Comment by spullara
18 hours ago
A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.
There is plenty of artists making music analogous to 80's and 90's classics. Not to mention millions of 80's and 90's songs she's never heard.
I constantly find myself discovering new 90s Boombap, Hip Hop beats and tracks from underground artists. Unfortunately a ton of these aren't on Spotify, although they exist on YouTube in near endless capacity.
A lot of my favorite songs of all time aren't great just because they sound nice, but they are great because they have immense meaning. Alice in Chains is one of the all time greatest bands and their lyrical messaging means so much, with the passing of Layne from a drug overdose the songs have a raw, visceral feeling. Many of their songs are explaining the struggle, they are deeply personal. That is lost with AI Music.
What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys? Plenty of artists plain suck and discovery is a problem that requires time and effort. If somebody makes decision to like what they like (and made, to some extent) that’s their choice.
>What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys
If you need it to be explained to you why it's a tragedy that a person's curiosity can atrophy (or fail to develop) to the extent that she can't seek meaning in what she engages with every day for enjoyment, then you might not have met the minimum requirements for this conversation.
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> What is the problem if somebody doesn’t seek the deep meaning or anything and enjoys whatever she enjoys?
Some people yearn for the slop.
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Yeah people seem to forget that before AI music, there was already a huge amount of "slop" music out there - background music, muzak, mood music. Hell, Spotify was put in the spotlight not that long ago for commissioning music to mix into their own most popular mixes (the casual background listening ones), so that they own the rights themselves and don't need to pay artists as much. A lot of music is for mass consumption / inactive listening, and honestly I don't think it makes much of a difference whether it's AI generated or churned out by a WFH producer. When it comes to whether I want to listen to it anyway, not so much whether said producer gets paid.
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elevator music doesnt need any deep meaning
Elevators don't need any music at all.
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I watch bunch of Russian speaking Wh40k lore channels, and the authors experimented with ai music. Now they finish many of their videos with ai banger, based on lore. Mostly rock, but they experimented with different styles. And I like it. “80/90s” generated music is way too easy target. Niche topics (or just topical music) is much harder to get in nice amounts.
There are several channels with pure ai Wh40k music. Some Star Wars creators are doing similar stuff.
I’m actively resisting desire to dump bunch of YouTube links, but if you want to hear what many people already vetted great, I’m happy to share.
I find super HARD to believe that we ran out of musicians doing music in the styles of the 80s/90s maybe your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy, not a crime; but saying nobody is making such music is a sad excuse.
It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.
It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.
If somebody told me "I choose to only read AI-generated books" I would also silently judge them.
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That might be OK if Suno had compensated everybody they needed to.
I feel sympathy for people who made something that was reappropriated by those without strong ethics.
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> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!
People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.
But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.
I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.
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"your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy"
Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.
Yes, and random song of 80s will be as shitty as random song of 2010s and 2020s.
Prompting a machine to generate random slop that sounds like other music isn't really involving yourself in the creation process. This person applied no taste or knowledge to the creation process, didn't learn anything. Just asked for a pattern matcher to give her something like what she already had.
Nobody generating anything on Suno is showing any kind of creativity. It's somehow worse then regular plagiarism.
easily liking any kind of music only on the merit that it is human generated seems lazy, too.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
Nobody does that. Literally nobody likes a piece of music just because it was made by a human.
But consider an album I found a couple of years ago, called "The Unfinished Violin". A UK folk musician, Sam Sweeney, bought a violin he thought sounded really good, noticed a name in it. Researched who he was. Turns out he was a music hall performer from Leeds. He had made the parts for the violin, but before he could assemble it, he was sent to fight in WW1 and died in Flanders. The violin had laid unfinished in an envelope for the better part of a century. Sweeney arranged a lot of time-appropriate, military related music for the album, and wrote a few himself too.
I didn't know any of this when I first heard "The highland soldier" on Spotify DW. I just thought, wow, that was a beautiful tune. And it sounded like it meant something to someone. And it, turned out, it did. It meant something to Sweeney, it meant something to the folk music collector George Butterworth who wrote it down (and then also died in WW1), it meant something to the people he recorded it from.
If I heard a Suno tune, it's entirely possible I'd also think, wow, that's a beautiful tune. But there's almost no human connection. Nobody cared about that music. It's not entirely devoid of humanity, because of course Suno was trained on the music of people who cared and had something to express, and there's an echo of it. But the link is severed. It has no human provenance.
You can cut yourself off from humanity, just use audio as a drug and not care where it comes from. Certainly a lot of people did that long before AI. But why, when there's so much human music to connect with?
> people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them
Like what? People say this kind of stuff all the time and it's either not true or they're generating things with very questionable taste.
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As someone with very specific tastes in music across several genres, yes, it's hard to find new bands making what I like. Every so often I'll find one, but it's pretty rare because- surprise!- the market for people with my tastes is really small so quality production targeting me is a bad career decision.
There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.
Possibly contributing to making it a worse career decision is not strategically optimal.
> it's ok to be lazy, not a crime
It's normal to hate AI being pushed down our throats, but it's a completely different thing when we call people names, who enjoy it on their own.
You can also treat lazy not as an insult, but a behavioural description. Everyone likes to be lazy for sometime, and if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout. In fact, that's precisely what was done here: "it's ok to be lazy".
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Well, it is kind of true though. I used to listen to bboy (breakdance) music; this was ok in the 1990s for the most part. Then things changed. The music today just ... sucks. I can't listen to it anymore. And bboying is now just a tricking contest, with a certain company abusing the dancers as advertisement-robots for them ... I also see that on youtube, with constant product marketing and product logo flashing. It's annoying.
I don’t want to copy paste my answer in another thread, but what if I want to listen to music about some lore? Some topic?
Like this, made by a guy who clearly understands who to use ai?
https://youtu.be/6YTjH_7QUT0?t=42
Ai is a great enabler for people who have ideas but don’t have chops.
Gotta plug nightride.fm as an online station that is fully fueled by artist-submitted, non-AI music. It's all 80s/synth-inspired with one main channel, but there are more niche channels (e.g. chillwave is a popular one) too. The site itself is also a real pleasure to stumble upon.
I'm not affiliated with it, nor am I against AI-generated music. Just a huge fan who admires the hard work people pour into making the scene work.
I did the same too. I listen exclusively to my own songs made with the help of AI.
My styles are orchestra and symphony pop, which I find rare these days. Even if it exists, the lyrics might not be something that I enjoy.
So I just write my own lyrics, decides on the melodies, and put it to AI to create a polished version.
Do I feel emotional when I listen to it? Of course, its my own lyrics that I wrote. Of course I sing along with it because its the melodies I chose.
And its even more emotional because I relate to it.
Someone can create some songs with billion listeners and emotional for others, but if it doesn’t relate to me. What am I supposed to feel?
My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me. But they might be able to resonates with my songs because it triggers specific memories or emotions for them. And for me that’s enough. Let the songs be the one that they resonates with.
> orchestra and symphony pop
You can find a ton of this on archive.org [0]. One of my favorites is from K-Mart background vinyl. AI can't quite do this yet.
[0] https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22Kmart%22&and%5...
That's actually a bit creepy to me. How do you deal with a lack of novelty factor here though? Because ultimately, if you yourself generate all music you listen to, how could anything be surprising? I often listen to songs that surprise me in one way or another.
When I said exclusively, its not that I am not exposed to other songs as well. I do follow certain artists that I really enjoy listening to because I find their lyrics and melodies resonates with me, even when its not in the genre that I preferred.
It's just I don't go and explore songs actively. If my playlist suddenly randomize itself (which YouTube Music usually do even when I already selected a specific playlist), I usually just keep it randomizing the songs, I either skip the songs based on the intro or just the title.
Sometimes, I only write the lyrics without any melodies, or just give a base chords for the AI to work with without any melodies, and AI might surprise me on how it suddenly chose a certain melodies or chord progression.
So you can say I'm exploring, but only within the boundaries of the lyrics that I wrote. Or when YouTube Music randomly plays a song for me and I immediately resonates with it.
Does it really have to be suprising? Some people already have a life full of surprises (read: stress). Comforting music can help with that.
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If you write your own songs, you'll realise that they are infinitely surprising to you, much like one's own children. Just endlessly fascinating. I sing my own songs all the time, probably more than other people's.
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't want to listen to new music by other people, or create more of my own. I'm simply sharing what it is to experience songs written by yourself. I saw Sting the other day talking about the very same thing to Rick Beato regarding songs he wrote 40 years ago, and I remember Brett Anderson of Suede saying that he loved listening to his own music. In fact, wouldn't it be weird if you didn't want to?
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Im a hobbyist songwriter (melodies and lyricist) of decades feeding my trove of MP3s/songs to Suno. Listening to Suno produced version of my songs is way more satisfying then listening to other peoples music. My Suno slop of many decades has the most meaning as they all reflect a time, experience, a feeling in and about life to current world events, etc, etc. Before Suno I was singing my songs heard in my demos (play piano & guitar) and Im a terrible singer now they all sound pro and again are way more meaningful then anyone elses songs.
> My listener wont be able to relate with me personally because they don’t know me
What a perfect illustration that while you typed on a keyboard you're so far away from making art.
PS: how many pieces of art that moved you were made by artists you knew or met?
I might misunderstood you or you might misunderstood me.
I was moved by a lot of songs made by artists I never met. But I was moved because of the song, not because of the reason why the artist wrote it. If I can truly understand the emotional state of the artist when they wrote it, I might be able to empathize with them. But that's me empathizing with the person that made the art as a human. Nothing stopping me from doing that as a human, even when their song didn't move me.
I publish my songs under a pseudonyms. They can infer what am I as a person based on the songs that I wrote. They can infer what emotions and feelings that I am experiencing while I write the songs. But it's all inference, unless they know me behind the pseudonyms, they won't be able to relate with me personally, as my real self, not as the songwriter. And I am okay with that.
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What's so weird about creating your own stuff? If I paint something stupid (like by numbers) and hang it in my room you're going to judge me?
This is not fine art, but it is creative. Lots and lots of creative pursuits are just tweaking shit others have provided as building blocks. I don't see how AI is different in this case.
Maybe this is were we will end up, society combined of individualistic, self-centered, non-empathetic, sociopaths. But can it be still called society?
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I also want to state that I think this is the perfect use-case for generative AI. You have a desire, and you use the AI to scratch your particular itch. Where it goes wrong is the people who want to make a quick buck by shoveling out heaps of random crap in the hopes that there will be some clicks to generate revenue. I mean someone is going to accidentally discover the prompt for the next "Baby Shark", get a billion views, and then the real onslaught will begin.
I wonder about the social aspect. People growing up with listening exclusively to their own AI-generated music will never dance together and scream to the same old songs, even if it just became “bad taste”. Its such a huge part of our culture that they will just miss. Same goes of course to all other parts of arts and culture. A good start to read is „ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“ by Walter Benjamin.
>Who else is going to make new songs for her?
Lots of artists! They are not even remotely hard to find. They are literally a google search away. Typing stuff into Suno because you can't be bothered to search "new artists that sound 90s" is crazy
> Who else is going to make new songs for her?
I doubt she has exhausted all the (old) music made in the 80s and 90s. It's not a problem with supply, but discovery. Ironically, Suno probably had to overcome that challenge while gathering training data.
The 80s and 90s were pretty much the golden age of music production in terms of breadth and sheer volume.
This is the distilled essence of a “first world problem.”
Plenty of people? There are gigs every week in my city by bands who make music in 80s and 90s genres and many of them still make new music, some of it really good. And you can usually find it at both Bandcamp and Spotify.
Even for making new music Suno is a godsend. My workflow has changed from making a whole track to just creating some nice loops with my favorite VSTs and asking Suno the rest. I get a song in the exact BPM and style that I wanted, while saving me a ton of time.
> All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her?
How much music do you even need? Is she listening 24/7?
I might be an outlier, but I grew up listening to some genres that have fallen out of fashion, and I don't feel like I need more songs from them--we've explored enough of what they can do. What I miss from the 90's isn't third-wave ska as people trying things and bizarre songs becoming hits.
This is interesting. I think AI music will be massive in a few years.
It makes sense to listen to music made just for you by a model that knows you. You're bound to feel more emotion from that than trying to relate to something that wasn't written about you
> I think AI music will be massive in a few years.
Massive like Temu/AliExpress products massive.
I think its the exact opposite. One of the best features of art, in any form, is that it offers different perspectives, viewpoints, ideas. Think of how many people changed something major in their life due to a song, a movie, a photograph. Now think of how little would happen if AI just repeated back what "it knows" you already like. Your entire life would just be a derivative of things you liked as a 6-year old. Nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing fresh.
She's in luck:
https://youtu.be/6JCLY0Rlx6Q?si=xZvid6TWR66LTqhE
There are millions of people making music in an ever-expanding set of genres. The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd. I guess she can listen to slop but maybe just look around a little instead?
Edit: slop not slob
It's not just look around a little. It's look around a lot. It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Have the ick for AI-gen, fine. But dismissing the things it solves puts you in a position where you'll never understand other people.
You can spend your time looking for music or you can spend it prompting Suno. Personally I'll always take the former, I enjoy it, but to each their own.
That's a really ironic comment. I think accepting AI music as a substitute for all but the most unimportant background noise, is a sign that one doesn't really care about understanding other people.
> It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Spotify algorithm not kind to everyone I suppose… I’m enough of a normie with music it works for me. Crate digging doesn’t feel too time consuming at all (as easy as throwing on quirky California college radio stations).
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I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.
> just look around a little instead?
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
"Slob" / "slop" is thrown around so much I don't take anyone seriously who drops that word unless the output matches the commentary. There's definitely a lot of trash AI stuff out there don't get me wrong, but there's also insanely high quality AI generated things out there. Hell, I've sent people songs made in Suno, and they were surprised to learn that those were AI generated. If you open suno and type in "90s jazz song" then yeah, you're likely going to get a bit of generic AI slop. If you get into specifics, voice style, instrument types, how they're played, which chords, etc. You can get some insanely high quality music. Not only that but Suno has a whole DAW style extension to it they call Suno Studio which is very powerful, you can get AI stems, you can add your own voice.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
Thing is, did it take effort and creativity to make it? I suppose you could argue that fine-tuning a prompt takes effort, creativity and knowledge, but I argue against that that it's only a fraction of what it takes to make real music.
If it didn't take effort to make it, if you can repeat it a hundred times in a week, it's slop. It's a good descriptor, even if to an untrained ear it's convincing.
I've also seen people using the term "slop" for low quality human-generated content (lowbrow movies etc)
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I’ve been thinking the same thing about AI artwork (as opposed to “chat pls make me a funny picture” and seeing what comes out, although there’s some increasingly interesting things coming out of that approach). There’s often an insane amount of work going into the guts of the image generation pipeline. Sure, it’s not pencil-on-paper drawing things but to me, art is about creating and exploring. All the same vitriol was directed toward cameras, audio synthesisers, 3D rendering, Photoshop, digital cameras, etc. The hate is not about the technique, it’s about someone else getting the same results “easier” with a different workflow.
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I just don't get it. Music isn't just what comes out of the speaker. There are artists, with lives and influences behind the music. There is personal expression in the lyrics. Even when the artist chooses to remain anonymous, or they choose to not have lyrics at all, there is still something personal behind it. A DAW is just a tool, and it's a tool that can be used badly, for example, over produced metal with quantized and sample replaced drums. Sure, AI can be a tool for music production just like a DAW can, but when it crosses the line into, lets call it "vibe-produced" music, it is indeed slop, and deserves to be referred to as such.
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Where would you look around?
Previously web search, YouTube, and Reddit would have been my go to but they have all been enshittified.
YouTube is excellent. Aside from my main account I have one that I mainly just use to listen to music, and I just surf the algorithm listening to whatever is in the recommend list, which is usually a handful of songs I've got on heavy rotation, but YouTube also tends to cycle back some old favorites, and some new gems. I just keep surfing it day in day out letting it take me where it will as one of two main ways I listen to music. I regularly find new gems pretty reliably. All the gems then go to my playlist in Spotify, which I listen to during my commute.
I’ve had good luck with gnoosic. Or taking artists I like as a starting point and finding out who influenced them, and who they influenced.
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> The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd.
The idea that only humans can make music is absurd.
> I guess she can listen to slob but maybe just look around a little instead?
The idea that AI generated = slop is absurd.
Humans create just as much, if not more slop. Look at 99% of "professional" output in creative fields. It's awful.
A human with taste steering AI tools can be better than a "classical" human with hard skills but no taste.
The old world is going to be run over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4
Completely. Run. Over.
That video isn't helping your case.
That's not to say you can't make effortful novel content using AI, but this is just lazy hollow stimulation. Like all the laziest of AMVs, nothing to say outside of "isn't this cool?".
We want to see the person underneath and what ideas they explore through the medium - AI is just a fancy new tool of the times.
Who cares what brush or canvas Vincent used to make Starry Night? Without his name on it, it's just another oil painting.
Rather than genuinely enjoying a well-made/actually entertaining AI content, people are just gonna blindly hate on anything AI-generated.
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Was that video supposed to convince us that AI music is good?
Huh, I wonder what happens when people stop making real music for AIs to train on, then.
I did not expect that one to show up here on HN, but it's definitely a human artist using AI. He has a few others which are just as entertaining.
Run over in what way?
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The Midnight are a pretty fun modern eighties band!
Not entirely comparable, but it's easier to find in Korea. "I do" by I-dle [formerly (G)I-dle] for example, has a wonderful 80s sound.
I have no issue with individuals choosing to listen to generative AI. I even occasionally listen to it myself when I’m deep working and just need to occupy that part of my brain (having previously listened to algorithmically generated music or those endless copyright free trance mixes for the same purpose). But I don’t like how it’s flooding discovery platforms to the point that it gets impossible to wade through slop and find actual bands that I could see in person.
It’s like when Etsy turned into a Made in China marketplace. MIC is fine, but if I’m going to Etsy it’s because I wanted something else.
I'm still discovering music from "my era". Music doesn't have to be new to be new to you.
> New music almost always targets young people.
Hard disagree, there is just music people make because it's what they want to make, if all you're looking at is the top 10/pop radio music, yes it will be tailored for the largest market but by no means is there a conspiracy to only accomodate the 'young people'.
The large number of actual bands from that era still around?
Consider yourself lucky if they still make music in their vintage style
I'm in a similar boat. I don't like modern music. I was never a big music fan TBH though I did like a few really good pieces from my day. That said I never cared much for lyrics because I didn't find them relatable. I'm only interested in the tune... I like lyrics but only for the audio properties of the words; literally, I like the sound of human vocal chords.
The way I use Suno is sometimes I play Ukulele and discover a tune I like; I record it and generate a song from it.
I didn't take any music lessons. I'm 100% self-taught so my recordings are a little rough but the melody comes through and Suno polishes it up nicely and adds lyrics based on a topic I've been thinking about.
I find both the creation and listening aspects relaxing and therapeutic. I'm not a musician so Suno is the only way I could actually produce and finish a song. It's very clearly my melodies, my songs but it's enjoyable to hear them as a finished product. There is definitely an element of surprise, the lyrics are sometimes quite insightful and clever too and I can actually start appreciating the poetic aspect of music in a way which eluded me before.
I suspect that by the time most musicians finish refining and producing their own songs, without AI, they're probably tired of hearing it. Suno avoids that. It's a truly novel thing to be both a producer and consumer of your own music. Perfect for an introvert like me who can't relate to anyone except himself.
It's nice to see that some other people also like my pieces though I'm not trying to make a career out of it.
Same as i almost only listen to my own AI Slop yet Ive wrote melodies/lyrics since a kid. Ive always recorded my guitar or keyboard along with my vocal (terrible singer here) track then mixed it in GarageBand and exported each song as an MP3. Now in 2025/2026 I feed my MP3s of my songs to Suno and they sound pro. Also, they have a ton more meaning to me then anyone elses songs. I dont care if others listen to my slop its mine and again more meaningful then all others music.
AI Music is changing music habits ...your friend and myself arent the only ones https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n....
Give it ten years or so and i bet the Taylor Swifts type acts and the big music industry machine wont be as celebrated.