Comment by galkk

12 hours ago

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?

Some people yearn for the slop.

>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.

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.

  • Also the almost industrial score music machines: trailer music, like two steps from hell, even Zimmer. Those are also can be considered as slop, even worse - highly formulaic, almost standard (YouTube “heroic music chord progression”). And those were written by humans

    • I’m not going to devalue your opinions—music is mostly a matter of taste—but you and your parent comment are stretching the term “slop”, like when a software user misuses “bug” to mean “something which doesn’t work like I want, despite it working exactly as designed for fifteen years”.

      “Slop” is specifically about AI content lacking in effort, quality, meaning. You may not like Zimmer, but saying it lacks in those areas seems a tad too much. “Formulaic” isn’t an indicator of slop either, most stories are formulaic following a variation of the hero’s journey. It’s especially not problematic when you’re someone like Zimmer who invents or popularises the formula.

      9 replies →

  • None of that is what I would call slop music. All of that is real music for real people with real use case.