts to making something new, because the practice of trying to make things is what results in what your art becomes. Tools and technology can shape what that thing ends up being, but they (traditionally) don't replace the process of creating it, and the feedback loop between who you are and the decisions you make along the way.
Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
Some people seem to compare this to sampling, but anyone who's ever actually worked with sampling in a creative way will realize how hollow that comparison is. Almost all good sampling still requires a good deal of active feedback, between the person working with it and the way THEY hear what's going on.
Remove the person from that loop, replace the decisions with a general vague notion, and you end up with something that sounds "like" music, but that feedback loop is broken.
I see the same thing with all the AI UI design that's coming out. It's all generally quite competent, and exactly the same. Great for a business tool, where maybe the velocity and an acceptable MVP is the only point, but terrible for actual design and novel thought.
TL;dr: Why do it? Because you want to, and you think that with enough time engaging with something you'll change, just as it does, and the result isn't something you could have ever predicted when you started. It changes you, and that's the point. Just like learning an instrument, or learning to code. It's not purely about the produced result, and that very result fundamentally is changed by you actively engaging with whatever the medium is.
> Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
This hits very close to the philosophical core of the AI debacle.
All hardcore fans of AI just want things done. The process is of no interest to them.
This is truly an eschatologic problem of desire. Consider:
Some people want to grab their result, attain satiation, have orgasm, and die, right now.
Others would much rather enjoy the process, the meal itself, indulge in gentle act of love in tune with the partner, and just keep on living their lives, continuously.
Thanks, I like this answer. I think part of my problem is more general, a struggle to enjoy something when I can tell I'm not good at it. It's kind of a circular problem, I will need to spend more time on it to get better and I need to conjure confidence that I could do so out of the ether.
I have experienced the process you're talking about, although to some degree I feel it's symptomatic of a lack of skill. I start out with some kind of inspiration in mind, but end up with a compromise between what I can do and what sounds good when I fiddle around with things. Part of me feels dissatisfaction that I don't know which knobs to turn to get what I want, but I suppose that's just the normal learning process (albeit less structured than those I have gone through in the past, which is its own obstacle sometimes).
> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company
This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.
Exactly, and that's the problem. The reasoning for creating the music is the problem, not that an artist wanted to use AI to generate something or experiment.
It's not even muzak at this point, at least that honest about what it is and why it exists. It's the music version of the automated AI videos on YouTube, which takes a Reddit posts, have an AI do a voice over and then run Subway Surfer in the background (Though I haven't seen one of them in months).
The way revenue works on these platforms is fundamentally broken. Revenue should be considered per user to artists they listened to per month. This is actually how YouTube Premium works.
Right now the way that revenue split works is you pool together all the cash from humans and hand it to whoever has the most bots.
Yep, that (majority!) amount of load on the infrastructure exists to try to win the rat race for whatever percentage of revenue comes from songs that are streamed regardless of their origin.
These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.
Do not try to solve an unsolvable problem, you'll end up hurting real users quite a bit more than you might imagine. Imagine new enthusiastic users trying your platform getting hit with an AI label because of inevitable false positives.
'Detecting AI' is not a problem that has real solutions, the only avenue is something supply side like synthid. But that harms users too, by introducing further barriers for indie users.
I train music generation models. They are very trivial to detect. In fact, detecting them then training them to evade detection by the detection model is a big part of training them! But the detectors win instantly without some hardcore regularization. Simply turn that off and you've instantly got a perfect classifier.
This isn't like text classification, the signal many orders of magnitude higher bitrate and so many more corners need to be cut. It's likely going to be nearly impossible or at least not remotely worth it to generate an audio signal that is truly undetectable in the foreseeable future.
This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.
"AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.
do you have any idea on what percentage of musicians use AI to create the song and then also create the sheet music so they can play it themselves? That seems like a decent workflow, use AI to get the song right, and then record yourself playing it with you're own creative tweaks. That's kind of how I do AI assisted coding.
There are some composers who use a workflow like this - Suno is a scratchpad which can be used to quickly trial ideas, clarify concepts with collaborators, etc. don't think it's common, either among composers, or Suno users at large
I assume you're not a musician, because that sounds insane. If you're good enough to play at full speed from brand new sheet music, then you don't need the AI. Playing from sheet music isn't like typing.
I'm curious how your platform might avoid false positives with intentionally repetitive music, in particular techno (either produced via a DAW or hardware).
It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data.
I dunno; there has always been shit videos on YouTube, obviously, but there used to be a sort of natural filter of videos that had nice transitions and decent narration and dialog that was more or less grammatically correct that made it so that I would mostly watch videos I enjoyed.
Now that AI has cargo-culted these traits I'm getting a lot of recommendations of videos that will initially seem "ok", and then I realize after about a minute that the narration will have some weirdness, and the script will have a lot of the typical ChatGPT "tells", and of course the video comes off as pretty low effort after that.
My YouTube recommendations have become increasingly useless, which honestly might be a good thing because it's made it so that I have less desire to use YouTube.
The weirdness is creeping in to regular Youtube content too. For example, I like to watch Ryan Hall's stream during extreme weather (tornado season in the US). In his forecast videos he has to start with something weird to prove to the audience they're not watching a fake AI generated channel, like eat a banana or apple while talking and wave the fruit around. It was very strange until i realized what he was doing. He also started wearing a suit which is very out of character for him, that must also confuse AI trained on his previous videos.
a lot of gen ai is essentially a pollution machine creating digital single use plastics. Whoever can identity and sift it for value will be the after ai heroes.
People who create AI music are largely not sharing it with others for any reason other than to create a revenue stream. They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas. The system builds brick walls where there was once osmosis.
>They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas.
If not they most definitely are listening to other music that influences them. If you have proof that such a producer listens to 0 music feel free to share it.
That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want.
Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so.
I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.
Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable.
Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.
It is a combination of publisher lock in and folks attempting wild new stuff that breaks out of what AI stuff typically produces.
Earlier this year with a lot of luck, the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine suddenly got discovered because they are doing stuff that falls outside of conventional music styles.
They aren't unique in the experimental nature they are exploring but it has highlighted an hunger from audiences to find stuff outside of the median. Folks like Frank Zappa had to relentlessly advocate for themselves as they figured there was a middle ground between these two thing.
On a similar note I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! This won't work for all projects, but for my indie games it's a good idea.
> I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good!
??
You say you deleted the tests, because you "should test it"? The logic seems inconsistent.
Sanity checking LLM-generated code with LLM-generated automated tests is low-cost and high-yield because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
I think DJs with even a light catalog of their own original music will become some of the most important artists instead. Nobody has any interest in going back to the old system.
As an user I wouldn't mind as long as it's attributed and I can skip it.
Pisses me off on YouTube - it's really hard to find something genuine in the sea of the AI written, AI subbed, AI generated and AI published - it's a scourge not because it's there, but because the channels are lying about it AND because 99.99999% of what I encountered it's not worth the waste heat processing a "publish 100 catchy videos about current affairs".
It's mostly the extremely high levels of fraud associated with such submissions than the content in itself. In Deezer's case:
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
If they were more commonly consumed by real revenue generating users then these companies likely wouldn't care as much. As it stands, it saves them a lot of money at very little real user downside to try to catch the fraud at both ends (the fake listeners + the fake uploads) rather than just one end.
No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.
Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs.
Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.
People who have been listening to music their entire lives isn’t the target audience. It’s mostly getting the young generations used to it, and accept it as a norm. Something about most people’s music taste formalize around high school/university times.
It’s close to how young people have never experienced pre-Fortnite/Roblox times, so they are fine with shelling out money for microtransactions.
How do you discover human-made songs in an ocean of slop? One of the reasons I subscribed to a music platform back in the day was the ability to discover new artists, and I found my fair share!
This is close to impossible nowadays, though I'm now giving Deezer a try since they're the only one doing something about it. Glad I cancelled Spotify 3y ago.
I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music?
The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.
> use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
That’s kind of how the music industry produces music these days. There are a few song writers that write for most artists, music producers who sample other music to string together songs for most artists etc. That’s why most music sounds the same and why AI generated music can be indistinguishable from mainstream music.
They do use diffusion models, but I don't think they would make a detour via images. They can just generate audio directly with audio diffusion rather than image diffusion.
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
> Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music.
Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments:
Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy.
Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits).
Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.
Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions.
For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.
I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process.
Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".
That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening.
In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?).
Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.
How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.
I'm in Canada and have been a Deezer subscriber for almost 2 decades now. Their premium subscription is well worth the money - I pay less than $90 for the year. They also have one of the highest track counts available compared to other streaming services (according to google).
Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.
This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms.
I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's actually more of a young person thing to want to get rid of all AI. I've only ever seen older people wearing a shirt with an AI generated image on it.
I would absolutely push that button a thousand times as well.
I mean, there are some positive uses for the technology, some will likely save lives and advance the frontier in medicine and science. The ways it's able to automate research tasks is a pretty big deal. And, even though I know that, I think with the harm it's doing to our humanity with all this slop overwhelming everything (the web is now more slop than human, YouTube and every music streaming app soon will be), it's maybe not worth it. I don't know how to balance those two things. And, I don't know how you'd regulate it to make it safe, even if we had politicians anywhere who wanted to.
however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers.
I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.
Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.
So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.
44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).
I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.
I agree with you, but I hope they prevent people uploading thousands of AI generated albums. If people start doing that, it can become difficult for non-AI artists to gain visibility in the recommendation systems etc.
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks
Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.
That might be true, but if you watch some of the youtube videos from solo game devs where they spend 5 years making a game, and come out with 28k in sales. Anything that brings a game concept to market faster I think is a win for everyone.
The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist?
And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record?
And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.
It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop.
Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad.
Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder.
Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast.
On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly.
And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.
I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.
The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.
Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%!
Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.
I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.
I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman
It seems like "personalised recommendations" are heading in that direction, but don't forget there's also the social aspect --- listeners will want to share what they liked the most, so even if they end up automatically prompting the AI to generate exactly the music they want, they'll find others who also like very similar music.
Good news: the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined the appeal) have upheld the Copyright Office's assertion that their album is public domain and ineligible for copyright protection. Prompts are insufficient human authorship, which is a requirement for copyright to apply.
Arguably, this makes sending such an album to a distributor a contractual violation as well, since you must assert that you own the rights to license it to them and are empowering them to collect royalties on your behalf.
> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop.
This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.
I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
Which isn't a problem if the process itself is joyful, but I have to admit I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way (shared goal or approval of some form).
None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
I’ve been involved in one music project or another (bands, albums, solo projects, etc) for the past 25 years.
During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to make a record together. We labored over it for almost two years and finally “released it” on bandcamp to very little fanfare.
A few friends and family had nice things to say, and one random stranger reached out with positive feedback.
I get a monthly stream report from bandcamp, and it almost always says zero.
I am so pleased with this project and have such great memories of making the album that I had two lathe cut vinyl copies made (one for me, and one for my friend).
I put a big part of myself into the project and was able to convey ideas and feelings that I couldn’t express effectively via other methods.
I listen to the recording about once a year. It’s a part of me now, and I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it.
To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
If someone else feels something as a result of your work, that’s a nice bonus, but not something I focus on at all.
If you didn’t sink a career’s worth of time doing creative work professionally, then that’s a nice relationship to have with creative output. For a lot of people, AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission. Mortgages not paid, cancer not treated, birthday presents not purchased for your kids, dreams dashed… and then people telling you the real purpose of creative work ends when you expect it to be anything more than a hobby.
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> To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
That's EXACTLY how I used to feel about creativity. I was an art major who didn't make it, and I found that expressing myself via my hobbies was good for the soul.
Then I almost died and completely lost interest in making art!
Facing my own mortality, I realized that the time I invest into my wife, kids and family will have a larger positive contribution on the world, I think.
I know that sounds like a Hallmark Card.
At the same time, I've often wondered what my life would look like if I appreciated my family MORE and my hobbies LESS when I was younger.
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I've been asking myself this question in the last year:
> Why do I want to make music?
I picked a basic DJ controller and a midi controller bundled with Ableton. I'm a novice, but I love listening to music and dissecting what makes a good performance. I crave that feeling of getting chills when I find something new that moves me in new ways. This set was a pretty recent example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfF8jzBVWvM
That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
I resolved early on that I was never going to make a money doing this, which simplified things greatly. There's a primal part of our brain that craves adoration. I do wish for others to adore my music. Even if it's a handful of people. I do wish to perform publicly one day, even if it's at a park for passersby.
Mostly I just want something to move my brain in different ways. I want to create something beautiful.
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I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).
Mind sharing where you went for your lathe cuts (assuming you are happy with how they turned out/sound)?
Please share your bandcamp page!
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It isn't in your profile. Why not post it there or here?
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The reality is, essentially nobody makes money by creating music. Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. A Taylor Swift impersonator would make no money singing the same songs. A cover band wouldn't do any better.
It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them. It's so paltry I don't really understand why authors are so concerned about copyright infringement.
People steal my copyrighted stuff all the time. I long ago stopped caring about it. But I do very much like Github as it protects me from others accusing me of stealing their code.
If you want to make money, you'll need a plan that does not require copyright protection.
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You're not wasting your time, my friend. But you've got to be very certain and honest as to why you want to learn that.
If your goal is being heard and appreciated, well, you better reconsider.
If you're doing it for your own pleasure and pure love of art, absolutely do go on, without any expectations. It may or may not take off, but the samurai must not care.
Agree 100% with this and I also think the default mindset of "being heard and appreciated / make some money out of this" is very recent and only from the last (or two) decade(s).
In the past learning a skill and do something was mostly for pleasure, and something that would stay in your inner circle of friends. Maybe one of your friends would tell his other group of friends but that would be it.
Now internet gave us the opportunity to reach the whole world and that changed the expectations.
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Can't agree with this more. I also started learning guitar and producing music very recently. I have no interest in getting heard and appreciated (on most days atleast).
It has been a tremendously rewarding journey to create new music and see myself improve. 10/10 would do again.
> the samurai must not care
Definitely recommend to OP to explore the modern warrior philosophy drawing from bushido.
I 100% agree with this and have found it to entirely be my own drive for learning and creating.
For me it is beyond trying to make money or become famous, it is simply to enjoy the journey and the creativity that comes with creating music.
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It makes you wonder.
Walk into any library, book store, second hand shop or wherever they sell media. Look at the hundreds of thousands of book, albums, DVD and I wonder how many of those folks were doing it trying to make it big, grab attention or turn it into a career?
And that is a very VERY tiny slice of the entire pie. For everyone successful artist you find, there are hundreds or thousands that never got lucky or had the skills to make it. I put luck first deliberately.
A good example, based on the IBSN listings there are currently 158 million unique books. That is one unique book for every 53 people on the world, how many can you think of?
I love going to old book stores and pulling out something random, usually some paper back from the mid 60's/70's on a topic you probably never even thought of. How much time and effort went into writing that, editing, producing, marketing it? I look up the authors to if they ever made much of it all, about 99% of the time, their name doesn't turn anything up. Despite their published works, they could still be alive, they are already forgotten under the sheer volume of works out there.
There are TV shows I remember, they had whole crews working on it, actors, writers and producers. The only proof they exist online is about a paragraph or two, didn't even get a wiki page. To be appreciated by those close to you, that should be more than enough, but for some it has to be broader, I do not know why.
I think a part of it is that many people come into this world thinking it is a race. I say, IF and that is a very big if; if life is a race, it is a 100meter race and it doesn't matter what position you come in. Saunter your way, take the long way. And yet when you get to the finish line there are loads of people racing past mocking you and desperately trying to convince that "You think that is the finish line? Nah, this is marathon and the real goodies are there!". And so they keep running as fast as possible, wearing themselves out and getting exhausted to no end. The joke being that there is no other finish line.
You can be content in you, content in now. Just be chill... damn it!
Also, find other people to produce/create music with. Then at least a few others are going to listen. It is way more fun that way.
Some people just never found what that thing is for them. And usually you find those things doing them the hard way while you suck. And then the reward is people will see what you do and recognize the work you put in. But if suddenly every person with a prompt does the exact same thing with zero effort, it does take away from the joy of doing it. At least if the joy of doing it is related to the feeling of liking to do "hard things" or liking to think of oneself as one that "does hard things". And I'd say that includes a lot of people and a lot of activities.
I bet a lot of accountants in the old days were really good at basic math, and proud of being fast and accurate and now there's calculators and the amount of people that work on mental math just for the love of the game is probably super small in comparison to when it was a core skill of many more people's jobs.
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I’ve asked an artist if they should be worried about the newest generative AI capabilities. This is his (translated) response:
> Artists? Pencil laborers, more like.. I am in favor of using AI in visuals. It will eliminate a lot of mere decorators, and won’t even slightly affect the artists. I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers. Impressionism was born shortly after that. See, I believe many cursed photography, but Monet never saw it as a problem.
> I hope AI as a technology has the same effect on the world of ART as the invention of photography had: it got rid of a lot of empty landscape copiers
I like this analogy. Maybe this time around is different, but I like to hope it's not.
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Wishful thinking.
What it will do is it will spoil it for 99% of small time artists that still managed to make a living out of it. It will drown audience with slop and make them not care for new releases even more.
That "artists" idea is that the Monet's will survive, but art is not a rat race where just the Monets need apply. A healthy art scene needs all kinds of creators, at different levels, and needs to be able to sustain a decent above-average quality chunk of them. Not just the Monets.
Not to mention it seems like the pretentious artist in the discussion sees themselves as some outlier Monet type that will be fine.
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If AI cuts the time it takes to get an acceptable result for him by half, will he also cut his rates by half?
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A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital. Or heck, even learning an instrument when MIDI was first introduced.
Even before generative AI, there is a long-going debate in audio circles around simulated guitar amplifiers. The truth is, the simulations of them have gotten so insanely good that now one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes.
My rule-of-thumb is this: "does this tool I'm using in particular take away from the authenticity of my performance or songwriting?" Example: I am very keen on performing vocals and guitar at the same time, and I don't have an expensive studio setup, and my office has background noise. I use these tools, and yes even some open source AI ones, 1) remove background noise of the individual tracks and 2) do a final master against a recording I want to target (using something like Matchering or similar [0]). It still sounds like me, my voice isn't perfect, my beat isn't consistent, but it sounds like I rented some studio space. So for me it was a cost-saving measure.
[0] https://github.com/sergree/matchering
>> one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes
And this is actually a problem. Great art usually comes from constraints, real or artificial. These things are a lot of fun to tinker with (a really fun hobby) but one amp, one guitar, and a small number of effects pedals will probably lead to you actually make more and better stuff.
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I know this is kind of at odds with this thread in general but
> but I know it requires work (...) to finish it
If you're like me and, when you get to this stage, you tend to burn out and abandon the thing, have you tried using gen AI to get you over that hump?
I love coding and still do but I often reached a point where all the fun, easy things were done and I'd be stuck at 90% with only difficult and boring tasks. I've been using Claude recently to just get me over that hump and finish my projects. It can still be fulfilling if you do it right.
Hey friend, if it helps, every “song” you make will eventually become a symbol and memory of a time in your life. It doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes these sounds have even more fidelity than text when it comes to capturing your emotional state and thoughts at the time. I didn’t realize that for a while but in retrospect all of the “it sounds bad” and “I didn’t finish it” didn’t matter
I love making music, and got into it as a venue to be away from the computer. I still do post-production in Ableton, but everything else happens with gear not even connected to a computer. I've tried to make music with a DAW, but it feels so sterile and boring, compared to actually using hardware to make it.
Maybe get a second-hand Novation Circuit to start with, or some similar "groovebox" that lets you make songs on one device, and see if you actually still do enjoy making music, yet haven't found the right process for you yet.
I don't think you're wasting your time, as long as you're having fun, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world. Sure, AI could probably make "better" (by some definition of "better") music than me, but AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
> AI couldn't make my friends smile at me as I play them my music I've made, that's quite literally priceless.
Can I ask how you share music with friends? I guess this is part of my problem, I don't really have anyone I could share with or collaborate with. The few people in my life don't listen to the type of music I like.
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Maybe you could see if there's someone who finds the "not fun" part fun and you could collaborate with them. That would solve two problems at the same time.
Either way, I strongly encourage you to keep using a DAW if that brings you joy. Using AI to create art is a different skill set, just like using acoustic instruments is a different skill set from using either. Each option appeals a different amount to different people, and you should just do what brings you the most joy.
> I wonder if I'm wasting my time
Art is strictly not about efficiency. Go do the thing instead of thinking about optimising everything.
> it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
So? Not everything you create needs fans or monetisation. It should still elevate your sense of accomplishment, like a kind of Type 2 fun.
You have the answer to the "why do it" in the first part of "why you are doing it". Just because something may be created at the click of the button doesn't mean it fulfills the goals you are looking for. People knit even though there are machines that do that for you. You are doing it for you.
I have two answers for you:
1. All that AI really does is a (partially) randomized exploration of the space that has been spanned by existing music. AI creativity, as far as it can be said to exist, is limited by this. You, on the other hand, are human and not bound by any of these limitations. You are free to explore wild things that no AI can do. Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments. Bang on random stuff that has a nice ring to it. Record background hums, apply filters and envelopes to them etc. And there are so many other ways to produce unique creations.
2. Most importantly, music is a form of human expression. It is able to capture the human condition in a unique way. As a human, you can express these things genuinely through your own emotions, experiences, memories etc. AI systems can only produce hollow facsimiles of this. Regardless of whether you are conscious about it, every piece of music that you create is a reflection of you: your thoughts, your emotions, your process. And that imparts the true value on your creations.
> Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments.
I'm not sure if you already knew this, but this is actually a thing already - it's been called "Botanica" and there are a bunch of cool tracks floating around.
Sample track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0QCBPnJz5w
Obligatory Ben Levin video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-mK82gLkWE
I used to make a lot of music in FL, mostly beats. I would make beats similar to whatever I was listening to at the time, try to get a little weirder with it every time. Like making Memphis style beats with crushed drums and warped samples running through PS1 reverb until it's drowning. It was never for anyone, I would send my songs to my group chat with my buddies for feedback. Kind of fell off just because I got into other hobbies. It doesn't need to be for anyone else. A re-mix of a song I did got 2M on YouTube though, the real catharsis was beating the botted 300k views the shitty rapper from my grad class had though. That video is copyright struck so I don't make any money from it, but that was never the goal, I just uploaded so I could send my songs to the boys/listen on my phone to do the 'ol car test.
I just recently setup a very simple home recording studio after picking up drums again at 40. I had the same thoughts, but I'm going it for me and it is extremely therapeutic. Plus, given the genre (extreme metal), I've gotten into much better shape. (Also picked up an 8 string guitar. I never grew out of my edgelordiness. No real point to mentioning this but just wanted to tell someone :)
AI music may eventually satisfy the masses and you can't stop that speeding train, but the process of creating something yourself will always have value if it's something you're interested in creating.
I have done this with music, writing, and many other things. AI doesn’t make any of these things less enjoyable for me because the process of creation itself is the part that I enjoy.
I have a very low bar for what I consider to be a successful creation: it just needs to be enjoyable for myself in the future. Anyone else who happens to enjoy the content I make is a bonus. I have several songs on SoundCloud that I have produced in the past and I still enjoy listening to them.
There are still several avenues for this, and I imagine they'll continue to exist even in a mostly-AI-enhanced world. You'll need to dedicate time to finding them.
For example, Battle of the Bits [0] is a community all about chiptune music. I'm sure you _could_ use AI to help you learn and produce some things, but the community is mostly about sharing ideas about what works at the electronic level, so even if AI became super capable, it wouldn't help you engage with the community in any meaningful way. There are several such communities across different domains and I imagine they aren't going anywhere anytime soon, regardless of how much improvement happens w.r.t. AI, since the focus is on "what you learned" and not so much "what you did".
Similarly, I have seen communities focused entirely on Silicon Graphics workstations, or pc-98 internals. Human passion-based communities aren't going anywhere, Google just makes it incredibly hard to find them outside of word-of-mouth.
[0] https://battleofthebits.com
> Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
This is the reason why a lot of us make music. Writing orchestral pieces is my own meditation. I don't share most of them, and replacing them with AI would defeat the purpose.
Please keep learning it! The world needs more musicians, even if we never hear them.
Art is a form of communication. You turn to the arts when the other methods to communicate something either do not feel as if they fit, or feel that they will not encompass the idea you wish to convey. Art is a dialogue with other people, not a commodity. The point is to help yourself understand what you want to say, not to say something that is valuable in way that can be exchanged for goods.
So do not become discouraged by the machine generated sounds. They are only sounds, not a message.
It's not a waste of time. Every time some new thing comes out and becomes popular, everyone everywhere says everything must be that thing because it's the future. In America, everyone wanted pure white sliced bread. People wanted frozen TV dinners. People wanted chain fast food restaurants. People wanted no effort reality TV. People wanted endless superhero movies.
Now people want actual food and they want stuff made with human hands and they want to know what's in it. People want TV shows with a proper story. People are beyond done with cookie cutter superhero movies.
The slop wave is going to pass. AI can make stuff that sounds super polished and perfect, but people will want the rough and crude touch of something hand made. They'll want to see videos of musicians showing behind the scenes of how they made something. They'll want to go and see a musician perform. Interest in 100% AI generated music will fade into the background and it'll be relegated to soulless Muzak used for ambiance in soulless chain restaurants too cheap to pay for actual music and too afraid to play any songs that might offend or annoy someone.
If you do it for money it is maybe a waste of time, because the chance to win the race were already low and now you have to compete with a tsunami of AI generated music. If you do it for your enjoyment, nothing changed and nothing will change
I'm having fun building elaborate software that meets my needs precisely and nobody else's. I mean, maybe it would meet other's needs but that production would take away from the fun and learning I have building it, and would also reduce its utility for me personally.
What about finding game creators or similar who could make use of a musical collaborator. Your music gains an extra purpose, you mix with other creatives and those others get their soundtrack sorted before they head to Suno as the easy option.
don't sell your work short. it has value because it comes from you, and struggling to finish is unbelievably common in the creation process - not to mention frustration and a lack of joy.
if you're creating because you feel a drive to create, you are making art and that has intrinsic value to yourself and others. if however you are performing the act of musical creation as a means to an end, what you are doing may be better considered work and not art. the work of others can also be appreciated but it is different.
keep at it though. you are asking good questions and unlike many you are also personally engaging with them.
If no one hears them, do they really exist?
I've been making music as a hobbyist for 18 years.
It's fun.
That's it's own reason. Even before AI you statistically will never ever ever make money.
Not only that, but legions of scam artists want to rip you off in some manner. 'Cool music , for 400$ I can get your listeners '
1. None of this should matter if you do it because it’s therapeutic.
2. If it turns out it’s not therapeutic for you, try something different. Play piano. Learn chess. Learn MMA. Go for a run. Heck, vibecode something silly. Music production is not the only way, if you have it a good try and it just frustrates you, try something else.
Just pick up your instrument and make some noise. DAWs are time sinks.
Music is about the “feel” first and foremost. Playing music on a physical instrument or singing is a feel thing.
DAWs are tools for polishing what was created with feeling into something “produced”. If that’s what you want to end up with, that’s ok. Just be clear with yourself on which you’re trying to do.
I had this exact realization. Taking chords from a chord progression generator, putting it into FL studio, adding a random melody that stays in the key from a cool synth preset, some random drum loop, and end result? I guess it could be called music. Its a combination of sounds that doesnt sound actively bad.
I noticed the problem when I realized I couldn't make music in a specific mood or genre. Sometimes I'd finish my song and think "oh wow, a happy rock song" or "a sad edm song" or whatever but it was always just random chance where I ended up. With music theory knowledge I could always add more instruments or notes that could exist in that place but with 0 direction, whatever I made was always listenable but never more than that.
Same applies to any creative hobby. Do it for yourself. I guess you can still share to your social circle. Others can still appreciate it.
I'd wager most people who make music are making it for the sheer joy of expression. Like .001% of people who make music get any kind of meaningful monetary return on it, and I think anyone who goes into it looking for monetary return is doing it for the wrong reasons. In my view, AI changes nothing where it matters it music.
Step 1: ditch the DAW and learn a real instrument
Step 2: find a local jam group or community band/orchestra
Step 3: have fun playing music with friends
what makes electronic music created in a DAW not “real”?
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Multiple problems with this one.
For one, acquiring an instrument is expensive - even secondhand, most instruments cost a significant amount of money. Learning it properly is even more important and expensive - fixing something in a DAW is easy, unlearning muscle memory is much harder.
Keeping up said muscle memory also isn't easy. Sure, if you got a free-standing house, no one will care much about a drum set, trumpet or whatever. But most people don't have that luxury in urban sets any more, and typical residential building quality makes even some electronic instruments (e.g. kicks still cause some amount of noise passing through floors) a challenge. Building noise ordnances / HOA rules are a bitch on top of that - most allow only a limited time window in the afternoon, useless for working-class people.
Local community groups... if your community has one, and they have some studio space where noise doesn't matter, great! Most, unfortunately, don't - space in urban environments is already rare and at a hefty premium, space that accepts noise and has adequate resources (in practice: a usable toilet is the most important) is even rarer.
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I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.
Fear not, a few of us are building in the direction you're hoping. Leveraging AI to make it easier to stay in a creative headspace with music rather than getting caught in a spreadsheet with endless settings
Sharing is definitely a core part of "why do it", but that can be sharing with friends/family or a living room performance
Some preliminary ideas here: https://songbird.studiocollective.xyz
I have little interest in doing a DJ set in public but I'll spend hours crate digging for new music and mixing circular black slabs of vinyl for nothing more than the love of the craft.
Making the art changes you. Don't do it with the goal of having produced 'content' in mind.
I have ~40 demoes from a music career that never took off. Now I am feeding little Suno with this demoes, turning them into afrobeat with oboe, deep house with harmonica, etc, and reliving the creative joy.
You can make a decent demo in a DAW and run it through AI for a nice production. The art of writing songs is still equally hard IMO. And a good song is still good, no matter what costume it wears.
Just remember that AI has lowered the skill ceiling to produce a lot of things. But it hasn't lowered the bar for taste :)
It's worth doing. Those "no AI" mixes on youtube are doing great, though the vast majority of people is clueless and will happily digest any slop.
Create for yourself, and for those that seek the human effort and passion. There's an increasing number of us.
I'm the biggest doomer on this site, yet I'm certain human art will become even more valuable, and appreciated, than it has ever been before in history. Just don't expect to make billions out of it, or to reach out to the masses that are quite content with industrial-scale mediocrity.
>I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself.
That's true of 99% of very polished finished work too. Amazing bands and artists in Spotify with sub 1000 streams/month.
>None of these problems are "new", but I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent. Kind of wondering how others are affected by all this, if at all.
Absolutely. One big concern is that even if you do it and you're proud of it, many will think it's AI anyway.
Plus the over-inflation of AI generated shit. It could all die in a fire.
You are clearly just at the beginning of your musical journey. I am happy for you. Yes, music for me too makes no sense without other people. This means, I suggest, that you must go out and find other people to collaborate with. The more you do it the more you realize just how many people out there are in the same boat as you. And once you find that right person or group, it’s like nothing else. And let’s be clear, this will take you far far outside your normal social circle. The type of people who like the same music as you may be completely different in every other way. It is important to actively seek out the right people and along that journey, define exactly what that person is, as well as who you are. This is the thing I care most about and yes I hope that more tools, AI or not come out to reduce that work that you have to do to make something polished, so everyone can focus on being creative.
> I've always struggled to enjoy anything that doesn't involve other people in some way
Well... play in band/orchestra ? You get to meet people, interact with them, build with them, etc.
I've been making music solo using various machines and computers all my life and I love it, but it's probably not for everyone. Yes, you're alone. Yes, (almost) nobody cares, so if you can't enjoy the process there is no point really.
() from time to time someone will show some interest but let's face it: there's just too much good music released everyday, competing with other distractions for the attention of the people.
For people like me, AI doesn't change much, it's another tool. We've been abusing technology in music for decades.
Learn an instrument (guitar,keys,drums...) if you haven't already and go jam with friends and do concerts instead. That's the best part of making music.
The age of music production is almost over, the age of the music industry already is.
I wouldn't want to be in the DAW/VST business today though, because a lot of potential customers are thinking exactly as you do...
I recently wrote more or less this exact comment on another platform recently (although I've been making music for a while).
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.
why are you learning to do woodwork when working wood was already automated away decades or centuries ago?
Mhm... it sounds like the main problem is that you like the result more than the actual process.
If you start a new hobby, you should enjoy the time you spend doing it. Of course, every hobby has its chores or tedious parts, but doing it just for the end product or for the validation you get from others will never work in the long run.
AI makes or will make everyone question doing „any” creative work. The real question you should ask yourself is „Do I care?”
If you do it for yourself - do it.
If you learn that to make money - forget about it.
"it will likely never be appreciated by anyone but myself."
AI is forcing art to return to having no meaning or purpose beyond itself and thats a good thing. It's how things used to be
Is it therapeutic if it relies on the approval of someone else?
> I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd).
If you enjoy the process and its outcomes, then it's not a waste of time. If you are forcing yourself to do it or have another motivation for it that is not rooted in genuine interest, then yes, you are wasting your time.
> I feel like AI is making this question of "why do it" or "what is worth doing" even more urgent
This is a spiritual question, so you will have as many answers as there are askers. I found my answer and am happy to share it with you. Why do it? Because I want to. What is worth doing? What I want to do or what gets me to the things I want. Wanting is a very important process, that is often damaged by conditioning. We are told that some things we want are bad and that some things we don't want are good. Or that ego is evil. So many ways this process can go wrong. I think fixing this in oneself is part of becoming an actual adult. Once you know what you want and what you don't want, you no longer are dependent on others telling you what to do or forcing you to do things you shouldn't be doing. Ego is not evil, it's there for a reason. Some people have an overgrown one while others have an underdeveloped one. What is needed is balance. I don't think the pattern recognition machine has anything to do with it. I suspect, that a lot of people who use music as a band aid for personal problems, i.e. people who build their identity around being special due to music making, are the ones who are afraid of AI, but if you just enjoy making music, then what does it matter if music itself is patterned and if a machine can exploit that? It doesn't take anything away from the joy of making music, if you experience it in the first place.
I need to force myself to do almost everything. Simply saying it's a waste of time because of that isn't practical unless I give up on life entirely.
In practice, it's not binary. I'm interested because I want to make music similar to that which I like listening to.
Sometimes I get enjoyment out of it, but sometimes I lose interest maybe because I'm facing a frustration.
My question of wasting time is connected to "can I even create something worth listening to". If nothing I could make is worth listening to, then I guess I would feel the process of creation is pointless.
I've heard others write about how what they produce is worth listening to, to them. I think that is enough, but I also think I lack confidence in my own judgement. Almost like I need someone else to confirm my validity. I have recognized that as a result of emotional neglect, but I haven't figured out how to fix it.
The not-fun work isn’t on the song, it’s on you. Improving the song is a byproduct. This only really becomes apparent over time but you’ll realise you were working on yourself all along.
It depends what you want to get out of it, and what you think art itself really is.
If it's nothing but an end product, that needs to fit a specific aesthetic, with a specific sound, then I probably agree. AI is making that "pointless" in a way.
Almost everyone I know who's been an artist for years though, has come to a similar realization: What you set out to create, and what it turns into through the process of creating it are different things. The meaning, truly is found along the way.
You can always be better, there's always more to learn. Nothing is ever truly perfect, or "complete"
If you write harmony, there's always a different way it could be written, that might fit better, or be more interesting. If you do sound design, whether that's with getting different guitar tones, synth programming, unique recording techniques, there's always more to learn, or a different way to approach it.
If the only point is an end result, then AI can deliver a simulacra of that.
For everyone I know that loves music, or working with DAWs, the end result is an ever shifting target as you learn more, and understand music in a different way.
Ultimately, there are no shortcuts to making something new, because the practice of trying to make things is what results in what your art becomes. Tools and technology can shape what that thing ends up being, but they (traditionally) don't replace the process of creating it, and the feedback loop between who you are and the decisions you make along the way.
Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
Some people seem to compare this to sampling, but anyone who's ever actually worked with sampling in a creative way will realize how hollow that comparison is. Almost all good sampling still requires a good deal of active feedback, between the person working with it and the way THEY hear what's going on.
Remove the person from that loop, replace the decisions with a general vague notion, and you end up with something that sounds "like" music, but that feedback loop is broken.
I see the same thing with all the AI UI design that's coming out. It's all generally quite competent, and exactly the same. Great for a business tool, where maybe the velocity and an acceptable MVP is the only point, but terrible for actual design and novel thought.
TL;dr: Why do it? Because you want to, and you think that with enough time engaging with something you'll change, just as it does, and the result isn't something you could have ever predicted when you started. It changes you, and that's the point. Just like learning an instrument, or learning to code. It's not purely about the produced result, and that very result fundamentally is changed by you actively engaging with whatever the medium is.
> Stripping all of that out, and jumping to a "finished" product, is, well very product focused, but to me completely devoid of art or musicianship.
This hits very close to the philosophical core of the AI debacle.
All hardcore fans of AI just want things done. The process is of no interest to them.
This is truly an eschatologic problem of desire. Consider:
Some people want to grab their result, attain satiation, have orgasm, and die, right now.
Others would much rather enjoy the process, the meal itself, indulge in gentle act of love in tune with the partner, and just keep on living their lives, continuously.
Thanks, I like this answer. I think part of my problem is more general, a struggle to enjoy something when I can tell I'm not good at it. It's kind of a circular problem, I will need to spend more time on it to get better and I need to conjure confidence that I could do so out of the ether.
I have experienced the process you're talking about, although to some degree I feel it's symptomatic of a lack of skill. I start out with some kind of inspiration in mind, but end up with a compromise between what I can do and what sounds good when I fiddle around with things. Part of me feels dissatisfaction that I don't know which knobs to turn to get what I want, but I suppose that's just the normal learning process (albeit less structured than those I have gone through in the past, which is its own obstacle sometimes).
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A video by Le Monde (french newspaper) showing that you can have an ai song ready and distributed to several platforms in less than one hour : https://youtu.be/G3d8wBOLS2c?is=meGcHQZtpcRFRUsj
(The original video is in french but it has an autodubbed english track)
> 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company
This is the nut. This isn't actual AI generated music. It isn't intended to be real music that people listen and enjoy. It's just filler to populate tracks that pay out to scammers, so that scammers can direct bots and hijacked accounts to play their tracks and steal a share of the platform revenue.
Exactly, and that's the problem. The reasoning for creating the music is the problem, not that an artist wanted to use AI to generate something or experiment.
It's not even muzak at this point, at least that honest about what it is and why it exists. It's the music version of the automated AI videos on YouTube, which takes a Reddit posts, have an AI do a voice over and then run Subway Surfer in the background (Though I haven't seen one of them in months).
That's the old meta, now it's Tumblr post voiceovers overlaid on Minecraft parkour runs!
The way revenue works on these platforms is fundamentally broken. Revenue should be considered per user to artists they listened to per month. This is actually how YouTube Premium works.
Right now the way that revenue split works is you pool together all the cash from humans and hand it to whoever has the most bots.
you described the spotify revenue model, AFAIK deezer does _user to artists_. based on an article I've read 2 years ago.
Yep, that (majority!) amount of load on the infrastructure exists to try to win the rat race for whatever percentage of revenue comes from songs that are streamed regardless of their origin.
I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker
These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.
Do not try to solve an unsolvable problem, you'll end up hurting real users quite a bit more than you might imagine. Imagine new enthusiastic users trying your platform getting hit with an AI label because of inevitable false positives.
'Detecting AI' is not a problem that has real solutions, the only avenue is something supply side like synthid. But that harms users too, by introducing further barriers for indie users.
I train music generation models. They are very trivial to detect. In fact, detecting them then training them to evade detection by the detection model is a big part of training them! But the detectors win instantly without some hardcore regularization. Simply turn that off and you've instantly got a perfect classifier.
This isn't like text classification, the signal many orders of magnitude higher bitrate and so many more corners need to be cut. It's likely going to be nearly impossible or at least not remotely worth it to generate an audio signal that is truly undetectable in the foreseeable future.
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This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.
"AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.
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Ignore the naysayers, keep trying, even if some percentage of false-positives is inevitable. We need such tools.
do you have any idea on what percentage of musicians use AI to create the song and then also create the sheet music so they can play it themselves? That seems like a decent workflow, use AI to get the song right, and then record yourself playing it with you're own creative tweaks. That's kind of how I do AI assisted coding.
There are some composers who use a workflow like this - Suno is a scratchpad which can be used to quickly trial ideas, clarify concepts with collaborators, etc. don't think it's common, either among composers, or Suno users at large
I would guess it’s significantly below 1%
Sounds dystopian. If I was tasked with designing hell for musicians, I would be inspired.
I assume you're not a musician, because that sounds insane. If you're good enough to play at full speed from brand new sheet music, then you don't need the AI. Playing from sheet music isn't like typing.
I'm curious how your platform might avoid false positives with intentionally repetitive music, in particular techno (either produced via a DAW or hardware).
Can you detect terrible music instead? In many ways that’s a more interesting problem and gets to the heart of why people dislike mediocre slop.
It's damn time for streaming platforms to allow users to filter out AI music. Better than that, would be for the EU to regulate this and to demand an opt-out by default for every streaming provider.
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data.
https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg
This is apparently how Deezer is doing it.
it will still miss the ai authoring the music, and a human performing it
Most of the videos uploaded to YouTube are worthless.
AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?
You can talk about ethics, IP, etc. but we're not even there yet.
I dunno; there has always been shit videos on YouTube, obviously, but there used to be a sort of natural filter of videos that had nice transitions and decent narration and dialog that was more or less grammatically correct that made it so that I would mostly watch videos I enjoyed.
Now that AI has cargo-culted these traits I'm getting a lot of recommendations of videos that will initially seem "ok", and then I realize after about a minute that the narration will have some weirdness, and the script will have a lot of the typical ChatGPT "tells", and of course the video comes off as pretty low effort after that.
My YouTube recommendations have become increasingly useless, which honestly might be a good thing because it's made it so that I have less desire to use YouTube.
The weirdness is creeping in to regular Youtube content too. For example, I like to watch Ryan Hall's stream during extreme weather (tornado season in the US). In his forecast videos he has to start with something weird to prove to the audience they're not watching a fake AI generated channel, like eat a banana or apple while talking and wave the fruit around. It was very strange until i realized what he was doing. He also started wearing a suit which is very out of character for him, that must also confuse AI trained on his previous videos.
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I discovered a new band some weeks ago (Hexxenmind) through Spotify. Really liked them, then checked concert dates only to find out it’s AI generated.
Honestly couldn’t tell in the moment but now that I know it’s generated it somehow feels “cheaper” and I dislike listening to them.
I've been caught out a few times after learning a new artist I liked was AI.
The time spent listening to AI music _could_ instead been spent listening to something created by a human.
That is what pisses me off the most!
a lot of gen ai is essentially a pollution machine creating digital single use plastics. Whoever can identity and sift it for value will be the after ai heroes.
Say what you about the Anna’s Archive Spotify scrape: it made me realize how much music exists and how much music was never listened to.
If every track was 3 minutes long, it would be about 1450 years worth of music. You can never experience it all.
> AI simplifies the creation, doesn't mean it's good and will be listened to. And if it will, then what's the problem?
From this attitude you might as well get your entertainment from spam or ads.
AI creation kills cultural sharing.
People who create AI music are largely not sharing it with others for any reason other than to create a revenue stream. They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas. The system builds brick walls where there was once osmosis.
How can art evolve under these conditions?
Why are some crafts more sacred than others?
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>They are also not consuming new AI music to be able to develop influences and synthesize new ideas.
If not they most definitely are listening to other music that influences them. If you have proof that such a producer listens to 0 music feel free to share it.
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That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want.
Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so.
I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.
Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable.
Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.
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So we'll be going back to publishers as curators. Good for the publishers, I guess.
It is a combination of publisher lock in and folks attempting wild new stuff that breaks out of what AI stuff typically produces.
Earlier this year with a lot of luck, the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine suddenly got discovered because they are doing stuff that falls outside of conventional music styles.
They aren't unique in the experimental nature they are exploring but it has highlighted an hunger from audiences to find stuff outside of the median. Folks like Frank Zappa had to relentlessly advocate for themselves as they figured there was a middle ground between these two thing.
On a similar note I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good! This won't work for all projects, but for my indie games it's a good idea.
> I recently deleted a whole bunch of automated tests because if the AI is going to write most of the code then I should test it to make sure it's good!
??
You say you deleted the tests, because you "should test it"? The logic seems inconsistent.
Sanity checking LLM-generated code with LLM-generated automated tests is low-cost and high-yield because LLMs are really good at writing tests.
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I think DJs with even a light catalog of their own original music will become some of the most important artists instead. Nobody has any interest in going back to the old system.
this seems like a pattern seen across industries when it comes to AI
even more consolidation and lock in
As an user I wouldn't mind as long as it's attributed and I can skip it.
Pisses me off on YouTube - it's really hard to find something genuine in the sea of the AI written, AI subbed, AI generated and AI published - it's a scourge not because it's there, but because the channels are lying about it AND because 99.99999% of what I encountered it's not worth the waste heat processing a "publish 100 catchy videos about current affairs".
Good for users too; I much prefer a curated selection since I don't have time to drink from the firehose
Why? HN isn’t “curating” the wave of AI-written tech article slop. Unclear if they should, readers here love it!
Hard to believe these models won’t get better and better at producing music that humans want to listen to.
The problem has never been that AI music doesn't sound good.
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To quote Fugazi, "It don't matter what they're sellin, it's what you're buying."
Who cares if people are mass uploading AI content? I care what the listen rates are.
It's mostly the extremely high levels of fraud associated with such submissions than the content in itself. In Deezer's case:
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
If they were more commonly consumed by real revenue generating users then these companies likely wouldn't care as much. As it stands, it saves them a lot of money at very little real user downside to try to catch the fraud at both ends (the fake listeners + the fake uploads) rather than just one end.
With songs like "A Million Amelias"... millions, apparently.
No matter how many AI tracks I blocked / downvoted on Spotify, they kept recommending them to me. It made me cancel my account. The thing is, from the consumer point of view, you can barely tell if it's playing in the background. Even if 90% of the streams are fraudulent, the remaining 10% is still real people who are none the wiser, but who would probably rather patronize human artists if given the choice.
Does that really matter? Eventually it will be 99%, but even then I am not necessarily concerned until it crowds out human created songs.
Before AI, 99% of anything was trash and now with AI, perhaps 99.9% is. But the thing that matters is whether the remaining 1% or 0.1% is good or meaningful for us or not. Though I guess soon enough even AI music will be meaningful for us, but I don't think this precludes the existence of human musicians.
People who have been listening to music their entire lives isn’t the target audience. It’s mostly getting the young generations used to it, and accept it as a norm. Something about most people’s music taste formalize around high school/university times.
It’s close to how young people have never experienced pre-Fortnite/Roblox times, so they are fine with shelling out money for microtransactions.
How do you discover human-made songs in an ocean of slop? One of the reasons I subscribed to a music platform back in the day was the ability to discover new artists, and I found my fair share!
This is close to impossible nowadays, though I'm now giving Deezer a try since they're the only one doing something about it. Glad I cancelled Spotify 3y ago.
Tangent:
I assume this “AI-generated” music is created the same way an LLM generates text: use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
But it seems plausible that algorithmic generation can be used at any stage of the process. How much disclosure do we (listeners) require? At what point is it unacceptable “AI-generated” music?
The answers are going to be subjective. And human. And dealing with this, I think, is going to take a direction like the “typewriters in college” headline from a few days ago - human involvement, low automation … things that don’t scale.
> use samples from a corpus strung together into a new [derivative] output.
That’s kind of how the music industry produces music these days. There are a few song writers that write for most artists, music producers who sample other music to string together songs for most artists etc. That’s why most music sounds the same and why AI generated music can be indistinguishable from mainstream music.
I mean, it was how Beethoven did it with dice, too. This is just much quicker and more comprehensive.
My understanding is music generation is more like stable diffusion. It generates a waveform as an image, then turns it into an audio file.
They do use diffusion models, but I don't think they would make a detour via images. They can just generate audio directly with audio diffusion rather than image diffusion.
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> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
> Today’s announcement comes as Deezer conducted a survey last November that found that 97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music.
Unable to tell it wasn't made by a human, but they can tell it's not very good apparently.
Something's missing completely from both this article and I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments:
Deezer will tag it and refuse to promote it once it's tagged as such. You're not gonna stumble upon it by leaving the autoplay on and it will not appear on any of its editorial playlists. Quite frankly this problem would be completely gone if every streaming service implemented this same policy.
Deezer also does some other things right: they boost the artist payout if the listener intentionally searches for an artist/song/album instead of stumbles upon it via autoplay/playlists, they introduced lossless audio a decade before Spotify, and you don't even need an API key to interact with its metadata (of course you need to oblige by their rate limits).
Some criticism so that this doesn't look like a pure promotion: their apps are absolute crap in comparison to Spotify and Apple Music, and even in comparison with TIDAL, which itself isn't really a pinnacle of user experience. It's definitely the most frustrating one out of the bunch that I have direct experience with.
I agree with your assessment. I have to say that their Android app is not very good. Serviceable, but not good. I heard their iOS app is better. I REALLY like their web app. Fast and smooth.
Same is true for Qobuz. Pays artists really well, is EU located, but their applications (although they support a lot of platforms) are still a little rough around the edges.
I found Qobuz recommendations really bad too, unfortunately.
From the press release, it's not all that clear what Deezer is doing about it. 44% of uploads getting less than 1% of non-fraudulent streams seems like a pretty strong reason to outright ban AI generated submissions.
For the non-fraudulent listens, I'm very curious how many of these are part of auto-generated playlists. Are people just being served this music as part of a feed, or are they actually seeking it out? I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.
Do any of these AI music generators produce output that can be iterated upon like the output of coding agents?
Probably yes, but let's hope not
I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process.
Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".
That would be neat, but I really don't see it happening. In software-land, it's my sense that, if anything, AI is working against open source. AI is creating busy work for open source maintainers with a large volume of low quality PRs, and scrapers are burdening those who maintain their own small-scale, public facing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, AI is ingesting their publicly available data to improve itself, with the implicit (if not explicit) goal of making those projects irrelevant (why read the docs, participate in a forum or chat, or submit a PR when you can ask your AI thing to just write the code you want instead?).
Furthermore, if a software developer is of the opinion that AI is "bad" in some way and they want to resist it, I think it would make the most sense to keep their code private. Open source is feeding AI.
How much of this is driven by passive income "entrepreneurs" trying to get their AI-generated tracks placed on playlists to gather streaming revenue? Normally an artist might release 10-15 tracks per year tops, but with AI you can easily churn out hundreds of tracks explicitly targeting trending playlists and (in theory) make a few thousand a month in royalties.
Youtube got hit by massive downfall in quality by this as well. It's absurd.
Similar stats for podcasts - https://www.listennotes.com/podcast-stats/#growth
Anyone else is this the first you've heard of "Deezer"?
They're not as popular in N. America, but they have some really neat feature. Including uploading your own MP3s and labelling of AI tracks.
I'm in Canada and have been a Deezer subscriber for almost 2 decades now. Their premium subscription is well worth the money - I pay less than $90 for the year. They also have one of the highest track counts available compared to other streaming services (according to google).
Given how little skill/effort is required for AI-generating music (compared to making it "from scratch"), I find it surprising that they're getting more human-created music than AI generated music. I would have expected something like 10x-100x more AI submissions than human ones.
This shit is so dark. I mean, popular music has always been pretty formulaic, and prone to imitation and trite bullshit, but at least when humans were making it, you'd occasionally get some spark of genius, real originality, even in the most mundane forms.
I use LLMs for code every day, but if I could flip a switch to turn it all off and prevent this shit from happening to the arts, I probably would.
Butlerian Jihad vibes are building.
"Probably"? I'd hit that a thousand times just to be sure.
Don't understand how one can experience anything but infinite dread when confronted with the effects of these models on the arts.
Maybe I am getting old. But I don't think so...
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's actually more of a young person thing to want to get rid of all AI. I've only ever seen older people wearing a shirt with an AI generated image on it.
I would absolutely push that button a thousand times as well.
I mean, there are some positive uses for the technology, some will likely save lives and advance the frontier in medicine and science. The ways it's able to automate research tasks is a pretty big deal. And, even though I know that, I think with the harm it's doing to our humanity with all this slop overwhelming everything (the web is now more slop than human, YouTube and every music streaming app soon will be), it's maybe not worth it. I don't know how to balance those two things. And, I don't know how you'd regulate it to make it safe, even if we had politicians anywhere who wanted to.
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Is there a way to listen to say the top ten AI songs?
however you might feel about AI generated media, flooding platforms with unlabeled slop is nothing but scammer behavior and we should take serious measures to disincentivize it for both the uploaders and service providers.
I do suspect we are in for a lot of verified-human platforms where your fee goes to supporting establishing an artist or author's humanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
Is it free to upload these files? Maybe a 1¢ fee would be enough to kill a majority of the spam.
Effectively yes. There are plenty of music distributors that have “no fee” distribution where they simply take a percentage of any royalties.
I suspect we are going to see that model quickly go out of favour though.
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What does human verification look like when you grant that it’s impossible to tell?
I don't grant it. if you mean it is impossible to tell from the music itself, perhaps. but there are other means of verification.
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Deez what?
I wonder how much of this even matters. Sounds like it doesn't (aside from taking up space on Deezer's drives).
> The consumption of AI-generated music on the platform is still very low, at 1-3% of total streams, and 85% of these streams are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by the company.
Even pre-AI, music has always been a winners-take-most business. Per an article from 2022, the vast majority of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners[0], which I suspect is far lower now due to the flood of AI.
Not sure about Deezer, but for Spotify there is some kind of minimum to get you into any algorithmic rotation. People try to game this with bots, i.e. botted streams, but the problem with bots is that the accounts are bots, so the recommendations just become music for other bots, hence the part where 85% of the streams are botted. So it doesn't actually work, and you have to rely on old-fashioned promotion to get into any algorithmic playlists.
So 44% of uploads being AI-generated sounds bad, but it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally, the same way that people don't naturally discover random, non-AI artists with 10 monthly listeners and tracks with less than 1000 plays. This isn't a defense of AI music slop, by the way; it's more pointing out that the "making a song" part only takes you about 20% of the way to becoming an artist people want to listen to. A harsh lesson our friends in /r/SunoAI are learning.
[0] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...
44% of uploads are probably not created by 44% of "artists". The core of people who are looking to exploit the system are going to be good at gaming the recommendation algorithm — they're specialists in it solely for the money who don't need to trouble themselves with artistic concerns.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but at a minimum it's extremely hard to game the recommendation algorithm (primarily talking about Spotify, maybe Deezer's is less sophisticated). The best way to "game" the recommendation algorithm, to kickstart a new/less-established artist profile, is to get onto popular playlists. However these playlists either have actual quality barriers (so they won't put AI slop music on) or they take $$ (so this doesn't really work with the "mass generated AI slop" approach).
> …it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever encounter them naturally…
"Extremely unlikely", you say? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-...
This is the very definition of unnaturally: the creators of those AI songs spent a ton of money promoting them, for whatever reason.
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I really don't care if it's AI, I love music and it's 100% subjective to what I like, I'm not less moral if I prefer some ones and zeroes than a real band if it pleases my ears. I created a lot of songs in Suno which I really really like and have been in my playlist for months alongside the bands I have listened for more than 30 years.
I agree with you, but I hope they prevent people uploading thousands of AI generated albums. If people start doing that, it can become difficult for non-AI artists to gain visibility in the recommendation systems etc.
> In addition to detecting, tagging and removing AI-generated music from recommendations, Deezer has now stopped storing hi-res versions of AI-tracks
Important point for anyone out there thinking about generating a lot of samples. Expect to get increasingly filtered out if you don't emphasize quality or uniqueness or something. It's cheaper to detect that something is generated, and apply standard base rate reasoning 'it's probably slop' and filter it out, than to try to do expensive evaluation to look for the rare gems.
I can see this being useful for solo game devs
If the music isn't important enough to write it's not important enough to put in the game in the first place. Solo game devs can use csound.
Maybe useful for ensuring their reputation gets tarnished.
Ah yes, vibe coded games with AI slop soundtrack. The future of gaming couldn't look any brighter.
That might be true, but if you watch some of the youtube videos from solo game devs where they spend 5 years making a game, and come out with 28k in sales. Anything that brings a game concept to market faster I think is a win for everyone.
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Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
No, not really. Spotify is trialling a voluntary “AI Credits” thing where people can highlight use of AI when they release music.
https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/
The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist?
And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record?
And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
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Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.
It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
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bandcamp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605490
Does Deezer charge per song?
Sounds like a free backup service to me.
This is good and cool.
If your goal is to create something you enjoy, do not labor over the process of how you do that, try everything, be a kid again, simply lose yourself in the joy of that thing, even if it contains "using ai" it's not a bad thing, it's merely another tool, like your DAW or photoshop.
Also, lastly, have fun, be frustrated, get angry, be excited, be mad.
Making music is fun, you don't have to make the process harder.
If you want to make money, good luck.
They call it UGC, user-generated content. I’ve been calling it UGB for a long time, the B standing for Bullshit.
Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast.
On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly.
And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.
I've had to change my video and music consumption habits, because I fall asleep fairly often with either music or videos playing in the background (bad habit, I know). I'm always sure to switch to a playlist running locally when I get tired, because I'll be damned if someone's slop is going to get monetized while I sleep and the algorithm starts sneaking that crap in.
How do they tell? Because they're awful? Some of them might be good. And many, if not most, songs created by unknown artists are terrible.
The funny thing about AI is counterintuitive. It will put an even higher value on quality as quantity is now essentially worthless. I don’t believe AI can generate high quality on its own. It needs to be used and manipulated to generate higher quality outputs than a human or AI alone can.
Great job guys! Almost halfway there! Keep working hard and we can make it to 100%!
Remember: AI use is mandatory and non-negotiable. Hopefully the Trump administration will be rolling out AI-use metrics for the whole population, so we can track progress against our goals.
Of course, it takes 2 seconds to shit out an ai song. I'm surprised it isn't way higher
... And most streams are fraudulent.
I'm not sure I'd care if AI generated music was competing against my own organic music, but having the stream-reward diluted down by bots is actually hurting artists.
"97% of participants couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music."
Is this the new Coke vs Pepsi challenge?
I remain happy with my decision to leave streaming behind and curate my own listening around artists I know, recommendations from people I trust and a complete absence of any and all of this worthless slop.
What a coincidence. Just today, someone on my high school alumni group just posted an album they "made", which is 100% AI generated music. They claim authorship because they created the prompts to the AI.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman
It seems like "personalised recommendations" are heading in that direction, but don't forget there's also the social aspect --- listeners will want to share what they liked the most, so even if they end up automatically prompting the AI to generate exactly the music they want, they'll find others who also like very similar music.
Good news: the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined the appeal) have upheld the Copyright Office's assertion that their album is public domain and ineligible for copyright protection. Prompts are insufficient human authorship, which is a requirement for copyright to apply.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-de...
Arguably, this makes sending such an album to a distributor a contractual violation as well, since you must assert that you own the rights to license it to them and are empowering them to collect royalties on your behalf.
> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop.
I wrote about it here: https://tombedor.dev/creativity/
This is incentivized by how streaming compensates artists. If these folks can also bot a bunch of "listens" to this slop they get paid out of everyone's monthly subscription payment. I want a streaming service where my money only goes to the artists I listen to - not to Taylor Swift and Suno artist #3141592.
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Great reason to steer clear of deezer
Why is that? They're being honest and reporting their numbers. Other platforms are not telling you.